Hey, thank you so much for pressing play. My name is Ryan O'Neill and this is the Sleeping

at Last Podcast and I love getting to make these. It is such an honor to get to share the

stories, the details that go into each of my songs and it just means a whole lot to me

that you are curious and would even listen to me drone on for a little while in each of

these episodes. So thank you so much. I really appreciate you and I'm looking forward to

sharing a new song with you today.

The song we're going to talk about today is called Wave After Wave and it is now available

everywhere and I'm really really excited about that.

As I mentioned in the last episode, this song belongs to a new small collection of songs

called Mother which are releasing one at a time between now and Mother's Day. These

songs are my way of processing the recent loss of my mom and as I mentioned before, I tried

over this last year to return to writing songs for my Atlas project, my primary project

and was just feeling entirely unable to focus on those themes. I just couldn't get anywhere.

It was deeply frustrating because I really believe that I could channel some of this heartbreak

that I was feeling into those songs. But I just couldn't find any traction and unlike

typical writers block which I'm very familiar with, I actually was able to write and that

felt so good and comforting. But each song that I followed along down the path just wasn't

a thematic fit for Atlas 3 and so I then set that song aside and then tried to get

in a different song. In the same story, it kept happening over and over and suddenly

it became really obvious that I needed to write these songs in order to process the

loss of my mom before carrying on and writing Atlas 3. So that's what these songs are, a

small collection called Mother. In honor of my mom, her beautiful life, the painful grief

...