Holding Your Cards

For nearly twenty years, I wrote songs that very few people ever heard.

Life moved on. Family, work, responsibilities, and countless reasons made it easy to keep writing while rarely sharing. The songs stayed with me. Looking back, I realize they had become the cards I was holding close to my chest.

Then one evening, I found myself playing music outside in Stillwater, Minnesota. It was the first time I had really stepped back into performing in nearly two decades.

As I played, I began watching the people around me more and more. Couples wandered by holding hands. Families laughed together. Friends shared a meal. Dogs pulled their owners down the sidewalk. Nothing particularly remarkable was happening other than another beautiful summer evening.

And yet it felt remarkable. For the first time in a long time, I wasn't thinking about whether I belonged there. I was simply grateful to be part of it.

That feeling eventually became the song I wrote, Alive Tonight.

There's a line in the song:

"I hold my cards close to my chest."

When I wrote it, I don't think I fully understood what I meant. Over time I realized the cards I was holding were my songs. They represented years of ideas, stories, and pieces of myself I had created but rarely shared.

Playing again after twenty years wasn't about proving anything. It was about finally sharing something I'd been carrying for a long time.

What surprised me most wasn't simply that people enjoyed the songs. It was that sharing them changed the way I experienced the evening.

The more I watched people living their own lives, the more I realized how much possibility still existed — not somewhere else, but right here, in ordinary moments, if I was willing to step into them.

Maybe that's what Alive Tonight has always been about for me.

The possibility was always there. Sharing the songs simply allowed me to notice it again.