"You seem to keep love like a shame to endure, you seem to think hope a disease to be cured..."

       Long Way Home and Hideaway share elements of the same story. I view them as sister-songs, so to speak. They have two different subjects behind their creation, but the motivation and the feeling, I believe, is similar. 

       I have always found the “place it in God’s hands” line to be tiresome and difficult. You may have heard the old example: a man is lost at sea and cries out, “God, please save me!” Another man passes by in a boat and throws a life ring, and says, “here, grab hold of this!” and the drowning man replies, “no, God is going to save me!” A bit of an exaggeration, perhaps, but the question remains: what exactly are we supposed to work for and what are we supposed to just live and let live?

       This is the motivation of the “maybe this is where I was always meant to be, then mama don’t come looking for me” line in Long Way Home. In other words, it is an expression of concern that perhaps working towards a goal is not enough if it wasn’t “meant to happen.” I am fearful of being in a situation that I feel constitutes a failure to attain the things I set out to attain and not knowing what could have been done differently, or knowing that even if I worked very hard, there is nothing more to do than attempt to take solace in the idea that it is “planned.” Perhaps this all sounds very arrogant - my intention is not to endorse rebelling against a divine plan or some such, but rather simply that I find it to be a daunting and frightening idea. 

       I think that Hideaway takes an outside perspective on a person in a similar situation, unsure of where to turn or what is in “the plan.” That is why I consider them to be so closely related. It was originally written about a girl I knew that I found very interesting and somewhat mysterious. There always seemed to be more to extract, and always seemed to be something new to uncover that was carefully shrouded. 

       To me, Long Way Home is a song from the perspective of a distressed pedestrian on the street in the rain, in a large city, in the evening, and Hideaway is from the perspective of an onlooker in an apartment window looking down and seeing that person, wondering what their life is like. 

Love,

NM