Lyrics:

If I
could live right
you said love would find me

So to tried
my lifetime
to find that love outside me

You keep saying
Keep on praying
Like that is how my healing will come

But all that praying
and obeying
That is what I’m healing from

You could say pray, I did
Obey, I did
I put all my heart into earning love
I could conform until the end
Hoping that love would find me then
That is what I’m healing from

If he
so loved me
that God would give his own son 

How come 
the system
is making me earn this love?

That’s not true love
That’s abusive 
That is not how healing will come 

That’s no gospel
That’s just hostile
That is what I’m healing from 

You could say play, I did
Those games, I did
I put all my heart into earning love
I could perform until the end
Hoping that love would find me then
That is what I’m healing from

(Repeat final chorus)

This song, and you:

Before you hear any of the behind-the-scenes stories of writing or producing this song, take a moment to reflect. What’s happening for you as you hear this song?

In what ways do you connect with it?

Or, in what ways to you find it creates a challenge for you?

Do you identify with having been a person who must work or perform to earn love?

What might enable you to release that narrative?

Producing this demo:

After the first day at the studio, co-creating the fuller version of You’re Allowed To with Jonathan Anderson, I returned to my friend’s house where my family and I were staying. The previous day, our minivan had sustained a popped tire on the last leg of our journey from the interior. I ended up working alongside a talkative tow-truck driver named Randy until midnight, and needed to take the van in to Fountain Tire the next morning to complete the repair.

As I paced the noisy city streets in the morning before the studio session began, two things became real for me: first, I now had a better understanding of what Jonathan’s studio and our one-day-old partnership was capable of. Second, I was experiencing a great deal of energy and urgency pulsing through me, brought on my the extra coffee I consumed while I waited for the tire shop, and a strong sense of the ticking clock on our studio time together, slipping away the longer the repair job took.

I knew what song I was going to hit today: a new one I haven’t shared with this list yet, that I had recently completed the home piano demo for just a few days prior, called “That Is What I’m Healing From.” On a Starbucks recruitment postcard, I was finishing the lyrics, trying to bring forth with clarity what was within me. A song with a title like that needs to get to razor-sharp clarity, to able to name with truth and authenticity the core of this journey. I had already gone through several top-to-bottom rewrites in the year-or-so this song idea had been kicking around, and was finally narrowing down on the core concept.

Between cranks of the tire iron at midnight in Maple Ridge, steps along curbs and sidewalks along Lougheed Highway, singing to myself in the drive to the studio, I was chasing it down.

The energy I brought into the studio on day two was in pursuit of that aim. I knew the song. I knew its influences. The lyrics sheeted were prepped on Starbucks wifi and ready to print.

I knew that I wanted this song to build from a quiet hum to an explosive build. Curiously, the song that embodied this take-you-by-surprise build was the track “Anyone” by Justin Bieber — I played it for Jonathan as one of the first things we did in the studio that morning. In this song, which starts with a simple arpeggiator rhythm, it grows into an explosive announcement with the live band by the time the first chorus hits, seemingly out of nowhere. I wondered if the song I was working with on could follow a similar path: start at a hush, and build into a full anthem.

We built the base track on keys and vocals, using his Fender Rhodes.

Jonathan contributed a brilliant idea for the intro vocal harmonies, where he mapped my vocal track to be manipulated by his microKorg to add a robotic undertone in the intro.

We used the Juno to build the astro synth and arpeggiators and mathematical cosmic noise throughout, as one of our first foundational contributions.

I sat down on the drums to demonstrate some key ideas: the early marching beat, to the da-da, da-DUMs on the second verse, to the building, building, building push into the final outro. Jonathan interpreted my guidance and re-performed the drums for the final recording.

What is there to say about the tumultuous walls of guitar noise? How can I honour the contributions of those guitar solos? Just do us all a favour and crank it up when you listen to it through. We worked through filter after filter, rifling through OK Computer and Our Lady Peace and Hawksley Workman influences to find a tone that could take us there, and I so appreciate Jonathan’s mastery here. At times, the song feels as big as a track from Coldplay or U2, and it’s thanks to the wall-of-sound, multi-layered explosions Jonathan built through to the end.

As Jonathan worked on the guitar work, I paced and air-drummed and sang along and scribbled in my last lyric changes on the print-outs. I was remembering an interview with Rick Rubin, describing his process of working with Kanye West during the Yeezus album, where Rubin’s work on the beat production had finished, but Kanye had not yet completed the lyrics. He said something like, “Don’t worry coach, I’ma get you that hail mary in the last quarter,” and managed to come in during the last day in the studio and delivered all the finished lyrics. We had built the whole song around the scratch track, and I knew there was still a key line I needed to change. The opening lines came in those final seconds, scribbled beside the printed original lyrics, before walking into the vocal booth.

Golden vintage Russian mic. Take after take to capture the shifts from the lower-key to the octave up, embracing vocal cracks as part of the ethos. It was Jonathan’s idea to layer in his own voice to repeat the words “I did” in the latter stanzas, as if a chorus or collective of followers were affirming the statement. Better yet, Jonathan’s voice harmonizing on verse 2, especially as he cover the lines “that God would give his own son” — I just hear David Bazan from Pedro the Lion, in all his shoe-gazing glory, in the very flesh.

I left the studio that day as if it had only been minutes since I arrived. And something had clicked — I’ll get to that at the end of the post.

In those moments as Jonathan was recording the guitar work, I was visualizing the song in the form of a music video:

A animated character runs on top of a hamster wheel, connected to cogs and assembly lines in a factory. A heavenly figure descends in front of him, dangling a heart on a string. He runs and he runs. He reaches and he reaches. He reaches out for the heart of heaven, for the promise of love, and he cannot achieve it from his position. It’s not until he allows himself to fall off that hamster wheel that he realizes it was all a trick. The love he seeks is not something outside of him, not something that can be offered, earned, taken away or achieved. The whole system breaks as he hops off.

(Maybe a little like the vibe of Gungor’s video for “God Is Not A White Man.” I imagine a part two where he returns with a sledgehammer to smash the configuration, like the Apple 1984 ad.)

The song itself

The song’s melody first came to me, sometime in the last 5-10 years, in the form of lyrics to the first verse, which at that time, went like this:

”I’m waiting
in realtime
for something to define me.

I’m waiting
in real life
for someone to come find me.”

I wouldn’t have had language for it at the time, but it was a song that described the feeling of being marooned by the promise of religion. What had been promised was a sense of acceptance, forgiveness, grace, and yet what was present was merely absence and anxiety. Am I good enough? Am I acceptable? Is there any sort of affirmation that will be spoken? When will it come?

How interesting. Where did that self-doubt even come from? Why did that sense of not-being-good-enough seem so tied to my spiritual life?

One of the first songs I ever learned on the piano that was not from my Royal Conservatory piano textbooks was a song called “There Is A Redeemer,” by Keith Green. I had learned this song, and memorized it, and it was the first song I ever performed in my church. It has a hauntingly beautiful melody, and the final lines of the chorus end with the words, ”the work on earth be done.”

Specifically…

“When I stand in Glory
I will see His face
And there I'll serve my King
forever In that Holy Place
Thank you, oh my father
For giving us Your Son
And leaving Your Spirit, 'Til…”
the work on earth be done.”

When will the work be done? Is it possible to know while you’re alive, or will you simply be kept guessing, constantly uncertain of what happens in the afterlife?

Green’s original is a song about yearning to one day seeing God, and in the meantime, having a lot of work to do on earth. For savvy listeners, the title phrase and melody from “That Is What I’m Healing From” matches and mirrors that closing melody line from the Keith Green final line, “the work on earth be done.”

The only other song I ever performed solo in church is one called “Refiner’s Fire,” by Brian Doerksen. It’s one about yearning to be purified, cleansed, and made holy — with no clear answer on whether the singer will ever be acceptable.

With songs like this, planted in the core of a human, what does it do to fully and deeply carry unworthiness and insufficiency as a core belief?

It creates an attitude of needing to conform and perform to earn love, which will never be achieved or received while alive. It’s a yearning that appears spiritually humble on the surface, but is a deeply rooted lack of love.

As I began to notice the prevalence of those thought loops in my life, and the roots of them, it helped me recognize the unhealthiness of my spiritual conditioning. It seemed my inner spiritual life was mostly a constant cycle of uncertainty about my acceptability. As I went through a process of growth, maturity and transformation, years in the making, I was getting more able to resist that self-sabotage. I wanted to try to name and label that kind of self-doubt loop through song.

“That is what I’m healing from,” names this condition.

As I finished my day recording with Jonathan that day, I left feeling like something had turned a corner. Like the imaginary love-earning treadmill I had visualized had finally and truly cracked and broken. Because if everything named in my song paints the image of an unhealthy factory of performance-based loved, then being able to fully name it and see it and call it out…it opens up access to the opposite.

Closing reflection

Do you carry any loops of self-doubt in your head, wondering if you are good enough?

How did those get planted there?

What if being loved was the default state?

What would you stop, if you believed you were already loved?

What would you start?

What if there was nothing to earn, achieve, prove, acquire or perform?