Worth the Time It Took

Greg Laswell’s How the Day Sounds is a song about being a long way off and then, suddenly, not being. The light comes back—or you move toward it, it’s hard to tell from inside it—and the morning feels like morning again. I was a long, long way off, he sings, and the line doesn’t perform grief, it just states it, the way you might describe a town you used to live in.

The song is from 2008, the album Three Flights from Alto Nido, and it has this particular acoustic warmth that makes it feel like a window being opened after a room has been closed too long. Nothing dramatic. Just air moving through. There’s a moment in the bridge where the melody lifts and he sings that it was worth the time it took to get here—and I believe it every time, even when I have no personal evidence for it.

That’s the specific power of a song like this. It doesn’t argue. It just describes the view from the other side clearly enough that you can almost borrow it.