Benjamin William Hastings
Commentary - Boy On The Moon
Okay, this song, I'm really excited to share with you because
This is the one that kind of inspired this whole concept of doing a songwriter's edition to begin with
Because I'd always thought with this song
There was a really cool metaphor behind it
And I tried really hard to articulate that metaphor in the song
But I've always been worried that people just won't get it
Or it'll go over people's heads or they won't fully understand
So I wanted to do this songwriter's edition so I could tell these kind of stories that lie behind the songs
This one specifically, let me share

So the image I had was something like this
If you were to take this giant sphere, right
The moon if you will
Like, so start that in your mind then just imagine it getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger
All of a sudden your nose is pressed up against the moon
Everything you can see, right
With, with your naked eye
So your nose is up against the moon
But everything you can see in this, this massive planet in front of you, you're right up against it
Is what you understand about God, it's God's wisdom
From, from your perspective so to speak, right
And yet, from, with your nose up against it and the whole sphere here
There is so much, so much of the wisdom, if, assuming this sphere, the planet, whatever, is the wisdom
That you just can't see, that goes beyond your reckoning
And there's obviously the famous Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon
And to me, the, sometimes God's wisdom, like, does things on the, on the dark side of the moon, so to speak
And so this song is me really trying to articulate that
And an example of that, for example, is like, uh
Like it's babies dying when they didn't deserve to
Like that makes no sense to me
I can't reconcile that, I do not know how to reconcile that or begin to reconcile that
And if I spend too much, too much time thinking on it
I really can't just, I really can't find a good enough answer to not be angry at God
Like that's, that's the honest truth
But I have to trust, and that's kind of what this whole thing of faith is
That those things are just happening on the other side of the sphere
It's like, it doesn't mean that it's not within the wisdom and the divinity and the, um
Within the plan of God in some kind of
Weird way that I just can't understand
What it does mean is that I just don't understand it
And there's maybe points in life where you just need to put your hands up and be like
"I don't have an answer for this, I actually don't understand it
I'm just gonna choose to believe
It's, it happened on the, on the..."
So I started this song with saying "It happened on the dark side of the moon"
And then I think somewhere in the process
I, I was able to resolve that, well, you know, maybe
Maybe it's not the dark side of the moon, maybe it's the far side of the moon
And there's that line "There's no hint of a shadow in you, it's just the far side of the moon"
Which is really, I'm trying to flip the, the dark side metaphor
But that took a long while to get there
And that's not always how I feel to be honest, like, um
The original lyric in this song was
"There are shadows to your wisdom
That my mind's eye cannot see, where my mind's eye cannot see
Um, where the horizon of my reason meets a terrifying sea"
And that was a much darker kind of take on God, like who are you?
I don't understand this
Um, and I was able to pull it, I guess towards a slightly more hopeful place, but the point being
You could scale the moon really for as long as you live and there will always be sides of it that you just cannot, um
You can't get to, you can't, you can't see
There will be parts of God for all His infinite, infinite wisdom
That just do not make sense, and I guess, or to me
and I guess we just have to accept
that there's things that He does in His wisdom that are on the far side of the moon, and
maybe one day we'll understand