Here is the song.

The stoic will one day break down and acknowledge the underlying emotional undercurrent that drives their life. The thing is, strong emotions such as Love, Death and Jealousy cannot be bottled up for long. They will explode. And when they do, no amount of philosophising will be able to provide consolation in that moment.

Through the character of Aaron Burgh, Leslie Odom Junior produces a song that touches on what it means to be forever in waiting for a great equalising moment that will right all the wrongs of one’s life. We all feel wronged in life. We are not in control of the cards that life deals us, but to compensate, we can be in control of how long we ‘wait’ for the great equalising moment to happen, therefore we have a vested interest in waiting, we are actually happy to wait. There is an underlying sense of gleefulness in Odom Junior’s voice as he ‘waits for it’.

Listen to the rational mind in the opening verses, the lowered voice, and how reasonable he is. Now compare that to the exclamations and direct language in the chorus.

The song is as much a study of character as anything. It’s almost as if Aaron Burgh is in the eye of a hurricane with destruction all around him, and if he doesn’t keep up the façade of the stoic, everything will come crumbling down. In the chorus, the façade falls off and we do feel the full force of the hurricane. With every unacknowledged hurt and suppressed feeling and emotional undercurrents getting sucked up into the vortex. It is said that the more compact the eye of a hurricane is, the more destructive the overall hurricane will be. And if you’ve seen Hamilton, then you know how the story of Aaron Burgh unfolds.

Here is the song.

There is a social experiment that I once did where you have to stand a few inches apart from a stranger and stare intently at their face for 10 minutes. There was a group of us doing this exercise in pairs and some people broke down and cried because the intimacy was too much for them to handle (why is intimacy too much for us handle?). This is an intimate song, not in a romantic sense, rather in the sense that Abimaro’s voice gets close to our very soul. To me, it serves as a reminder that it is God’s prerogative to get as close to us as this. I often wonder if this is the reason why people reject the idea of a personal God. Perhaps people really don’t want a God in their business, someone who will remind us that we will one day have to fit through the eye of a needle.

“Perish spoil fade, everything I’ve owned or made, it will perish spoil fade , but I won’t go empty to my grave…”

Study these words closely. This is the kind of folly we all laugh at on paper except when we’re doing the exact same thing in our lives. It is an illogical conclusion that sums up the futility of human striving. The piano captures this sentiment perfectly in its desperate attempts to keep its head above water throughout the song.

And what of Abimaro’s voice? The pure texture that it is. The voice that haunts us with its uncanny proximity. In this video, Abimaro describes her songwriting process as coming up with the words, having the melody develop from the meaning of the lyrics, and then letting her band give the melody ‘wings’. Ain’t that something. And now listen to how the song begins to levitate in the second verse, particularly at 2:17. Ain’t that something indeed.