The Story of Finding Home

“What in the world does all of this mean”?

I’ll show you…the best I can…

What is home to you? Webster’s dictionary defines home as : one's place of residence : the social unit formed by a family living together : a familiar or usual setting : a place of origin (I like that one). Home is comfortable, home is peaceful, home is familiar; but can home also be a bit unfamiliar or cause a bit of discomfort? I’d like to think that the discomfort, the unfamiliar territory, and the chaos all happens on your way to finding your home, finding who you are and finding your purpose.

If by now you’re wondering what in the world I’m talking about, please go listen to the debut album “Finding Home” by Collective, then please come back and finish reading and everything will make more sense.

I believe that this song and this album is a true testament to what time can do to the creative process, and even to one’s growth process. I do not believe in just writing whatever comes out and then maybe or maybe not releasing it. Instead, I see the creative process as something that requires vast amounts of time. I like to give my ideas plenty of time to grow and flourish, then when it’s time, I just know when they are finished or when I’ve just made a right move. I had the idea for a song called “Finding Home” for quite sometime, I generally have a long list of potential song titles from which I can build a storyline. With the main guitar part stretching back to around 2014, this song had plenty of time to grow. For the longest time I thought that the subject of the song should actually be about time, but I could never seem to do anything with that. Then one day the subject of finding home dropped into the depths of my being and I knew that had to be the title of the song and potentially an album title.

Once I knew what the subject of the song needed to be, I instantly had the ascending and descending chorus; “i’m finding home, i’m finding home” down…easy right? Ha. After that it took probably another year and a half to two years before I could figure the rest of the song out. Of all the songs on the album, this one definitely had the longest journey. In those few years of not having a finished song, I would pick up the guitar, and just start playing the tune, and over time a storyline of movie sequences would play through my head. This sequence was of a character in a snowy wilderness with nothing but vast mountains, evergreen trees and darkness all around. This character was on a journey to find something that he had lost long ago, or maybe hadn’t even discovered yet. His path being lit by a light he sees atop a distant mountain, he journeys through the forest to find peace and purpose…his home. All of this imagery is what played through my head every single time I played that tune, and every single time the imagery would get thicker and thicker until I knew what the song needed to be.

Finding Home was the only song on the record that I had help from an outside source. In the winter of 2017, I met up with my friend Nicholas Jamerson and presented him with this idea for a new Collective tune. I laid out the entire story line that I had in my brain and he began to pull all of the thoughts out of me. I kept playing through the song over and over and Nicholas would write down each line that was said. One second to the next we were each bouncing lines off of each other back and forth until there was an entire song, an entire journey right there in front of us. I genuinely don’t think I could’ve written this song if it wasn’t for Nicholas. I am forever so grateful! I think it was so hard for me to finish the song because from around 2014 until the time the album came out (January 31st, 2020) I was still on the constant search of finding my home. It was so much of a personal story that I just couldn’t write it. I was living the storyline everyday and for that reason I just couldn’t pull the lyrics out of myself, someone else had to.

No I wasn’t homeless, I have an incredible wife and an amazing family, I always had a “home”, in the physical sense. In the context of this song and this entire album, what home represents for me is purpose. Finding purpose. I knew early on that I had some kind of calling on my life and it would’ve been easy to jump out of the gate and make something happen years ago, but that wouldn’t have been right. Be still. From 2014 to 2020 I was on such a crazy, intense journey to find my purpose and what I truly needed to be doing with my life. I had gone through a hard breakup, searched for what love truly is, stepped into a bigger role at my church, my dad was diagnosed with a rare medical condition that has steered Beth and I and my parents on a whole different journey. In addition, I started a career where the odds are completely against me to succeed, and met the absolute love of my life!!! By no means am I saying that I have everything figured out. Honestly, I’m so excited to keep figuring things out and keep growing. It took a lot of pushing and pulling for me to figure out what I needed to do with my life, who I needed to do it with, and when to act on it (that was a big one). So what is it, what am I supposed to be doing? This. I’m supposed to play music, writing songs that mean something, and tell my story so that it can help YOU and whoever needs to hear it. Every time that I’ve said “this is only the beginning”, that is why. I see this traveling much longer that just an album or two, more than just a video or two, and more than a blog post or two. This is my life and this is what I’m going to do. Because I know that this is what I’m called to do. It’s what I HAVE to do. 

The amazing thing about this song and this entire project, is that “Finding Home” can mean something completely different to each person who listens. For Beth and I, the search for home was the search for purpose, but my mom has mentioned multiple times that when she listens to the album, it puts her and dad on a search for peace. For you it might be finding who your supposed to be, maybe you’ve lost who you were, maybe its the search for God? I just hope that this can help us all find what we are looking for and we can all collectively become stronger from it!

Speaking to the imagery of the song, at the end of the song when the character reaches the top of the mountain and the music starts to resolve, I always envisioned him seeing only a lantern at the top of the mountain, not a cabin or some elaborate house, just simply a lantern. Maybe that’s a new song that starts with “I can see a lantern on the summit” ha! Nah but really... To me that thought of only a lantern on the mountain symbolized that sometimes things aren’t always as they seem and sometimes maybe you have to just travel a little farther before you truly find what you’re looking for. Not that the path that you’ve trekked has been wasted, but that you’re on the right path, you just have to go a little further.

Brennen Meek.

Written 5.4.2020