In 2018, a story I posted on Instagram found its way to John Mayer. It was a short clip of me singing along with his song Moving On and Getting Over. His response to the sender was a sole and simple “wild.” While thrilled, I never knew what that wild meant. It seemed neither negative nor positive.
I sat with that for a few days. I figured that among my quest to answer the beck and call of passion by pursuing a life in music, I was and had been running a bit wild. Like the unpredictable nature of a vine growing up a tree and twistedly hanging from another, wild is the way of the weather, the voice of childhood dreams, and the spirit of an unleashed artist.
At the time, I was beginning my traverse through the hardest couple of years of my life to date, and the thickest depression. The reality of chasing my so-called dreams on foot was proving to be a fest of suffering the consequences of my questionable habits and false beliefs. I knew I must look myself square in the eye if I were to continue, weeding away the roots which monopolized the fertile ground available to me. With a gauntlet to run ahead and a long history of escaping into music, I stepped out of my then-self and wrote a song addressed to me from the future.
Wild shifts between first and second person to tell the tale of the evolution of a person’s relationship with their desires, passions, and quirks. The future-self probes the present dreamer to remember, when they feel tried and narrow, that once upon a time, their passions first chose them. This endows them with a responsibility to develop their talents, shying away their trivial reservations, and providing a peaceful conviction to prevail.