Song & Story Vol. 3: Fireflies x Between Two Kingdoms

This one’s tender: in which a song about a dream you can’t rest from, and a memoir about mortality, reveal they’re built the same way.

In the Fireflies cover, one insistent note—a single pedal tone—pulses under most of the track. It feels like the dreams that won’t quiet, the ones the vocalists say are “bursting at the seams”.

In the memoir Between Two Kingdoms, the insistent note is mortality. Suleika Jaouad, diagnosed with cancer as a young woman, writes grief as “a ghost that visits without warning… shadowing you breath for breath”. It won’t let up either.

And then, just before the song’s outro, the pedal tone stops, the insisting lifts, and you can pay fuller attention to the vocalists and chords. Likewise, at the memoir’s end, the author survives and writes about “certain dreams I can’t dream, for I never thought them possible… I complete a half marathon”.

Both song and story build on a note that won’t stop, and both end when it finally does, leaving us with hope.

What’s a song or a story that did this to you? I’m always collecting them.

Watch me talk about this on Instagram.