“We can say we tried” — Did I Ever Tell You (Vol. 2)
“Did I Ever Tell You” is a column in my monthly newsletter where I talk about the story behind the songs I’ve written. This was first published in the February edition. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox every month.
I love the story of Icarus. He and his father, Daedalus, are locked up in a high tower and Deadalus makes them wings to escape. He warns Icarus not to fly too close to the sun or too close to the sea. But where’s the fun in that?
Icarus flies too close to the sun because, I mean, it’s the sun, and it melts the wax in his wings. Sadly he falls into the sea and dies.
But what if he didn’t? What if it wasn’t even Icarus and his dad? What if it was two lovers who knew that things would end horribly but went ahead regardless?
I wrote the first few lines of Ignis Brothers’ To Fly in early 2019. Usually, the first parts of a song that drop in my brain are the opening lines. And for this song they went:
Honey, you’re insane
One of us will have to stay
We can’t both run to the light
The song begins with caution. It’s one lover telling the other “Nothing about this makes sense. We shouldn’t do this.”
And I tell you, the human capacity for hope can feel like insanity sometimes.
In the second verse, sung beautifully by my bandmate Ruka, the response is:
Honey, don’t you see
There’s a chance that you and me
We’ll make it out alive
And this is where it happens. The compromise. The decision to go ahead and try. They even make a show of it:
And we’ll walk through the city
With our hands on our heads and we’ll say
We’re not birds, we can’t fly
They acknowledge they are flawed. That this journey is not one they are entirely equipped for.
But then the story is suddenly not happening in the city anymore. These people actually try to get to the sun!
But we did what we could
And got close to the sun
Now our wings are all gone
Our fall has begun
But we can say we tried
To fly
I bet this is what Icarus would have sung as he fell. He would sing so loud to drown out the sound of Daedalus telling him “I told you so.”
Because it doesn’t matter that he told him so. Icarus wanted to touch the sun and he tried. But he failed.
And life does its thing and we too fail sometimes. But we can say we tried… to fly
Listen to the Ignis Brothers album The Cost of Our Lives.
