Adam:

Some people get lucky and become successful overnight. And for others, it can take years and years and years and years. My perspective on this song was written while reminiscing on my journey to get to where I am as an artist mixed with the growing process of just being a human being. 

I’ve been releasing my own music since 2012, including 6 albums pre-Northwest Stories. I’ve been doing this a long time. And I’ve gone through so many moments where I think about stopping because over the years it felt like I was putting in years worth of work just for a handful of people to hear it. I’ve seen other artists release their first song and within a few months they sign a record deal to one of the biggest labels in the world. I’ve seen a lot of other artists give up because life becomes too busy and they can’t fit making music into their schedules. At the end of the day I asked myself “Would I still do this even if no one listens?” and the answer is yes. I love making music. So this song helps remind me that it is going to take time.

The ideas for this song began with thinking about how it takes years and years to finally learn something. Meaningful skills can’t be learned overnight. I see my kids and watch how they grow over the years. You can’t learn to walk or talk right away. It takes time. 

The first line talks about how my mom used to say “go to bed so you feel better”. That was the beginning of me thinking back to when I was a kid and how I’m still learning things in my adult years that I was trying to learn when I was little. 

So here are a couple big lessons I've learned over the years…

1) Everyone has to run their own race 

2) God has a plan for everyone and the timing is perfect

‍

RJ:

It’s currently 10:57 pm as I’m writing this and I’m holding my newborn baby girl, which at one point in my life I thought I’d never do, because my wife and I struggled with infertility.

In the last 5 years, my wife and I have had 3 kids.

In the last four years, Adam and I have released 32 songs as Northwest Stories, with this song being our 32nd.

I’m glad Madison and I started and never gave up.
I’m glad Adam and I started and never gave up.

I had made tentative plans for my life and how I wanted it to go, but this is so much better than anything I could have blue printed.

I can clearly see how every little detail, down to timing, struggles, skills I picked up, and people I met along the way were perfectly orchestrated by God.

Some of the boats I untethered crashed, and others made it to a beautiful shore.
Each untethered boat was valuable for me.

Ultimately, the untethered boats I kept sailing with, that made it to another shore, made it there because I found joy in the journey of those boats.

I had a friend who lived by the motto:

“If ya ain’t having fun, ya ain’t doing it right.”

When I first heard that, I thought to myself,
“That’s not true.”

Chores aren’t fun, work isn’t fun, school isn’t fun, trials aren’t fun, the list went on and on.

I knew those things were good for me to do and were the right things to do, but they weren’t always fun; in fact, they mostly weren’t.

In my mind I had proven my friend’s life motto false.

But then, one day, I realized he might have been on to something.

The more I thought about it, the more I noticed how the “unfun” things made up the majority of my life. What a miserable life if the majority of it was devoid of joy.

So I adopted his life motto with a few altercations:

‍“If I’m not finding joy in what I’m doing, I’m not doing it right.”

Swapping fun and joy was a small but important replacement for me, because joy involves a sober mind and eternal perspective, while fun is fleeting and dependent.

We were born so that we might choose and experience joy.

When everything you do must have joy in it, everything you do must have eternal purpose in it.

If you can’t find the eternal purpose in something, you are either doing something in a way that doesn’t have eternal purpose, or you are thinking about it in an eternally insignificant way.

If something feels empty, wasteful or fleeting, then change something.

Every worthwhile destination takes years and years to get there, so enjoy the journey.
We were born to choose and have joy.