Somewhere only we know

And if you have a minute, why don't we go
Talk about it somewhere only we know?
This could be the end of everything
So…

Credit citation - Artist: Keane
Album: Hopes and Fears
Released: 2004
Songwriter(s): Tim Rice-Oxley, Tom Chaplin, Richard Hughes
Recorded: Late 2003

These lyrics are from Tom Chaplin and Tim Rice-Oxley from the English group, Keane. They were a group of friends having attended prep school together in East Sussex, England. They had pulled their little band together after scattering for college.

Before they were Keane, they were "The Lotus Eaters." They traveled the small circuit roads, playing in pubs, trying to get noticed, trying to survive. Even copying their self-made recordings on blank CD's, to be sold after their gigs.

At one point, Chris Martin, in the early days of Coldplay, asked Tim Rice-Oxley to join his band as the keyboard/pianist. He declined, saying that Keane was just starting to come together.

Years later,  Keane was struggling to record just a few singles, with no label. While Coldplay was early into becoming a legend.

Discouraged and with little financial support, they kept playing pubs and small gigs. Finally, they stopped performing and recording altogether in 2002.

Then, at some point later in 2002, they gathered to play a gig in London. It was attended, by chance, by the same man who discovered Coldplay. He offered to produce and release the first commercial single by the band, "Everything is Changing."

And it was. And it did.

Hopes and Fears, was released on in 2004. It debuted at number one in the UK went on to become the second best-selling British album of the year. This from a group that started by singing Beatles covers in their early days.

The group's name, "Keane," is a shortened version of Cherry Keane, a friend of Tom Chaplin's mother, and a woman who often cared for Tom and Tim Rice-Oxley when they were young. Chaplin remembers her telling them not to give up. When she died of cancer, she left money to the family, which ultimately helped the group persevere through their darker days.

They didn't give up.

And thus we have this track. These words: "Somewhere only we know." This song, like most of their early work, was largely about heartbreak and loss. Though many consider it a pop track to be buried in the boneyards of the commercially overplayed, it's philosophically worthy.

Strip away the hook, listen to the words. And you'll find something.

We are who we've been. Who we've become. And we will become what we live. 

I believe that our souls yearn for special moments in time. Our lives are circuits of time when things happen. Unfolding sets of experiences.

Most things that unfold may seem mundane or even routine. But some transcend into the extraordinary. For they are the times when we've made a conscious connection to another soul.

It's a connection that two people share during a moment in time. In a place, yes. But in that moment, the atmosphere blurs. We know where we are, but the world becomes a small bubble of two souls. A sphere of consonance, of harmony. A place where a soul becomes married to its purpose.

It's a place, a moment in time, that only two people can know. Can understand.

And the thing is, these places are sacred. They should be remembered and cherished.

For they are the things that shape who we are. Who we will become. And what we will take with us into the great everything that is beyond.

And that's why this simple track is so worthy. Why I love it.

No matter what happens, two souls will always have a place - or places - that only they know.

And if you have a minute, why don't we go
Talk about it somewhere only we know?
This could be the end of everything
So…

Let's go. Somewhere only we know.