the one who wrote the songs

Every once in a while, a song arrives that changes something in you. Not because you wrote it particularly well, or because you finally found the perfect lyric, but because somewhere in the process it quietly tells you something you didn’t know until you heard it for yourself.

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That’s what happened with the one who wrote the songs.

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For most of its life, this song wasn’t called that at all. I was convinced it was going to be MY NAME IS TROY. In my mind, it was going to be a declaration — a cinematic moment of finally standing in my own identity after years of surviving, adapting, and becoming whatever each season of life required. It felt powerful. It felt triumphant.

The problem was, it didn’t feel true.

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Every time I tried to make the song bigger, it somehow became smaller. Every attempt to turn it into an anthem pulled it further away from what I was actually trying to say. I couldn’t understand why until one line appeared almost out of nowhere:

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“I just don’t think they’ve met the one who wrote the songs.”

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When I read those words back to myself, everything stopped.

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I realized I wasn’t writing about introducing myself to anyone else. I was writing about recognizing a part of myself that had quietly existed underneath every version of me the world had come to know.

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We all create those versions, don’t we? The dependable one. The strong one. The patient one. The one who always knows the answer. The one who keeps the peace. They’re not dishonest versions of us — they’re often the parts that carried us through seasons we couldn’t have survived otherwise. They deserve gratitude.

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But they’re not always the whole story.

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As I continued writing, I found myself thinking about every song I’ve created over the past several years. I had always assumed they were reflections of my life, snapshots of experiences, relationships, grief, hope, healing. Looking back, though, I began to wonder if I’d had it backwards all along. Maybe I hadn’t been writing songs to explain my life. Maybe the songs had quietly been leading me back to the person who was writing them.

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That realization changed eveything.

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The title changed. The ending changed. Even the music changed. What had started as a declaration slowly became a conversation, and then something even quieter than that. Instead of announcing who I was, the song became an acknowledgment that perhaps the person I’d been searching for had never actually been missing. Maybe I had simply spend so many years becoming what I needed to become that I’d forgotten to look beneath it.

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Ironically, that’s exactly how this song came into existence.

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Normally I rewrite endlessly. I’ll question every lyric, every melody, every phrase. I’ll convince myself something isn’t quite right and spend days trying to improve it. This song refused to let me do that. The first complete version made me cry — not because I thought it was perfect, but because it felt unmistakenly honest. I lived with it for days afterward, listening while I drove, while I ran errands, while I did ordinary things. I kept expecting to discover the line that needed rewriting.

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It never came.

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For the first time in my life, I found myself looking at a finished song and realizing I didn’t want to change a single word.

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That may be the greatest gift this song gave me.

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If you’ve followed my music for a while, you may notice that many of my earlier songs ask difficult questions. They wrestle with grief, identity, trauma, love, regret, and hope. They reach for answers without pretending they’ve found them. the one who wrote the songs feels different. It doesn’t answer every questions those songs asked, but somehow it no longer needs to. It simply sits beside them with a quiet confidence, as if to say, “We’ve come far enough.”

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More than anything, I hope listeners don’t hear this as only my story.

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I hope they hear their own.

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I hope it gently asks what became the question I couldn’t stop asking myself while writing it: Who is the one beneath your survival? Who is the version of you that has been patiently waiting while you became eveything everyone else needed you to be?

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Maybe you’ve never actually lost that person.

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Maybe you’ve simply been taking the long way back.

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When I finished this song, I realized something that caught me completely by surprise. I wasn’t only writing these songs for the people who would eventually hear them.

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Somewhere along the way, they had quietly became the map that led me home.

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And perhaps that’s who the one who wrote the songs has been all along.