My Point of Return

NEEDLE DROP 001

My Point of Return

On “Voyage to Atlantis,” the music we return to, and the songs that somehow know the way back.

“Voyage to Atlantis” — The Isley Brothers

My song is “Voyage to Atlantis” by The Isley Brothers.

It is the one I return to most, and what brings me back begins before I even consider the words.

The guitar.

There is something about the way it moves through the song—unhurried, warm, almost floating. It does not simply sit behind the lyrics. It creates the place they are asking us to imagine.

Before the words begin wrestling with leaving and returning, the music has already made departure feel possible and home feel close enough to find again.

That matters to me.

Because sometimes what I love most about a song cannot be explained by its lyrics. It is a sound. A chord. The way an instrument enters at exactly the right moment and makes you feel something before you have decided what the feeling is.

Then come the words.

Can I go on my way without you?

Suddenly, all that openness is holding something heavier: distance, devotion, leaving, return.

Maybe that is why I keep finding my way back to it.

Some songs reach us before we understand why they matter. They play in our parents’ homes, from car speakers, somewhere in the background of childhood. We hear them long before we know we will one day choose them for ourselves.

Then one day, the song belongs to us too.

What once lived in the background becomes something we reach for on purpose.

And somewhere between hearing it then and choosing it now, a song becomes more than something you remember.

It becomes a place you know how to return to.