MUSIC (Live Cover Video): "How to Save a Life" by the Fray - a song that makes me think of suicide and depression...

Hello everybody on HIVE and especially those of the Music Community! I am writing to you from Cape Town, South Africa. The two hobbies I tend to post the most about on HIVE are my music and song writing (usually performed these days with fellow HIVER @clairemobey – please follow her!) and surfing.

Now when it comes to music – I have lots of ideas for future posts:

•My/our own original music. Claire and I have just had a great gig at the Barleycorn Music Club and I look forward to going through the footage and sharing some with you! We will probably have to “rock-paper-scissors” to choose who shares which songs so please be sure to follow her (@clairemobey) as well!
•Covers that hold a lot of meaning to me/us. This post is one of those.
•I want to carry on with my series on wacky/unusual instruments that I find/make and then post videos of those in action.
•I keep finding other South African musicians that I think the world should be listening to – so I hope to write more posts about them too!

Okay – well this cover used to be a hit when I was young, and it has always sounded great. However, it is only much more recently that I have really paid attention to the lyrics and understood the depth of them…

To me, this song is about how hopeless you feel when you watch the people you care about fall apart, make bad decisions, fall into depression, or even choose to end their lives… You want to save them, but I have learnt in life that you cannot really save anybody who isn’t ready to be saved… you can only support them as they save themselves, but it has to come from them… and that’s so hard to accept sometimes.

The extreme cases? My father recently learned that an old friend of his had chosen to shoot himself. Many years ago, I watched my wife take the call that a friend had chosen to step in front of a train. Do we all have these stories and people in our lives?

For me, I used to have a musical friend who loved to jam bass, guitar and harmonica with me. He was paraplegic (in a wheelchair) from a terrible motorcycle accident. One day I checked my facebook at the airport, after a holiday with no wi-fi, to find out that he had died, and it had looked like an overdose. Was this intentional? Well, there has been a few times where I had seen glimpses of how truly unhappy he was in life. To make the story worse, he left behind a young child…

So here is my version of “How to Save a Life” by the Fray: