The Everyway
Lyrics
Verse I
Who would’ve thought?
This is goodbye?
No time to give you all the love I know that
Tears can only cry
Just close your eyes and let me
Hold you as the years behind us die
Chorus
Cause you’ll always go on and on and on in my head
Along with all the things I wish that I would’ve said
And I guess we’ll never know the things that would've been?
But we don’t gotta live the years we wish we would’ve lived
Cause they all belong to the everyway
Verse II
You gave me more
Than you ever had
And you told me little lies to keep the world
From fading all to black
Just close your eyes and let me hold you
There’s no time for looking back
Verse III
You searched for gold
To make me a crown
And you kept my head above the water while you
Found the strength to drown
Who knew that once you’ve
found your way up to the heavens,
there’s no way back down?
Behind The Lyrics
I haven't lived my life with many regrets thus far. As a young man, this is fairly manageable. There's simply not that much life behind you to regret.
But as a young man, you tend to think of regret as wishing you had done something differently in the past, or perhaps not at all. Regret is something you feel when looking back over something you consider now to be a mistake.
But as I get older, I'm becoming familiar with a different kind regret. It's not the bitter kind you feel in relation to a past you cannot change, in the sense that there's a moment you look back on where you could have turned right and instead went left.
It's more that the number of lefts and rights you've taken in life grow exponentially until it's nearly impossible to know where life might have led you along another course.
As more life accumulates behind you, the question of what could have been simply gets larger too. And it's not so much a situation of looking back over the past and imagining what things might be like now if you had done differently then. It's more like looking at the totality of the life you have right now and wondering what things might be like if they had simply been differently.
It's not the kind of regret that hangs on a particular moment or choice or wrong turn that you would go back and change if only you could. It's more like not even knowing how things could have turned out differently, but wondering what life might have been if they did.
But as you get older, this kind of regret can eclipse a lifetime. And it gets to a point where the sheer gravity of it all actually makes it easier to dismiss; where so much has happened by now that questions of "what if" can be almost thoughtfully entertained without seriously weighing upon one's heart. Almost like cracking a joke about a distant tragedy in one's past.
In more certain terms, The Everyway is sort of about the relationships we have with people over the course of our lives. And how as we get older we have less time with each other left. Do we want to spend that time lamenting what could have been? Or cherish what is to be had right now? It's an open question that these lyrics explore.
— David Kennedy
