#1 Songs I Relate To
‘When My Time Comes’ by Dawes
“I thought one quick moment that was noble or brave would be worth the most of my life” is one of the beginning lines of “When My Time Comes” by Dawes.
I correlate it with when I lost contact with reality the first time. I took some cigarettes from a gas station and was chased by the police into an adjacent yard to a convenience store, and I was arrested. I thought I was doing something big in my delusional state. I had just returned from my cousin’s wedding in Hawaii. I had been working at a military base for the previous eight months, doing mostly manual labor, after going through a clinical depression during my first semester in college. The line, “I was offered to save, I lived less like a workhorse, More like a slave,” particularly related to the feelings of my first real job working on a military base.
I thought I was going to change the world with my noble or brave moment. I remember speaking to my cousin’s wife about overpopulation at the wedding. She replied that the world’s whole population could fit in Texas.
After the wedding, while attempting my second shot at college, I became delusional from the lack of sleep. I thought we would solve global warming if we could get the world’s population to Texas, and everyone jumped at the precise time in unison to distance ourselves from the sun.
The lyrics, “I wanted to pay for my successes with all my defeats,” resonates with me failing at school and struggling to become an adult.
And, “if Heaven was was all that was promised to me, then why don’t I pray for death,” is pretty much what I was putting myself through getting arrested.
Ranting while deteriorating in jail felt like, “So I shouted a few quotes I knew, as if everything that is written should be taken as true, and every path that I had taken and conclusion I drew, would put truth back under the knife.”
The hurricanes that hurt my state that year and the wars in the Middle East were bringing me down. I think witnessing the horrors of Hurricane Katrina on my TV affected my psyche, and I was in a vulnerable state with my handling of failing at school and life.
I had a chance to meet the members of Dawes at a pre-show event. I asked them about two of their songs. One was about “When My Time Comes.” I asked them if it was about someone going through a breakdown. Taylor, the lead singer, said it was about trying to make it as a musician and if he could support himself in making music. It was a last-minute song in the studio on their first album, and it’s still one of their most popular songs today.
The other song that relates closely to me is “April 24th,” which happens to be my birthday. Some parts of that song relate to my experience with my concerns about my heart. I asked them at the pre-show if April 24th was the origin of “When my Time Comes,” but they said it wasn’t.
That night, it was an awesome feeling singing along with the entire crowd as they played “When My Time Comes.” I realized everybody is struggling to make it in their own specific ways, and the song is universal.
