In celebration of Pride Month, we’ve posted a recent performance of our song “Those Eyes” on its own to Mosaic Mind’s new YouTube channel. I wrote some words to go along with it:

Because of the environment I grew up in–Catholic school until college–for a long time, any sense of attraction I felt gave me a sense of dread. Even after I came out, I always felt guilty when I developed feelings for another guy, especially if it was a friend. But after years of therapy and some scary (but important) conversations with friends, I realized how messed up it was that I had such feelings of guilt and shame and FEAR associated with just finding another person attractive. And if I had any hope of finding a partner, I’d need to do SOMETHING to change that perspective.

So I wrote a song about it. I wanted to write a song about finding someone attractive, and being excited about that. Not “love at first sight.” Just the joy of discovering someone you’re interested in and wanting to learn more, the same way a song on the radio might grab your attention and lead you to do a deep dive on the artist. And I didn’t want it to be “about” being gay, but I wanted to make it clear that the speaker was a guy falling for another guy–hence all the times it says “boy” in the lyrics.

When we first broached the topic of working on original music in the band, I sent a batch of song demos to the other guys to see what they might want to work on. Of the four songs I sent, and without any other context than the song itself (a crappy recording of me playing and singing the song on acoustic guitar), “Those Eyes” was unanimously chosen to be the first song we worked on. Any trepidation I felt about workshopping and performing a song that felt very emotionally risky for me quickly fell away as we began working on it and I saw how comfortable the other guys were with it. And how much they ENJOYED it.

It’s great to be able to play music in a band again. It’s even better to get to play music with a group of people that accepts and appreciates who I am.

For anyone else out there struggling the way I did–gay, straight, whatever–I hope this song gives you some sense of solace.