We All Burn, Burn, Burn

Thoughts on a damn good song, the noisiness of the world, and the yearning to feel everything before the candle flickers out.

The first time I heard it, I wept in my truck.

Not the polite kind of crying that I do at coffee commercials during the holiday season. Not a single dignified tear rolling down a cheek. It was a full blown ugly cry. I mean, the kind of crying that surprises you and wakes you up. The kind that rises up from somewhere you buried something long ago. I was listening to Zach Bryan’s Burn Burn Burn and somewhere in the middle of it, without warning, this song reached straight down into my chest and put my heart in a choke hold. It found the exact shape of something I’d never quite been able to say out loud.

I guess that’s what good music does to us humans. Sometimes, it shows you something new. But, more often, it shows you yourself more clearly than you’ve been able to manage on your own. It gives your interior life a few chords, a melody and a dose of the truth. Suddenly, you’re no longer alone in the room with it. Another human being, sitting somewhere with a guitar, felt this exact thing. And they said it better than you ever could.

My daughter loves this song too. That means something to me. More than I can easily explain. Our souls seem to resonate with the same basic vibrations.

Let’s break this gem of a song down and search for what pulled at my heart strings:

The Noise

“Everyone seems a damn genius lately / TikTok talking, late-night TV / Still so much I have yet to know / We get dressed up just to go downtown / In some ego-filled late night crowd / It seems to be where I feel most alone”

The world is deafening right now. And I don’t mean loud in the way of construction or traffic or the volume my wife watches TV on while I’m trying to read. I mean loud in the way of billions of people performing their certainty online at full volume while the rest of us sit quietly with our doubts.

On every social platform, every screen, in every conversation at the wrong kind of party, someone has the all answers. Someone has cracked the code. Someone is living their best life and wants you to know it in considerable detail.

The highlight reels are endless, the confidence is unshakeable, and underneath all of it, if you’re paying any attention at all, you can feel the profound, shared, unspoken grief of people who are deeply lost and working very hard not to show it.

As for me? I’m still seeking. I say that without shame and without apology. My real life (and everyone’s real life that I know) would look like trash on a well curated Instagram feed. But, I’m also not fighting toward perfection. The older I get, the more the questions multiply rather than resolve. I’m cool with that. I think that’s what wisdom actually looks like. Not the accumulation of answers, but the courage to keep sitting with the unanswered questions long after everyone else has uploaded a photo of their dinner, gotten up and left the room.

And the dressed-up crowd, with their fancy clothes that chafe, pinch and bind, their enormous egos making small, glittering, disposable “connections” — I have less and less patience for it. What I want now is a front porch. A cup of coffee. A real conversation that gets us somewhere closer to the truth. I want to sit across from someone else in a hoodie and flip flops and have us both admit what we’re actually afraid of, what we’ve lost, what we’re still hoping for. That’s the only kind of Saturday night that feels right.

The noise isn’t the world coming alive… The noise is the world being terrified of silence.

The Longing

“I’d like to get lost on some old back road / Find a shade tree and a honey hole / And talk to my grandpa again”

I never knew one of my grandfathers. The other died when I was too young for the conversations that actually matter most. I was too young to ask him what he was afraid of. Too young to ask him what he would have done differently. Too young to sit with him long enough to find myself in him.

That absence has a shape. It still takes up space.

Part of why I started this — this project, these words, this podcast, all of it — is because I want to be the grandfather I didn’t get to have. I want my grandchildren and their children to be able to hear my voice. To read the things I thought were worth thinking, writing and talking about. To find themselves in me and know that they came from somewhere real, somewhere good, somewhere that was searching for the right things even when it didn’t have the answers.

I want them to know:

You’re not new. You’re not alone. Someone who loved you even before they knew you was also sitting up late at night, turning these same questions over in the dark, and trying to make something honest out of it.

That’s what Zach Bryan is doing with this song. He’s leaving a record. He’s saying to anyone really listening that this is what it felt like to be alive inside his particular life. And when I heard it, I recognized it as exactly what I’m trying to do here. Different instrument, better vocal arrangements, same longing.

It’s The Little Things

“And I see God in everything / The trees and pain and nights in the spring / So why do I still long for a home?”

I believe in God. I want to say that plainly, without footnotes or apologies or the kind of careful hedging that has become politically correct. But I’ve never needed a building to find Him. I’ve found God in the snow falling outside a window on a quiet morning. In a bird at the feeder, doing the small, serious work of being a bird. In my son’s smile catching me off guard. In a sunset that stops you mid-sentence because nothing you were about to say is as important as what’s happening in the sky right at that very moment.

I’m still searching for a religious identity in the formal sense, for a tradition or a community that holds the same things sacred that I do. But I’ve stopped waiting to find it before I call myself spiritual. I’m close to God in quiet moments. In the everyday cathedral of the world He made for us. I believe we all came from the same great creator, that we’re woven together in ways we can’t entirely see, and that the divine is not somewhere up there behind a velvet rope in the VIP section. It is here, in the grain of the wood and the color of the light and the inexplicable fact that any of this even exists at all.

How lucky are we?

So why do I still long for a home? Because knowing something is beautiful is not the same as feeling like you belong inside it. You can be full of faith and still feel like a ship lost at sea. That tension is not a failure of belief. It’s the human condition, as honest and raw as it gets.

The Freedom

“Head to Paris on a late-night flight / Find a bar and get in a fight / Write a few poems on a sunny balcony”

Damn. I love this verse.

Because it’s absurd. And it’s completely true. It’s the fantasy of a man who still has inside him that version of himself who was young, dumb and reckless. The young man burning candles at both ends and not knowing yet how ruthless the world could be. The version of him (and of me) who had enormous dreams and almost no idea what achieving them would actually cost him.

There’s a feeling I used to have as a college kid that I’ve been chasing ever since. It wasn’t happiness exactly. It was the feeling of being very much alive inside a world of wide-open possibility, where the stakes were somehow both enormous and light, where you could stay out until three in the morning on a Tuesday because nothing had calcified yet into obligation and consequence. The feeling of mild recklessness. Lower expectations. The intoxicating sense that you were still becoming something and hadn’t yet hardened into whatever you turned out to be.

I want that back. Not the ignorance. Not the not-knowing-how-hard-it-gets. Just the feeling of being fully lit up by being alive. The joy you feel with a backpack, a train pass and a world to explore. The willingness to board the red eye flight on a whim. To find the perfect neighborhood bar. To smack someone in the face and be smacked back. The feel of a bloody lip and a pumped up ego. To write that poem in the fading light of dusk. That’s what being truly alive feels like.

I think what the Paris verse is really about is the urgency and the desire to feel everything. Pain, love, joy, the sweet specific ache of being somewhere unfamiliar at an unexpected hour.

Not to be comfortable. To be fully awake.

I don’t want a managed life. I want a felt one. I want to burn and burn and burn and appreciate every single minute of it.

The Finish Line

“I know I’m bound to die one day / So when I reach those golden gates / I pray to say I did the best I can / Sit with my mother and the dearly departed / Send a prayer down to the broken-hearted / Let ’em know it all turns out just fine”

Here is the hardest thing about being a person: you know. You know there’s a finish line. You’ve always known. And every religion, every philosophy, every myth ever told around every campfire since the first human looked up at the dark and asked why — all of it, at its core, is an attempt to make peace with that knowing.

To be born knowing your going to die.

I’m not afraid of death in the way I used to be. I’m learning to hold it differently, not as a threat but as a frame. The frame is what gives the painting its urgency. The fact that this life is fleeting isn’t a cruelty. It’s the thing that makes any of it matter at all.

What I want, at the end, is exactly what Zach Bryan sings here. To say:

“I did the best I could. I tried to be honest. I tried to love well. I tried to feel it all and not look away from the hard parts.“

And then I want to send something back to the people I love. Some signal, some sign, an assurance that some version of it all turns out just fine. Not because I know that with any certainty. But because the people I’ll leave behind will need to hear it. Because the ones who love you suffer from the weight of not knowing. And if I can spend my life building something that survives me and eases that weight even slightly- a website full of words, a voice on a recording, a record of someone who was here and was trying- then that may just be enough. That’s the whole point of all these YouTube shorts, and Instagram reels, and blog posts. My attempt at leaving modern day stenciled hand prints on my cave.

The Chorus

“So let me go down the line / I wanna feel it all / Joy, pain, and sky / So let me go down the line / We all burn, burn, burn and die”

We all burn, burn, burn and die. Damn. That’s not nihilism. It’s permission. To barrel head first straight down the “long white line” of life. Feel the joy. Feel the pain. Look up at the sky. Don’t spend your burning time nursing the flame. Don’t curate your life into something safe and presentable and quietly half assed. Let it all the way in. Marinate in it. Soak it all up. Stay awake for it, unapologetically.

I started this project because I wanted to go on my journey with witnesses. Because I think the examined life is not only worth living, but that it’s the only respectful way to be grateful even to have been given a life to live at all.

These words are part of my burning. They are how I make sure I was here, really here, present to the whole strange gorgeous aching thing of it.

So yeah. The first time I heard this song, I cried like a baby. My daughter loves it too.

That feels like it should be exactly enough.

We all burn, burn, burn. Challenge yourself to make it mean something.