Shades Of Joy

Parents are strange. I don’t really know mine. I mean I know them but we don’t really talk much. Every year I get better at knowing how to talk to them. I’m scared they’ll get too old before I get good enough at it. But with them it’s a disconnect we’ve always seemed to have, as far as I can tell it’s not because I’m queer. But recently some of my friends have had horrendous experiences coming out to their families.

This song is about growing to admire the ways that parents change their own lives as time goes on, when we grow up, and the ways that’s often not reciprocated in turn. It’s for a friend who’s mother started revealing herself as homophobic, more and more, and it was strange and unexpected. Scary and quite unhinged. 

People who can’t accept their children being queer feels like they’re holding on to this image they liked, this facade. I think as the children we accept our parents honesty more than they accept ours. When mothers learn new things or stop pretending to like things, or fathers change their hobbies or change their attitudes, I think we have an easier time celebrating that from the other direction. It’s nice when we get to finally be people together, real people.

An unaccepting parent is such an absolute betrayal of what was promised — you were watching me grow, you celebrated my life as I got taller, got smarter, learned so much, changed so much. I’m meant to stop now? But I can’t! And this growing pain aches like all the others! Won’t you be here for me while I grow? I thought you said that. I thought that’s what you were saying when you said you loved me. I love you. Won’t you love me?

I wrote Shades Of Joy while I was writing a song a day for a week, and it ended up on my 2024 album ‘Sunshine Special’.