All the Wrong Reasons

The story behind the song

What do you tell a kid who wants to enlist?

Somebody half your age asks what advice you'd give someone who wants to sign up. The honest answer takes half an hour, and by the end of it they're looking at you like the question was a lot bigger than it sounded. This song is that answer.

Why did you join? Seventeen. Thought it would be cool, and that girls liked a uniform. The song owns that without flinching. It opens in a folding chair in a strip-mall office, with a government pen.

Would you do it again? In a heartbeat. Not for the same reasons. You stay for the ones you find: lessons you can't learn anywhere else, and people who could call you twenty years from now, with nothing in between, and you'd already be reaching for your keys. All they'd have to say is where and when.

The part that isn't in the brochure

What you do stays done, right or wrong, and it walks with you for the rest of your life. You can't undo the past. And sometimes doing the right thing is the most difficult thing you will ever have to do. The kid gets told all of that too, because leaving it out would be a lie.

The long answer

So the song is the whole answer, aimed at the kid in the folding chair, who is also the person you used to be. The back half drops to one voice and no instruments, because the last thing you'd say to that kid deserves nothing behind it.

That's the advice. Do it. Then write one you can live with.