"Gotta Figure This Out" - Erin McCarley

"Gotta Figure This Out" (2009)
Erin McCarley
Lyrics
Major Influences: Fiona Apple, Patty Griffin, Greg Laswell

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Your heart and head are at odds.  Your head tells you what you need to do.  You need to breathe and be flexible, like joints just worked out at the gym.  You need to let things go because you don't have the capacity to take on every battle you feel you should fight. You need to live like normal people do, on the surface.  You can't take yourself or any of the circulating events around you too seriously.

Your head tells you what you need to do...But your heart won't listen.  It wants to be irrational.  It wants to lead you into a delusional happiness only to come crashing down the next because of some paranoid fear.  If you can't tell which force will win, this song describes you perfectly. 

This song is featured on Erin McCarley's album "Love, Save the Empty", released in January 2009 by Universal Republic.  The Nashville-based singer/songwriter calls this album "a document of her search for authenticity in herself and in others." Her honesty in all of its original songs show, as she says on her website, that she is "not afraid of being sad."

But is it really sad to search for the reality hiding somewhere within your skewed perceptions?  Is it really sad to you have to "figure out" the darker parts of your conscious that you know will cause you to lose what you love if you don't eliminate them?  If you're resting "deep inside a shadow", if you're constantly "insecure of what you know", something is wrong.  And you have to figure it out to fix it.  You have to figure it out before time beats you to the chase.  It's not a sad search.  It's not really a desperate one either.  It just has to be done.

 McCarley hits a nerve that we all at some point should be lucky enough to have.  It's a nerve that appears when we've found ourselves at odds with who we are in order to maintain the possibility of becoming and staying who we want to be.  If sticking up for what we want means facing a darker portion of our personalities, that is what we must do.  It's our "story to tell" and no one else's.  No one else can defeat the monster within us that threatens to have us lose what we've come to love.  Because it's only through listening to the sound of our shaky hearts that we can "make it right."