BJ Barham - Waking Up The Echoes, live in St Pancras Old Church, London, 28 Feb 2024

"It's going to get real sad tonight, I apologize, but I'm trying to sprinkle in a few happy upbeat love songs, in between the really sad ones." This is one of the sad ones, with an introduction where BJ talks about losing friends to fentanyl. "Is that a big thing over here? It is an epidemic. It used to be, as long as you stayed away from the needle you didn't have to worry about fentanyl, but now it's in all the party drugs, it's in the coke, it's in just about everything .. I wrote this for one person, but now it represents about 26 people I've lost since 2020."
Lyrics:
How's your Mom and them, I haven't seen your folks in ages
She was always kind, had the best sweet tea high school me ever tasted
Weddings and funerals used to always get me down
But these days they seem to be the only thing that ever brings me back to town
I wish you'd have called me
Maybe I could have talked you down
But the thing that I wish most of all
Is that you were still around
Can't help but laugh about all the trouble that we got
Into in the back of that Short Sugar's parking lot
All the life we lived, all the plans that we discussed
Before Milwaukee's Best snuck up and got the best of us
I still hear your voice when I cross that county line
Waking up the echoes in the canyons of my mind
Hold on to the good times, leave the bad ones for the plow
It ain't goodbye forever friend, it's just goodbye for now