Day 20: All is As All Should Be – The Dear Hunter

Life poses some interesting questions. It’s easy to go about your life ignoring them and simply living, but sometimes they jump out and grab you and don’t let go. For me, that happens late at night when I can’t sleep. Thoughts start racing around in my head – what is life? Is it a dream? Am I even here?

That’s something philosophers have loved to ponder for centuries as well. World religions have tried to answer these questions. How did we get here, where are we going, and what do we do in the meantime? It’s a lot to tackle. Take Hinduism for example. The all-encompassing force of Hinduism is brahman, and we are all supposedly separated from it but meant to reunite with it. We have to live good lives or else we will continually reincarnate until we’ve reached brahman.

For some people, that makes sense. It’s only human to try to figure out what’s going to happen when this life is through. We have the human desire to know the unknowable. And it makes for some great songs.

Day 20: All is As All Should Be – The Dear Hunter

In late 2017, my favorite band came out with an EP. I was hoping it was going to be Act VI of their narrative albums, but All is As All Should Be did not disappoint. A simple yet poignant EP, it asked some of the more intense questions of life, and pointed to the fact that we’re not here for long, so what are you gonna do with the time given to you?

The title song is the most poignant, in my opinion. Frontman Casey Crescenzo wrote extensively on it in the vinyl’s liner notes. At the heart of the song is a “what if” question – what if at the end of our lives we could watch a movie of our existence? Parenthood seemed to inspire this, as Crescenzo is a relatively new father. A new existence can bring more questions about existence.

What were we before?
Were we always what we are or
Were we made to change?

The song starts with questions as a matter of fact. And good questions too. Who were we before we were us? Reincarnation tries to answer that, and other religions answer that by saying we are souls – we were part of the Universe, part of some spiritual plane, or nonexistent until we were conceived. They’re tough questions to answer, and honestly, we may never know til we get there.

Copycat, you can’t look back
Your eyes, they haven’t seen nothin’
But at the end when you’re looking out through my eyes
You’ll see that all is as all should be

The copycat is Crescenzo’s young son. In the liner notes, Crescenzo muses that his son’s experiences won’t be the same as his, and there are a lot of things he needs to learn on his own. But Crescenzo has the ability to look back on his thirty-ish years of life and see the patterns, what went right and wrong, how he learned. It’s part of the human experience.

As I fade away, you come to be and when the cycle ends
It begins with an unfamiliar me
You’re doomed to brave decisions I’ve made
But maybe every mistake was placed deep beneath
The current we sustain

The second verse gets intense, in its sound and its lyricism. It’s a deeply existential song. Crescenzo is imagining what it would be like if he could look back on his life. He would see an “unfamiliar me” being born, living, growing, changing. It parallels his thoughts toward his son’s life. His son will do the same thing, but almost separate from him and his experiences.

The song plays out with a chugging rhythm with these words being repeated:

All is as all should be

It’s almost like a mantra, either of self-assurance or fear. Or maybe it’s just a pounding reminder that we have very little control over this life. Try though we may, life has troubles embedded in it regardless of what we do to stop it. But this mantra is comforting as well. This is the way it’s supposed to be. You can look back on where you’ve been and see the patterns, the ebbs and flows, and see how it all turned out.

All was as all should be.