To David Le’aupepe

So I was jamming out to the band that will surely be my Spotify new artist of the year earlier, and I thought it would be a good idea to blog about some lyrics for a change of pace. The band is Gang of Youths out of Australia, and the song is called “Fear and Trembling” if you’d like to look it up.

Full lyrics available here.

Watch the MTV Unpluggled version here.

Be an overachiever and buy the album here

          Now, we could do all the nerdy stuff here like discuss how the song references Kierkegaard and Shakespeare, but we will avoid that now unless people comment and want to hear more. I want to focus on the emotions of the song though, because they are powerful.

The lead singer David Le’aupepe has been extremely open about his struggles with mental health problems, particularly anxiety and depression as well as a suicide attempt, about which he wrote the song “Magnolia.” I believe “Fear and Trembling” is the best from their highly acclaimed album “Go Farther In Lightness” (though the whole album is amazing). I feel this way because the lyrics are so sharp, so to the point, and so true of the realities of mental health problems.

Yet, the most beautiful part of the song to me is this part:

And the part of me unspoken
And the part that’s self assured
Are belligerents divergent
In a psychic civil war
But I’m a crier and a fighter
Not a faker and a fraud
So if losing my religion
Is the way to finding God

Then light it up
The shadow’s in my blood
“Oh, a weary heart”, they say
“It shatters it all”
So light it up

The psychic civil war part brought me to tears the first time I heard it. It’s also a good reminder that crying and fighting are not necessarily mutually exclusive. It’s a lesson I tried to teach my students and my baseball players before I had to leave teaching – failure makes us better. It’s true in the weight room, it’s true in the classroom, and it’s true in life. You just have to fight the internal wars with as much energy as you can.

So here’s my promise to myself, to David Le’aupepe, and to all of my wonderful readers who take an interest in my recovery: I’ve been feeling like a weary heart a bit lately. I know that’s ok. However, I promise that I will find a way to light it up, to drive the shadows from my blood and, as David sings in another song, I promise “I will not hurt like this forever / I’m responding to the call / While there’s speakers in the outfield / Blasting out my favorite song.”

Thanks for the motivation, David.