“Black Hole” is a song I wrote and recorded in 2020. Then, a couple years later, I came across this essay on one of my favorite websites, publicdomainreview.org. During the Great Depression, the US Farm Security Administration sent out photographers to document people’s living and working conditions. This project brought us well-known photographs like Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother.” It also produced what would become thousands of “killed negatives” – photos rejected for whatever reason, punched with a hole to make their rejection clear.

The song itself was inspired by my learning that many galaxies, including our Milky Way galaxy, have at their center a black hole. I just felt like I could relate – and maybe you can too.

There’s a black hole at the center of everything
Even you even me what is gone what is yet to be
There’s rage there’s rest there’s reality
Warped around what we cannot see
There’s a black hole at the center of it all

Don’t you look too long or hard at the black hole underlying everything
breathe it in, breathe it out, hold it close, let it go
There’s love there’s light there’s levity
rippling from what you never see
There’s a black hole at the center of your soul

dream perchance to sleep
Void and without form
In the dark and deep
Ever being born

Through the black hole at the center of your soul
broken hearted blessings flow
path of pain, gift of grief, fire of faith, cloud of unknowing
There’s hope there’s hell there’s history
Enigma wrapped in epiphany
round the black hole at the center of us all

*PS – “Black Hole” is one of 19 songs I’ve gathered from my last decade of songwriting and recording, and am preparing to release as an album. Fingers crossed, it’ll be out before this year is over!