✍️ LYRICS & COMPOSITION BY EME LATINA (2026) ————————————— MIDNIGHT MASS CHALLENGE: @ The Soundry Discord ————————————— 📝 THE CRITERIA: 1. Your track needs a recognizable element drawn from sacred, devotional, spiritual, ceremonial or ritual music that becomes the musical DNA of your track. 2. Now ruin it. Make something beautiful that feels slightly wrong; that sounds like it belongs at a service nobody remembers advertising. ———— ABOUT: ———— This is a personal song that speaks to grief and faith, equal parts beautiful and doomed. It's emotional and real. Faith for me changed as I got older, because it didn't feel like salvation; it didn't make the suffering feel purposeful or protected. Losing people close to me deepened that feeling. My mom's death was simply the nail in the coffin. I drew heavily from the sound and feel of church music, but turned that into a slow funeral-march, with vocal harmonies and dynamics that give it this almost sacred feel. I broke thru the beauty and sense of comfort by dragging it thru a heavy, slow,, oppressive, and occasionally violent soundscape. I’m not even saying there is no heaven. I suppose I’m asking what happens when you stop believing in one? Maybe we simply pretend it has any purpose at all, because that's what we tell ourselves helps. ———— LYRICS: ———— Looking back at all I've lived, and lost, it's more and more clear how high the cost-- they say the higher you climb, the harder you fall. So, what happens when you stop believing in heaven? You taught me to pray, and how; How to grasp my hands and think, bow my head and pluck my heartstrings, and as a kid I guess we always think that nothing will ever tear us apart. You’re the reason now, that I can’t pray; that I can’t believe in something bigger than myself— You were that something, gentler, more nurturing, much bigger, until the day that heaven pulled the trigger. Away you go (away), as if incapable of anything else… expiration has no grace, one day life just ends, and we can act and pretend that it had a purpose. We tell ourselves that helps. When we are crucified to our pain, when we fail again and again, we pretend. I suppose that helps. You taught me to pray, to hold a rosary, to sway to our favorite church song and say the word of the lord; I don’t do those things anymore, but even before, I stopped believing in ceremony. Away you go (away), as if incapable of anything else… expiration has no grace, one day life just ends, and we can act and pretend that it had a purpose. We tell ourselves that helps. When we are crucified to our pain, when we fail again and again, we pretend. I suppose that helps. The funeral was nice, everyone sat accordingly, the decor, a bit ordinary… except for your roses. I hope heaven heard me crying that day, and asked itself why, why I don’t pray anymore... Away you go (away), as if incapable of anything else… expiration has no grace, one day life simply ends, and we act and pretend that it had a purpose. I suppose that helps. I suppose that helps.
