Love Me Later, By and By

Patience and Perspective in Caamp’s By and By

The Caamp story is a good one: two middle schoolers meet at camp (not band camp) and decide to play music together; people love their music because it resonates with the experience of being that we can’t always put to words; the band grows into something those two friends only dreamt of when they first came together. Caamp came into being when these two guys - Evan Westfall and Taylor Meier - began playing together after meeting at summer camp. Years later, they expanded to become the group we know today as Caamp. They’d originally chosen to call themselves “camp” as a tribute to their roots, but when they realized the hardship such an indistinct name would cause for people trying to look them up, they added the extra ‘a’ to create a more unique moniker. I know this wasn’t their intention, but I appreciate that the ‘AA’ in the name works nicely for a recovery translation essay. 

The members of Caamp traveled to Fort Worth, Texas to produce their second album, By and By; they speak of this experience as cathartic and enlightening. Something about being in that particular place at that time in their personal lives and music careers led to the creation of an album that is deeply reflective and touches on the internal roadtrip of loss and beginnings that inevitably accompanies personal growth. I’ve been listening to the album in its entirety, something I hadn’t done until I started this essay at my friend’s recommendation. He noted that there was something in the song worth exploring, and I haven’t really stopped listening to the album since. It’s not obsessive; it’s research.

“By and By”, the title track, has been on my playlist for a while; it just hits something that felt right even if I didn’t have a good explanation for why; it’s something true that touches on a lot of what I’ve been feeling these days. I’d felt this way about the song for a while, but wouldn’t have explored it in depth or looked closer at the more confusing lines without someone else suggesting it, so big thank you to him. 

I really connect with the opening lines: Driving through West Virginia/ And I’ve seldom been thinner/ With that chip on my shoulder/ This past year I got so much older. I love driving songs. Not because I do a lot of driving these days, but for the reflective, journey-esque nature of them. I was trying to pinpoint just what “this past year” might be for this translation. The last year in active addiction, the first in recovery, etc. I felt the need to find something that fit best for my writing, but after reading a bit about Caamp and watching their mini doc on the album and going through a series of small unfortunate events that didn’t do much other tha make my life more difficult than usual, I decided that their “past year” could be any year, any period of time of journeying through life with all the challenges, joys and experiences that make us and bring us to a point when we can look back at it and make some sense of it. I’ve seldom been thinner reminds me of something Bilbo Baggins says to Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings before he leaves his home in the Shire: “I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread” (Tolkien, LOTR). Bilbo’s thin feeling stems from his proximity to the Ring, an addictive force that complicates his ability to cultivate connection or reflect honestly on his life. His decision to retire from the Shire involves leaving the Ring behind and taking time for himself to live among the elves and to finally write his book. Someone at a meeting I recently attended said something in his share about “running myself thin,” and I connected deeply with that concept. Most days, I feel like I’m just running from one thing to another with no real time for reflection on what I’m doing, and that’s what being thin feels like. It’s when we run or think ourselves right out of the strength and clarity that we get from slowing down to pray, to meditate, to process our experiences with others or in the company of our Higher Power. That thin feeling comes when we feel mentally and emotionally drained, stripped to the point of walking skeletally through our lives with just our bodies to pull us through. When that happens, over the course of a year or however long, we feel thin and spent spiritually. 

Caamp takes to the road as a kind of escape, thin and shouldering a weight. That visual of having a “chip on my shoulder” makes me think of the resentments we carry with us. These are the ghosts of past relationships and experiences that continue to manifest in how we live our lives in active addiction and even as we move forward in our recovery if we don’t address them. And it’s hard to address them effectively when we’re running ourselves thin. When he sings that he’s gotten “so much older”, you can feel the tired, resigned way he accepts the state he’s in. This is someone coming through a hard time and feeling the weight of it even as he accepts where he is. 

This time on the road becomes time for perspective on the past: Lookin’ back over my life/ Spent the most of it tongue tied/ I wish I’d had more time/ Listenin’ to you speak your mind. A bit later, he comments that he’s been so numb for so many years. Our speaker is someone who has spent so much of life without access to a voice or to the feelings that speak for our hearts. And he can now see that in this solitude of silence, he also neglected to let in the voice of truth - that you he repeatedly regrets not listening to could be someone in his life or simply the voice of his conscience that he has failed to heed. This seems to be the one regret voiced throughout the song: that he hadn’t made the time to listen all those years. That’s something I regret too: not listening to the people in my life or to the voice in my mind that contradicted the voice of active addiction I mistook for my own. Simon and Garfunkel have the lyrics people hearing without listening in “The Sound of Silence”, and that rings true for the experience of living in an addiction mindset. We might hear people voice their concerns, speak of love, or tell hard truths; but we’re not willing to listen. Maybe because we’re not ready, and maybe because we don’t know how. 

We can hear everything someone says to us without really listening. To listen, we need to accept the words spoken to us and give them value if we find them to be true. My experience listening to By and By this time around has given me a sense of this distinction between hearing and listening: when I just hear the songs, I enjoy the music and can sort of sing along to the words without analyzing them or finding any meaning deeper than the surface level images they evoke. When I listen, I experience the songs. I find connection in the music and lyrics that was always there but somehow existed outside the reach of my distracted mind. It’s the same with people or with the truth that lives beyond words in our minds. We make a choice to hear or to listen, and only when we listen can we decipher the meaning these voices try to convey. 

Caamp moves into the refrain: Now I’m thinkin’ about her everyday/ On my mind atypical way/ Are you a life force?  The quotidian presence of “her” on his mind in this way implies that this someone occupies space in his life now in a way that he’s not used to experiencing. I like the light innocence of that line - thinkin’ about her everyday - it sounds like the way you’d think about a crush, ruminating on the person of interest and wondering if she’s thinking about you too. But Caamp pairs it with the idea of this person being on his mind in an “atypical way”, which implies a kind of thinking deviant from that in past relationships. I checked these lyrics on their site, and it’s definitely “atypical” as opposed to “a typical” way, though they sound the same. She’s on his mind in a way that sounds like “a typical” and thus feels slightly familiar to his thought patterns with people in his past; but this is atypical. It’s something new even if it holds echoes of the old. 

This word choice could reflect the ways in which our relationships with and thoughts of the people in our lives shift with perspective. When we’re running ourselves thin, it’s easy to think selfishly. We focus on getting through the day, survival of our ego, avoiding the pains of rejection and loneliness in our single-minded and tired path from dawn to dusk. When we let people into our lives at a point in time when we’ve put that thinness in our past and are actively moving forward to something healthier and more connected, we’re able to think about others in a new way. Fear can lead us to subconsciously evaluate the other person’s potential to cause harm rather than being present to accept and think of that person in a way that looks like love. Thinking about someone gives him or her space in our minds, and that space can be a function of love or of the need to control something. There’s a difference between obsessing over whether someone will leave or stay, hurt or help us and wondering how we can bring some joy or peace into that person’s life. 

When Caamp sings of this person, pairing that thought with the question - are you a life force? - he gives us a glimpse into the kind of relationship he’s been ruminating on. It’s not just a passing crush or fanciful thought of a past girl in his life; it’s someone with whom he sees the potential for something meaningful. Caamp’s her can be anyone in our lives who comes to mind in these quiet moments of perspective. Someone whose friendship, whose love means something to us, whom we care about having in our lives, and whose presence in our life leads us to ask if this relationship is a life force? I had that lyric cycling in my head every time I played this song, because I didn’t have a clear understanding of what Caamp meant by it. I had a rough sense of what a life force could be, something that gives us life and keeps us going. It’s that vital energy or spirit that we need to live. The repeated question are you a life force? could be equated to is this connection? It’s asked by someone tired and worn thin who has finally awakened to the presence of what could be true connection in his life. And in his state of reflection, he tentatively asks the question, maybe because even though he knows the answer, he hasn’t yet arrived at a place in his journey where he can confidently claim this connection as something he’s worthy of having in his life. 

I love watching videos of the band playing this song, because when they break into this chorus thinkin’ about her everyday…they move from a sort of reflective, solemn playing into this burst of joy that seems to build as the song goes on; it’s as if the more he vocalizes that he’s thinking of her in this atypical way, the more confident he feels in his worth at having this kind of connection. It might just be thinking and acknowledging a connection at this point, and he does acknowledge the trials of fully embracing happiness in his life with lines such as And it’s so easy/ To be blinded by the night/ To feel lonely in the night and I got dust in my eyes/ Rust in my mind. The visual of light and night evokes this sense of living in disharmony with the day and night. Blinded by the light takes lyrics from the original Bruce song, and the idea has mythological roots in stories that warn against mortals forgetting their place and looking or flying too close to the sun. The flaw these tales condemn is hubris, or excessive pride. It’s a defect of ego, which lies also at this feeling of loneliness in the night. When our ego takes over, we look into the sun when we should be looking at ourselves or noticing others. We lose sight of where and who we are, and it leads us to lose sight of the day and night as gifts and part of a yin-yang cycle of balance in the universe of which we are part. It’s easier to be blinded by the light than to look directly at ourselves, just as it’s easier to feel lonely than to acknowledge that we’re never truly alone when we’ve cultivated connections with ourselves, God and others. I’m absolutely guilty on both counts, both night and day, but I’m working on it.

And this idea of having dusty eyes and a rusty mind reflects the absence of true seeing and conscious thinking that has been his life for so long. He recognizes these faulty practices rooted in ego, and in acknowledging them takes a step in moving to a place of greater clarity. That journey of recovery might feel lonely and difficult, but it’s one he’s willing to take with the knowledge that home is on the horizon. He sings Pulling my belt tight/ Just me and the stars tonight; the belt-tightening image suggests that he’s meeting himself where he’s at: thin and tired as he may be; and the stars demonstrate that even in this solitude of travel he has an inkling that he’s not truly alone in the way he’s felt before. We’re not perfect at any point in our recovery, definitely not in our active addiction; so we have to meet ourselves where we are with the belief that we’re not alone. 

My favorite line in the song comes somewhere in the middle of it all and includes a promise, perhaps to the woman he’s thinking of or perhaps to himself: I’ll be home come next spring/ Won’t you say you love me later, by and by. It’s as if he’s recognizing the need for some time on his own and some personal growth before he comes home, the place we work to recover in our hearts and minds through this work. He pairs this promise to return with a request that she’ll save her love for him. I feel like this is his way of negotiating a bit with himself, maybe anticipating that he’ll be worthy of this love in time, even if it’s something in his life already, and that’s enough for me. This feeling of knowing we have so much work ahead of us and yet believing we’re worthy of the love coming our way is a step to confidently embracing that love we already have without the fear that it will see us for the mess we are and choose not to remain with us. He sees himself as someone who still struggles to see and think clearly and is still on the road but on his way home, and that conviction in his destination reflects his willingness to recover, to love and to receive love in return. He emphasizes this claim on love and connection with the closing refrain Are you a life force/ For me. This is something for him, just as recovery and the connection we find in it are for us. This life that we’re building, however slowly and painfully the process might seem at times, is for us; recovery is our birthright, and happiness and love are part of that. 

The song and album title is so fitting to this message. By and by are words that may seem dismissive or vague, but they evoke a sense of proximity and continuity with their simple definitions. Caamp could have said “soon” or “in a while” (both of which don’t sound nearly as good to this tune), but they chose “by and by'' because while we need to accept the process of time and the waiting, we have the sense of direction and relation that “by” as a preposition gives us; paired with the conjunction “and”, we also have a promise of the ongoing nature of this course we’re on. And the phonetic similarity between “by'' and “bye” can’t be overlooked. Our shortened version of ‘goodbye' - the syncopated ‘God be with ye’ - gives us bye as meaning “be with you.” Maybe a stretch, but it works. So by and by becomes a promise to be with you and to continue being with you. It becomes a promise of consistency and presence rather than a dismissal or non-committal. By and by is both the waiting time and the connection at once, a request for patience and a promise to keep showing up on the road towards that home. It all comes by and by, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. And we have to work for it, but that path is so much less lonely and dark with faith in the fact that we belong; that the sense of connection we start to feel with others and with ourselves is real and for us; and that, by and by, we find ourselves home.