The Message

August 17, 2020

Some songs find their audience in the daylight. This one found its first listeners in the dark.

“The Message” debuted on radio on Caravan to Midnight, John B. Wells’ late-night show. If you know the show, you know the hour — the part of the night when the rest of the world is asleep and the people still awake are the ones searching for something. Answers. Meaning. A reason to keep going. That’s the audience this song was written for, whether I knew it at the time or not.

And that show has only grown since. John B. Wells puts the weekday Caravan audience at more than four million listeners a night now — and Ark Midnight, the Saturday show, at more than eight million. And would you believe it? Millions of listeners — and one of them was my former grade school teacher, tuned in that night.

Harry Hess and I wrote it in 2019, and it was released on August 20, 2020. The verses are quiet — lost, tired, straying along the way. That’s where the song lives, in that low place where you’re not sure which way is forward. And then the chorus comes in and it doesn’t creep up on you. It hits. It’s explosive. The whole song opens up and the message breaks through — out of the wreckage, into the open, and once it’s out there, it doesn’t stay put. It spreads.

That’s what the chorus is saying: “Send me a message / Out of the wreckage / I’ll spread your message to the world.” The message isn’t polished. It doesn’t come from a perfect place. It comes from the wreckage, from the middle of the hard part. And the point isn’t to keep it. The point is to pass it on — hope, love, truth — to whoever needs it next.

The other line that holds the whole song together is the one that challenges me every time I sing it: “But it’s not enough to say / That I believe, and walk away.” Belief on its own isn’t the point. Living it is. If you don’t live it, the message stops with you. And the song is asking you not to let it stop.

So a song about a message finding its way to someone in the dark made its radio debut on a show that airs in the dark, to listeners who are up late searching. That feels right to me. Some messages are meant to travel at night, when the noise dies down and you can actually hear them.

It can be a small world sometimes. You send a message out to millions of strangers, and it finds its way back to someone who knew you when you were a kid. That’s the thing about a message — you never know who it’s going to reach.

If you’re the one it’s looking for, I hope it finds you.

— Franklin

behind the music · franklin mckay