I first heard Andrew Peterson’s music when I was in high school. I remember listening to the album Counting Stars and being struck by the quiet beauty of the music and the thoughtful poetry of the lyrics. As someone who loved literature, I was stoked to find words that seemed like they’d been carefully crafted to engage the imagination. Over the years, as I’ve listened to more of Peterson’s music, I’ve continued to appreciate his commitment to honest storytelling. Whether they’re reflections on his own journey or reflections on stories in Scripture, Peterson’s songs ring with authenticity – a heart and mind seeking to know God better. In this post, I’ll be reviewing my favorite album by one of my favorite songwriters: Light for the Lost Boy. Of all Peterson’s albums, this one has impacted me the most, and I think it’s his best collection of songs. Here’s why you should give it a listen…
Loss and Longing
Compared to the albums that came before it, Light for the Lost Boy sounds and feels different. While earlier records like Resurrection Letters: Vol. II and Counting Stars were full of bright, organic-sounding folk melodies, Light for the Lost Boy contains darker, grittier rock instrumentation. The somber musical tone of the album undergirds the weighty themes that its songs grapple with: the loss of innocence and the longing for restoration. These themes are evoked by the recurring image of a little boy lost in the woods, which ties the songs together and reappears in different forms throughout the album. At various points the lost boy is a character from a novel, Peterson’s children, and Peterson himself as a kid and then as an adult. This image of a lost boy also occurs in three novels that Peterson references and interweaves with his own story: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ The Yearling, J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The album’s opener, “Come Back Soon,” begins with two haunting images that set the stage for what is to come:
I remember the day of the Tennessee flood
The sound of the scream and the sight of the blood
My son, he saw as the animal died
In the jaws of the dog as the river ran by
I said, “Come back soon.”
It was there on the page of the book that I read
The boy grew up and the yearling was dead
He stood at the gate with the angel on guard
And wept at the death of his little boy heart
I said, “Come back soon.”
While Light for the Lost Boy explores heavy realities – the brokenness of the human heart and the effects of the Fall on our bodies and the earth – it’s also suffused with a glow of hope, lit up with longing for restoration. Songs like “Carry the Fire” express this longing beautifully:
And we dream in the night
Of a king and a kingdom
Where joy writes the songs
And the innocent sing them
Story-Weaving
One of the things that I appreciate most about this album (and Peterson’s music in general) is the way that he nods to works of art that have influenced his own faith and songwriting. Light for the Lost Boy is full of thoughtful, subtle allusions to some beautiful works of literature: The Road and The Yearling and Peter Pan, poetry by Alfred Tennyson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and writing by C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton. Even though I’ve been familiar with the album for years, I’ve continued to discover new things to appreciate in the music and the lyrics. It was super cool to revisit songs like “Carry the Fire” and “Don’t You Want to Thank Someone” this summer after having read The Road and Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, and to discover references to these works that I’d never picked up on before. “Come Back Soon” took on new meaning when I realized that the song references Romans 8:22 and Isaiah 55:12. It’s a mark of great songwriting when a lyric can surprise you with new insights after such a long time.
Light Along the Road
Like Rich Mullins’ classic A Liturgy, a Legacy, & a Ragamuffin Band, Andrew Peterson’s Light for the Lost Boy has grown on me as I’ve grown up, becoming more meaningful with time and experience. Last spring, I was diagnosed with a deformity of the brainstem area called craniocervical instability. This condition is shared by my mom, my little brother, and my little sisters, three of whom have already had spinal fusion surgery. The process of waiting to be diagnosed was pretty scary, and during this time I found that the words of Peterson’s song “You’ll Find Your Way” kept popping into my head. The lyrics, which were based on Jeremiah 6:16 and written to Peterson’s son, brought comfort as I pondered an uncertain future:
When I look at you, boy
I can see the road that lies ahead
I can see the love and the sorrow
Bright fields of joy
Dark nights awake in a stormy bed
I want to go with you
But I can’t follow
So keep to the old roads
Keep to the old roads
And you’ll find your way
As I struggled to trust God and bucked under the weight of uncertainty that I felt him saddling me with, the words of this song kept pointing me back to him, reminding me of the well-worn truths that have given my family hope in the midst of the suffering that we’ve faced. On the other side of the diagnosis, the hope-filled truth in the song “Day by Day,” drawn from 2 Corinthians 4:16-17, hits me harder than it did before:
Don’t lose heart
Though your body’s wasting away
Your soul is not, it’s being remade
Day by day by day
I still remember the day years ago when I heard “Don’t You Want to Thank Someone,”the concluding song on the album, for the first time. I remember listening to it in the laundry room of our old house and getting chills at the thundering crescendo of the bridge. The beauty of the music got to me, but it was more than that. At the same time, the lyrics both prompted me to wonder at the beauty of the world and woke up an ache inside me for something beyond it:
‘Cause I can see the world is charged
It’s glimmering with promises
Written in a script of stars
And dripping from the prophet’s lips
But still my thirst is never slaked
I am hounded by a restlessness
I am eaten by this endless ache
But still I will give thanks for this’
Cause I can see it in the seas of wheat
I can feel it when the horses run
It’s howling in the snowy peaks
And it’s blazing in the midnight sun
Just behind a veil of wind
A million angels waiting in the wings
A swirling storm of cherubim
Making ready for the reckoning
How long? How long?
Listening to these words, I experienced a bit of the longing that we all feel at some time or another: the longing for what’s been broken – in our hearts and bodies, in our relationships, and in our planet – to be healed and set right. It’s a longing for God to reach down and crush the evil that has ripped this world apart. It’s a longing for the dawn to break. Great works of art – whether they’re books, movies, paintings, or pieces of music – have the power to stir this longing in us. If we allow the beauty that we experience in them and in the world around us to break through our defenses of busyness and distraction, we may feel the weight of the lostness that we all too easily cover up and ignore. We may find beauty pointing us toward a place that we’ve never been to, but that still seems to call us back like home. As we wander through these woods, I’m so thankful that we have poets and fellow Christ-followers like Andrew Peterson to help light the way.
Words for Wayfarers 