Hi there, thanks so much for pressing play. My name is Ryan O'Neill and I make music under the name

Sleeping at Last and as you may know since you chose to play this podcast, this is called The

Sleeping at Last Podcast and it's the place that I so deeply enjoy getting to share the stories

behind my songs and all that went into them. So thank you very much for being curious, I really,

really appreciate you.

So getting to share new music is probably my favorite part of this whole thing. It puts oxygen

in my lungs and all the nerves and excitement and vulnerability that comes along with sharing

something new that I've made. It's just a really special and kind of big feeling and I just

really love it. On today's episode I do get to share a brand new song and I'm so excited to

share it with you and to talk about it but it's also very bittersweet. It feels like kind of a

strange letting go for me personally. This new song that we're going to talk about today is called

To Be Enchanted and it's one of several in a small collection of new songs that I wrote since my

my mom very unexpectedly passed away last year which is still extremely hard for me to say out loud.

But in the days after she passed I sat down at my piano and it kind of felt like a friend,

it felt really comforting and I wrote a song called Mother in Her Honor which was released last

year around Mother's Day and because of that feeling and it felt a little bit like healing, I had

every intention of getting right back into writing my atlas three songs and moving forward to

the best of my abilities. But every time I sat down to write one of those songs I just could not

find my focus or my footing at all. And so I ended up doing a lot of travel last year and a bunch of

therapy and every time I came back home from one of those trips I would try again. I would sit down

at the piano and again and again and again hoping to get unstuck. Eventually songs did begin to show up

which I was so grateful for but none of them fit the themes of atlas three not not even close.

...