My Point of Return

NEEDLE DROP 001

My Point of Return

My song is “Voyage to Atlantis.”

It is the one I return to most, and part of what keeps bringing me back happens before I even consider the words.

It's the music itself.

The guitar.

There is something about the way it moves through the song—unhurried, warm, almost floating. It doesn't simply sit behind the lyrics. It creates the place the lyrics are asking us to imagine. Before Ronald Isley begins 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 isn't something I can explain through its lyrics. It's a sound. A chord. The way an instrument enters at exactly the right moment and makes you feel something before you've decided what that feeling is.

Then come the words.

Can I go on my way without you?

Suddenly, the music that felt so expansive is holding a question about distance, devotion, leaving, and return.

It is a question August understands well:

What happens to what shaped us when we begin to change?

Maybe we carry more of it than we realize.

The music our parents played becomes music we choose for ourselves. A song that once belonged to the background moves into the foreground. What was inherited becomes personal.

And suddenly, something you never consciously chose has become one of the ways you know where you come from.