I’m still exhausted, but it’s no longer the – forget everything, I tap-out kind. My headphones and a brisk walk back outside are aiding that toxic mindset, where I all really want to do is listen to Hozier gracefully suggest that I use my voice.

In the aforementioned album release video, there are numerous canvases drying in the room. He walks right by some of them and stares intensely at the black-and-white writing he delicately centered on the easel. The album artwork of Hozier under water lingers on a canvas behind it. Maybe the neglected paintings are songs that didn’t work? Maybe you have to paint 100 of them to get one that you stare at deeply. Maybe the one that grabs you is actually in black and white instead of the larger one next to it, where you threw on – every color you had inside of you, thinking that would get people’s attention.

The simple joys of creative expression and humane moments start to resurface as I constantly spin track #3, “Movement”. Hozier explaining “Movement” to Apple Music states, “There’s a reference to Jonah and the whale – a person inside of a much larger thing that is moving.”

There’s a lyric gently placed in the verse that rings, “When you move, I’m put to mind of all that I wanna be.” Then, three minutes into the song, Hozier starts let his voice go. Some “muster-up the strength” melodies fly from his gut as he delivers the last “move me, baby” chorus…

“Move me, baby

Shake like the bough of a willow tree

You do it naturally

Move me, baby

So move me, baby

Like you’ve nothin’ left to lose

And nothin’ to prove

Move me, baby

So move me, baby.”

And that’s how I feel. I just want to leap into the arms of the art and let it take me wherever it shall go. Because, like Wasteland, Baby!, that’s what moves me. When you glance over the colors of your core with intent to create a picture vibrant enough to attract everyone, you disrespect and miss out on the most fruitful raw elements of the art that are cemented right in front of you.