I was in a TSA line and I started to feel stressed and nervous, but as soon as I realized I was only reacting to the emotion of the hurried people around me, I could disregard my own sense of alarm, and I instantly felt calm again. Hey, I can stay relaxed when I'm picking up on other people's fear? That's a cool hack.

Writing songs has been my way of clarifying life lessons, so I pictured a situation where there's an alarm going off and I stay calm through it all.

Imagine it's a stormy night out in an empty parking lot and the flood waters are rising and I've got to move my car to higher ground, but I accidentally locked my keys inside. The best thing to do is break the window, but the alarm is gonna go off, and it will be loud and incessant, as if the car is screaming: "Hey! There's danger!" But it's only me breaking into my own car, so why be alarmed? I know that most of the fear I feel is not helpful. It's doing me more harm than good. It's just primitive brain stem programming.  Staying peaceful while surrounded by alarm? That's a hack I want to practice. 

This song is about getting creative with how you think about the events in your past so that you aren't just living out a victim story.  So maybe your dream didn't soar as high as you had hoped, and maybe it came down hard, but the crash is not the whole story. This song comes from childhood  memories of home life crashing down around us kids and it's about appreciating the handy skills of disassociation that were just what I needed at the time to get me through.

This song helps me keep my emotional buoyancy so I  don't drown in the sea of sorrow. Walking through an art museum, I noticed how those beautiful works of art are often surrounded by a frame that holds back the hopelessness and protects the beauty from the bland white walls – in the same way that a little boat holds back the whole ocean. My songs keep me afloat, and even though I can't make the world beautiful, I'm grateful that within the small frame of my influence, beauty sustains me like a lifeboat and keeps me from sinking.

This is about a garage sale with a bunch of cool outdoor equipment. The odd thing is that when you find the gear that you want to buy and you bring it over to the guy sitting at the folding card table with the gray cashbox and you ask: "Hey, how much for this?"

The guy looks at you and says: "Are you gonna use it?" And when you say yes, he responds: "Just take it." Maybe putting a price on it would just make him even more sad.

Here's a song about falling in love. But actually falling. Like out of an airplane with a parachute. It's an interesting moment to propose marriage, but it's emotionally fitting. The bold things we dared to do for the sake of love somehow stay done forever. No matter what the future brings. 

This is a custom song. I enjoy putting my songwriting craft in service of other peoples hearts and other people's stories, and this is a story of watching someone you love disappear.

Bicycle touring has always been a beautiful meditation for me. Seeing my shadow stretched out beside me is a way of describing how it feels when I'm just where I am and just content to be there.

This song celebrates a lifetime spent in pursuit of an impossible goal. I know that comparing my humble craft to being a rainmaker is an outrageous claim, but the bragging is not about how good I am at this, it's about how good this is. I love being in a line of work where you spend most of your time calling on the sky for rain. 

If I were to paint an image of what being in love feels like, it would be the scene in this song: The two of us are safely standing on a rock in a river on a cold morning, our breath steaming. We are protected inside a love that keeps us safe from the cold. And we can get back to that place no matter where we are, even curbside at the airport.

This song teases me about the time I waste scrolling the screen of distraction.

Here's a song about tending to your own heart and making sure it doesn't get too bitter. For this song, the scene is a rose garden — in a war zone. It is a dangerous place to be. The tanks shake the ground and there's destruction everywhere. But that just means that when the war ends, we are really going to need the things that keep us human. This song gives me courage to believe that peaceful music still has a place – even in violent times. 

This goes both directions. 

I'm sending this out to you, but this wish is also what I receive from the music. I have always sung the songs I needed to hear, the songs that keep me sane. And from this song I get a sense of the dignity of good work.