When this moment is all you have
“My microphone isn’t spectacular, but it’s okay.” That’s how Heron begins “Dead To It”. A plain statement, easily overlooked. But in that small admission, he signals everything. He isn’t reflecting on the past or reaching toward the future. He’s reporting the moment as it happens. The act of creating becomes the subject itself. This isn’t performance, it’s process. In a time when lyrics are expected to be authentic and introspective, Heron goes further. He shows us the present in its rawest form. It’s meta in the truest sense, collapsing the distance between experience and expression. And in doing so, he captures something many of us recognise: when life narrows to a point, when memory, doubt and fear all collapse inward, and the only way through is to face it.
“Dead To It” remains suspended in that space. The song loops like a thought you can’t quite finish. Old memories, unspoken songs, and unresolved emotions circle in his head like baggage too familiar to unpack. But none of that matters anymore, because the present demands attention. It’s louder than the past and clearer than the future. Heron doesn’t turn away. He stays with it. Stuck between what he used to believe and what no longer feels true. That average microphone, the whirlwind in his mind, and the fragile inspiration that survives it are all he has. And that’s enough. Because this moment isn’t just personal. It’s a portrait of what so many artists, and people in general, quietly go through. When there’s nowhere to go but inward, when everything external falls away, and you’re left with one task: to speak honestly, or not at all.
Sometimes, a quiet sorrow takes hold without explanation. It doesn’t always come from external drama or visible crisis. Often it begins in subtler ways: a shift in creative energy, a passing doubt, a haunting memory. Things others might call small but which carry disproportionate weight for the one living through them. That tension builds. Not because someone is weak, but because they feel. Because something within needs to be understood, shaped, voiced. Pain, whether large or small, demands expression. And when it isn’t ignored or smoothed over, it pulls you into the present. A state that is both confronting and clarifying. It becomes a wound, but also a remedy. A mirror held too close to ignore.
In that space, the past loses its shape. You no longer recognise the songs you once leaned on. “Old songs feel like something somebody else used to play,” Heron sings. The safety of previous work, previous selves, begins to feel distant or even disposable. That can be terrifying. But it also pushes you somewhere else. Into a new space where nothing is familiar, but everything is possible. The uncertainty tightens around you, until it starts to feel like pressure. Like hands around your neck. And oddly, those hands are what hold you up. They give you the urgency you were missing. Not to escape, but to create something that feels like now.
Because that’s where clarity begins. Not in retreat, but in the thick of it. Heron’s refrain isn’t one of surrender. It’s a line drawn. “Dead to it” doesn’t mean numb. It means cut off from the noise, the fixes, the expectations. A kind of inner silence that strips away the unnecessary until all that’s left is what you really mean. It’s not always pretty. It’s not clean. But it’s real. And in that space, the simplest act — sitting in front of a microphone — becomes something else. A survival instinct. A ritual. A lifeline. When the world around you feels false or distant, sometimes the only sacred thing left is the present. And speaking from it can save you.