Glen Phillips: Courage


A track I’ve been looping a lot lately is “Courage,” by Glen Phillips. It’s been this constant background track, that I’ve had going over and over as I’ve been working most days.

The thing is – I’m not quite as taken with the lyrics of this song. Phillips is a great songwriter and has a lot of great songs… but this one is lower on my list. In fact, a majority of this song I fine just… ok. It’s fine.

But for some reason, it’s a small section near the end of the song that I absolutely love. There are two parts. First, and I’m not sure what to call this… a bridge? It’s perhaps a slight apex of the song, when he sings:

Though we all return to dust
There’s a lot of us
In a terrible rush

What follows though, is what I love most about the song. I bear through the first part, just to get to these final lines:

Some take the road to Damascus
Some take the road to hell
I’ll take highway 1 to the evergreens
And everything will turn out well

Something about the arrival here, makes the song for me. I just like it an awful lot.

There are a lot of versions of this song online, and honestly the whole backstory about a party is less interesting to me. The one version I’ve found that makes the most sense to me is where the song ends with the above lines.

Couldn’t find a good video version of this on YouTube, so I’m embedding the Spotify version. I know it’s a little odd, but I’m hoping someone else has the same reaction as I’ve had, to these final lines.

Related:
Glen Phillips: Grief and Praise

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