Sa7urn

GATHER ALL THE GHOSTS YOU'VE SEEN,
ASK THEM ALL WHOSE SONG THEY SING
GATHER ALL THE GHOSTS YOU'VE SEEN
HOLD THEM UP AND WASH THEM CLEAN

You open up your eyes and you are standing in front of an audience of your friends, family, and peers, all waiting to hear something that you have made out of your entire life up to that point.
You close your eyes and you can see your childhood. You are growing up in Moore, Oklahoma, a perfectly average Midwestern suburb famous for country music and high school football, and you are right in the middle of it all. You pass the time by absorbing the culture not of the world around you, but of the entire world outside of the one around you.
You open up your eyes and you are living in a house just outside of the city. Or is it a wasteland of guitars, microphones, drums, air conditioners, and days-old food? Or is it an endless web of cords and cables all carrying the digital offspring of your imagination to a new home inside of a big, bright box on your desk? Or is it an ocean of blood, sweat, tears, and a lot of pulled-out hair? No, it's just a house. Or at least it was before you moved in. Right now you are staring blankly at the wall with a guitar or a bass or a couple of sticks in your hands and you are wondering what is going to end up on that box on that desk.
So you close your eyes and you remember all of that culture that you endeavored to soak up after one-too-many days staring blankly at walls and listening to the million decibles loud voices of all of those high school football games, and you start to let your mind sink into everything that you have absorbed. All of the music (the rock, the jazz, the classical, the god-knows-what-to-call-it) and all of the time spent driving around listening to classic rock stations blowing out all of the classic rock songs from Floyd, Zeppelin, Sabbath and every other band with a name that can be suitably shortened to one recognizable word, or all of the time spent blowing your own ears out while watching Tool, Green Day, Sigur Ros, or The Cure on stage, it all comes to mind along with all of the literature, the movies, the television, the comics, and all of the everything else that ever showed you a world bigger and more important than one that only included you, and suddenly, you start to understand...

WITH ONE EYE ON THE GHOSTS YOU'VE KNOWN
PEEL OF THE SKIN THAT YOU'VE OUTGROWN
OR LAUGH YOURSELF INTO A JOKE
JUST KNOW IN SORROW YOU'LL FIND HOPE

Then you open up your eyes and you are a child and immediately, even as a kid, you know that music is the answer. You aren't even old enough to know what the question is, but you know that the answer is music. It's the stamp that you will leave on the world, and you can only hope with every cell in all the blood in every vessel in your body that you can mean as much to someone as someone meant to you.
So you close your eyes and you wish for kindred spirits, for long-lost brothers, and for partners in crime, and when you open up your eyes again, there they are. Whether it's someone that you grew up with and knew for your entire life, watching them jump into band after band, only to help them climb back out, or someone that you had crossed musical paths with some time before, only to realize later that you were both just missing that third piece to make it all work, whether you are really brothers or just feel like you could (should?) be, whether you are Brett, Brady, or Jesse, you can just feel right knowing that, at least for the three of you, the planets have aligned, the spheres are in harmony, and Sa7urn has made its revolution.
You close your eyes again and you remember all of the hardest times and how many big celebrations and much bigger fights it took to make it as far as you have come already. Think of all the parties that you played, all of the songs that you wrote, all of the times that you beat and screamed and yelled, and think of how all of that is what made you all what you are now.
You open up your eyes and you see all of those friends, family, and peers still waiting for your first notes. It's July of 2006 and you are performing a special show in honor of the release of your self-produced debut album In Sorrow You'll Find Hope. The three of you have been a single unit for just three years now, but you all feel like you've lived a lifetime. You know, however, that everything is just beginning...