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Oxygen

from The Way Down by Van Plating

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about

This is a song of recovery and healing. Over the past handful of years since I returned to songwriting full time I’ve done a lot of emotional trauma work, a lot of excavating, a lot of breaking dissociative patterns I’d created in order to survive and function in my days as a young mother who had a lot of areas of trauma and abuse I’d avoided for so long I didn’t even realize I was walking around half alive. So I began to wake up, to really feel the pain of those things, to explore my own heart and experiences without fear, and it was hard. But it was also beautiful. When I was writing this song I kept coming back to the way it feels to be a kid body surfing in the Atlantic. You get pumelled by the ocean the waves ,the sand, you’re bruised and scraped and you come up for air struggling but you’re having the time of your life. It’s this wild, joyful, kind of violent thing. That’s how I have felt in the process of recovery over the last few years. In coming back to writing, I ws also coming back to my childhood self, I was no longer afraid to feel all of it, and as hard as the lows were (and sometimes still are), I wouldn’t go back. You can’t have sun without shade. And the flip side of those lows is the heart-cracking depth of joy you can’t experience if you’re half awake. What a wonder, to be fully alive.

lyrics

V1

Oh hollow breath
I hate to see you go
Are we brave enough
to face what we're unsure of?

Pre 1
Hanging on
Against the undertow and I'm slippin'
Scraping ground
my shoulder bruised
My mouth is full of sand


V2
Whose side are you on?
My wings were made to soar
Cut the silence 'cross the night
Freefall from the chord

Pre 2
Oxygen
Scrapes against my forehead, eyes shut
Whole again
Carried on, a wave assaults my wounds
The stars are
Ancient babies ever new
Alive

Chorus
And the waves break
And the night comes
And the day light
We won't run from
And the waves break
And the night comes
And the day light
We won't run from



And when I woke up I was alive
And when we broke up I couldn't hide
And when I woke up I was alive
And when we broke up I couldn't hide

I'm alive
Alive

credits

from The Way Down, track released November 19, 2021

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Van Plating Lakeland, Florida

Critically acclaimed indie americana artist and multi-instrumentalist Van Plating has a rugged vulnerability uniquely hers ─ fermented in the orange groves and hot verdant summers of the sunshine state.

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