Never Alone

The song and the story

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The Story

Never Alone was the first song Joseph and I wrote together in the “new era” of our relationship. We met 20 years before in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, as Mormon missionaries. He was my district leader—my ecclesiastical authority (as he likes to tease me when he wants my attention or a swift smack on the butt). It was at our first district meeting together when we sang the opening and closing hymns that we realized how well our voices blended. A few weeks later, we discovered that not only could we sing together, but we could song-write together.

“I have a few lyrics I’ve written,” I said, “but I don’t know if they are any good.”

“Maybe I could help you write the music for them,” he offered in return. It was a match made in heaven.

Joseph and me inside a windmill. (Notice that we have our hands tightly but appropriately folded in our laps. Oh, the sexual tension.)

The songs we wrote together then were religious and naive. “Simple Faith” and “Home” were the titles of our first awkward attempts at co-writing. At the time, I would have balked if anyone suggested that something like sexual tension existed between us. But now, I like to remember the scene in that little chapel in Rotterdam with a touch of romance—us, sitting together on the piano bench, our heads leaning ever so slightly toward each other. Years later, the memory has a golden halo to it, as if there might have been a clerestory window above us, surrounding the two of us with soft filtered light. I didn’t know it then, but he told me years later that from that very first district meeting, he had, indeed been falling in love with me. Of course, for Mormon missionaries, fraternizing was strictly prohibited, and Joseph was far too obedient a missionary to let on how he felt.

We came home from our missions just before Christmas, 2001. As soon as I was back home in Missouri, he called my parents’ house to ask me if he could come all the way from South Carolina to take me on a date. Oh, the tragedy! I was already spoken for by a boyfriend who had waited for me on my mission. We were ships in the night and we didn’t speak to each other again for many years.

Now, fast forward to 2013, when I left the Mormon church. I tried to leave quietly. I swear I did. But after a year of suppression for the sake of my family, my grief and anger found their voices when I wrote an essay about my disaffection entitled “Under the Pretense of Love.” The essay went fairly viral thanks to the ExMormon Reddit. And because we were connected by Facebook, Joseph read it too. Shortly after its release, he reached out to me to talk. He was having doubts as well, he said.

We reminisced together about the music we had made together. As musicians, it was the hymns and songs that had been our primary means of feeling “The Spirit,” and which formed the foundation of our faith. We asked each other, “Do we have to leave the music behind too?” It was a soul-wrenching question, and we even played around with the idea of rewriting some of the LDS hymns for secular use.

Then one day, long before we even acknowledged the possibilities of a romantic connection, Joseph asked, “How long are we going to keep living these parallel lives?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, still oblivious to the hope behind his question.

My marriage crumbled. His had been dead for years. I dated around. So did he. Every few months, we talked over Messenger or on the phone about how hard it had been, We talked about the loneliness we felt—losing our faith. Losing our love. Losing our music. In this way, our parallel paths began to converge, one conversation, one word of tenderness at a time.

Finally, early in 2019, after walking our parallel paths for far too long, my eyes and ears were opened to him by a song he sang to me. It was the music. It was always the music.

One day—it was spring I remember, because the trees were blooming in that memory—Joseph was having a particularly hard day. I was in Arkansas. He was in South Carolina—too far apart for moments like these when the thing you need most is to be held. I remember exactly where I was when the beginnings of a lyric came to me for the first time in almost twenty years. I was at the gas station, pumping gas and thinking about him. I wanted to give him a word of encouragement. A word of hope. The words that came felt like a revelation and became our first song, Never Alone.

A note about the lyrics. In this song, I talk about things like prayer and help from above. To be honest, I surprised myself when I wrote it. I really didn’t know how I felt about God, and I hadn’t prayed in several years. But I knew I had been led to Joseph and I knew our story was too beautiful to be mere coincidence. And despite all the pain and disillusionment I had suffered, these concepts of faith, connection, and hope still meant something to me, even if they didn’t mean what they used to.

I am reminded of the words of the poet Rilke in his “Letters to a Young Poet.” He said, “I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

For me, writing this song and admitting, if only to myself, that I still yearned to pray, and to believe, even if I didn’t know how, was feeling and living into the question, more than professing the answer.

This recording is the original recording of the song that emerged from those lyrics. It was captured on an iPhone and contains all the artifacts and imperfections of a first performance, including (if you listen carefully) a little laugh of Joseph’s that still fills me with nostalgia for that first beautiful year of rekindled love and the hope that we are never truly alone. Joseph wanted to re-record it more professionally for release on my Substack. But I like it just as it is. I hope you like it too.

Joseph and I performed together for a small group of friends

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Never Alone

Verse 1

You’re feeling low
Got nowhere to go
It’s the end of your rope
And the end of the road
You’re worn out and tired
And chased by your past
By the memory of happiness 
That just couldn’t last

Darling I know how you’re feeling 
I’ve been there a time or two
I am here if you want me, And maybe you’ll let me 
Pass something I’ve learned on to you. 

When you feel you’ve got nothing but questions 
And your fear starts to tear you apart
Take a breath. Say a prayer. 
The answers are there.
Just remember you’re never alone.

Verse 2

Your head hangs down
Feel chained to the ground
By the choices you’ve made 
And the people you’ve found
There’s no going back
To set yourself free
But there is a way forward
If you can just see

Mistakes are a chance for redemption—
A chance for a brand new start.
Let your struggles refine you, But never define you
There’s someone who still knows your heart.

So when your world feels like a prison
And all that you’ve worked for is gone
Lift your head. Look around.  
What’s lost will be found. 
Just remember you’re never alone. 

Verse 3

Some things go wrong
No fault of your own
There are people who’ll use you
And storms you can’t control 
In a world of hurt
There’s a soft place to land 
You can get through the hard parts
When you understand 

That pain is a place that you pass through
And failure’s a way that you grow
And that all you can take is the love that you make
And the light of the truth that you know.

So when the skies darken around you
And you feel like you’re falling apart
You have friends. You are loved.
There’s help from above.
Just remember you’re never alone.

Don’t give up. You’ll get through.
I’m promising you
That you’re never, no never / alone.