I HOPE YOU KNOW

I Hope You Know

TL;DR

“I Hope You Know” was the third song I ever made.

It started as a love song for my husband.

It did not stay that way.

As I started singing over the music, the song changed. The sounds changed. The lyrics changed. Eventually, something that began as a simple way of telling someone I loved him became a song about humanity, our place in the universe, and the ridiculous amount of importance we assign ourselves.

We want everything to mean something.

I’m just not convinced that it does.

This Was Song Number Three

When I made “I Hope You Know,” I was still very new to songwriting.

This was only the third song I had ever created.

I was learning how to turn an idea into an actual song. I was learning how arrangements worked. I was learning how my voice interacted with the music I was making.

And this song took me about three weeks to finish.

The strange thing is that the original version sounded completely different.

I didn’t sit down with some grand philosophical concept about humanity and the universe.

Originally, it was a love song.

I Hope You Know I Love You

The title came first from something much more personal.

“I hope you know.”

I was singing to my husband.

The idea was essentially:

I hope you know that I love you.

That’s where the phrase came from.

But once I actually started singing over the music, things began changing.

The vocals made me hear the song differently. I started changing sounds. The arrangement moved away from what I had originally made.

And eventually the lyrics started moving somewhere else entirely.

The love song disappeared.

“I hope you know” stayed.

How Can We Be Everything and Still Mean Nothing at All?

The song became less about one person and more about all of us.

Humanity has an incredible ability to convince itself of its own importance.

We build civilizations.

We create religions.

We fight wars.

We create governments, companies, borders, hierarchies and entire systems to determine who matters and who doesn’t.

We spend our lives worrying about careers, money, status, accomplishments and what other people think of us.

We make ourselves enormous.

Then you look up.

And there is an entire universe sitting above us that doesn’t appear particularly concerned with any of it.

How can we be everything and still mean nothing at all?

That’s the question at the center of “I Hope You Know.”

I Don’t Find That Depressing

There is an easy way to interpret all of this as nihilism.

That’s not really how I see it.

I’m actually pretty content with the idea.

We don’t have to be cosmically important.

Humanity doesn’t have to be the center of anything.

The universe doesn’t owe us an explanation for why we’re here.

We can simply be here.

And while we’re here, we try to make something out of it.

We love people.

We make things.

We create music.

We build lives.

We decide that certain things matter to us even if, on the scale of the universe, none of them matter at all.

There is something freeing about that.

Things Happen for a Reason

Sometimes I catch myself thinking that things happen for a reason.

I understand the appeal.

You look backward at your life and see all these little events connecting to one another. One thing happened, which caused another thing, which eventually put you exactly where you are now.

It can feel intentional.

But I also know that’s absurd.

“I Hope You Know” is actually a tiny example of that feeling.

I had written this piece of music.

Much later, I started singing over it.

Singing over it made me change the sounds.

Changing the sounds changed the song.

The song stopped being about telling my husband I loved him and became a philosophical song about humanity desperately searching for meaning in an enormous universe.

Looking backward, I can construct a perfect little story about how the song was somehow supposed to become this.

But it wasn’t.

It just did.

And maybe our need to turn that sequence of events into some kind of destiny is exactly what the song is about.

So, Naturally, I Added a Guitar Solo

The song is intentionally repetitive.

Eventually I felt like it needed something to break that repetition.

So I added a guitar solo.

Why?

Partly because the song needed it.

And partly because I might as well show that I’m multi-talented.

Which, in retrospect, is pretty funny considering I had just written a song about humanity’s inflated sense of its own importance.

Apparently I am not exempt.

Listening to It Now

When I go back and listen to “I Hope You Know,” I don’t feel embarrassed by it being my third song.

I’m happy with it.

Of course I’ve learned a lot since then. I’ve made considerably more music. I understand songwriting and production differently now than I did when I spent those three weeks figuring this one out.

But I don’t feel a need to apologize for the person who made it.

I was learning.

And somewhere in that process, the song became something I hadn’t intended to make.

I actually think that’s one of the more interesting things about creating music.

Sometimes you start with an idea.

Then the song tells you that you’re wrong.

I Hope You Know

We’re very good at pretending we’re permanent.

We’re very good at pretending we’re important.

We’re very good at constructing meaning around things that may have no inherent meaning whatsoever.

Eventually, we’re gone.

Eventually, everything we’ve built is gone.

Given enough time, even the things we consider permanent stop being permanent.

And yet here we are.

Making things.

Loving people.

Playing guitar solos.

Trying to make something out of the tiny amount of time we’ve been given.

Maybe there’s a reason for all of it.

I don’t think there is.

But I hope you know.