“Make Your Own Change” is a country-folk song about going through a mid-life crisis and coming to the realization that despite everything; despite working hard and trying to do things right, the narrator in the song has somehow missed the point. But the universe sends him a message, in the form of a roadside fruit stand with a handwritten sign saying, “Make your own change”.
I wrote this song with Colin Black and Les Hauge. Colin came up with the title and the idea for the song after seeing a vegetable stand on a visit back home to his Mom’s place in rural Georgia. And as soon as I heard the title, I thought it could make a beautiful song about a life-changing epiphany. And that’s the kind of song I like to write!
At one point, the first two verses were written, and I was thinking about what the chorus should say that would sum up the message of the song. And as I was driving home one day, I started thinking about the great Bob Seger song, “Against the Wind”. Especially the part where he sings: “I was livin’ to run and runnin’ to live”. That line always got me, even as a kid, although I didn’t have the life experience at the time to truly understand it. But I realized as I was driving that the feeling that line gave me was very similar to the feeling we were trying to express. And by the time I got home I had the chorus:
Running so fast, I lost track of the reason
I wasted years and I let love slip away
I came back to find myself some healin’
Cause I can’t keep going on this way
I know… you gotta make your own change
“Running so fast, I lost track of the reason”. That’s kinda what Bob meant when he wrote those lines of his that I loved. And I had wasted years and I had let love slip away. The truth of that hit me hard.
And I also realized that for most of my life I’d been trying to change my life by trying my damnedest to change the people and the world around me. But, like the narrator in the song, I’ve reached the point now where I’ve come to realize that the biggest change we can make, the biggest change we need to make, is actually within ourselves. “Make Your Own Change” is about that moment of realization.