"My New Best Friend is Loneliness" (acoustic)

Along with articles exploring thoughts on life, and occasional voice memo’s/demos of unreleased songs…something else I’d like to share with you all are periodic acoustic performance videos of songs of mine, along with a bit of a lyric breakdown and dialogue about the song itself.

I felt called to do my song “My New Best Friend is Loneliness” first for a few reasons…

I haven’t played this song live in probably about a year and a half now, maybe longer. It’s a song that puts me in a pretty specific head space and if I don’t feel like that’s a space that I can access, then I don’t find it possible to do the song justice. Despite the fact that I’m far removed from the events and circumstances that brought this song to life, it’s still a heart-wrenching song to me…and I don’t think it’s respectful to the song itself to perform an emotionally watered down version of it. And perhaps it’s because I’m now in a wonderful relationship, or perhaps it’s for reasons still foreign to me, but I just haven’t been able to access the mental and emotional space I need to in order to really effectively bring this song to life for a live performance.

That all being said….this is still probably my favorite song, or at least one of my favorite songs, that I’ve ever written.

Artists say they don’t have a “favorite” work of theirs and how they are all special in their own ways….I’m calling bullshit on that one. Everyone has favorites. And this is definitely a favorite of mine.

So with that, I’ll give a brief explanation as to how the song came to be, I’ll paste the lyrics below, along with an acoustic performance of the song in full just for you!

MNBFIL

This song was released in the spring of 2019, but it was written in December of 2018. I was touring from Memphis up to Pennsylvania for the holidays, playing shows up the east coast. I had a show in east Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, Baltimore and then Philadelphia to cap it all off. Throughout the whole autumn, I had also been in communication with a lady who I was very fond of, and had been for several years. We were never “together” and went through long periods of time without talking to each other but somehow, I had mustered the courage to express how I felt earlier that summer and the information wasn’t received horribly so we were waiting the entirety of the fall to reconnect over the winter while I was going to be in the area. (she was PA based)

There are details I must leave out, and then some details I’ll choose to leave out to protect at least some anonymity and privacy of both myself and the other party involved, but I’ll do my best to be vulnerable even with these limitations.

Essentially, we reconnected, and it went horribly.