Now that it’s up on YouTube, I thought it might be helpful to tell the story of my latest song.

I don’t know about you, but it has been a challenge for me to find inner stillness and repose lately. I find myself getting more physically tired than usual; there are times when my body wants to simply cocoon, and it is nothing for me to sleep 9 hours a night when, in our pre-covid world, usually 7 or 8 would do. Sometimes, seemingly at random, I find my heart racing when I am doing routine and normally unstressful things like washing the dishes. Perhaps these episodes are simply the body’s way of reacting to the enormous and seemingly random suffering that is going on all around us, in the face of which it is so easy to feel helpless and freaked out. The coronavirus-related stress was multiplied when our beloved dog, Higgins, died three weeks ago today, and again when his brother, Moseley, sprained his ACL the next day. (Mozey is fine now and makes a cameo appearance in the video above.)

While I’m a pretty upbeat guy, there is a mostly-unspoken layer of stress that is overlaying everything these days, sort of a darkness lurking just outside my field of vision; it is perceptible, in other words, but hard sometimes to see or name. It was good last week, therefore, to have some occasions to face the darkness head-on. We talk about humanity’s dark times on Passover, during the Seder, when we refer to our slavery in Egypt. My dear friend, Rabbi Adir Glick, and his rabbi dad Yoel sometimes talk about our “inner Egypt,” the places where we are imprisoned by our own psyches. Christians, too, willngly enter the darkness during Lent and especially on Good Friday, recreating the story of Jesus’s death, the emotional low point in the liturgical year. Sandy and I talked about this on a walk around the block recently, and I felt grateful that there are ways that our religions have given us to name the tough stuff, not to sugarcoat it but to look it squarely in the eye.

As many of you know, I’ve been turning to writing new lyrics, and sometimes new music, to deal with the current situation. A variety of feelings have been coursing through me, and I imagine the same is true for you. When the coronavirus first hit, part of me was just so mad. That’s why I wrote “Bye, Corona!” early on. But that didn’t seem like a complete response.

In addition to some other goofy songs, there was something else I felt was important to communicate, because I felt truly fortunate to experience this myself: that we can find calm and stillness in this turbulent time. I have actually found that, and it seems pretty miraculous. It’s not completely accidental; “even though it’s scary now and then,” I have wanted to carve out time to be quiet, and to deliberately work at being centered and calm. I have a modest meditation practice for which I am deeply grateful. I’m not sure I would feel grounded at all without it. I am fortunate to live in a quiet, wooded area, with trees and nature all around; it is quieter than usual here these days. Whereas the constant low din of Interstate 88, a mile north of us, typically throbs like a very low bass line through the entire day and night, now it is a much subtler presence, more like someone plucking a huge contrabass from time to time. Perhaps it’s this extra quiet, along with yoga and meditation practice, that together have helped me find some inner stillness.

There’s another dimension of it, too, involving the wider community and all of you. I started feeling that not only would I be helped by my being able to get centered—the obvious personal benefit—but perhaps I also could help others by staying grounded. And that’s when this latest song started bubbling up. I tried to think of a song that evokes a sense of settledness and repose without being saccharine or overly chill. Very soon, Count Basie’s Lil’ Darlin’ came to mind, the great tune by Neal Hefti. Others have written love-song words to this tune. I decided that the song was just the right vehicle for a lyric of encouragement. The lyric came into shape over the course of a day or two, after a process of moving words and phrases around until it felt just right. I was happy to let it simmer for a few weeks, since it seemed to need a longer gestation period than some of my other corona-related efforts. The people who own the song have exercised their rights over it, so that they get any royalties from whatever ad revenues might come from my version of the song. That is a good thing.

Hope you like it. Thanks for reading and for listening.

Jonathan Miller is co-founder and artistic director/CEO of Sounds Good! Choir.