There is something about the night sky that makes you honest. Maybe it is the darkness. Maybe it is the vastness. Maybe it is the feeling of being so small that your problems stop feeling like the center of the universe and start feeling like exactly what they are: temporary.
“When the Stars Collide” is Tom Bruggemann’s most cosmic song, and also his most intimate.
“I wrote this lying on my back looking up at the sky,” Tom says. “And I started thinking about how many people throughout history have looked at the exact same stars and felt the exact same things I was feeling. Loneliness. Wonder. Love. Fear. It is all the same. It has always been the same.”
The song connects the personal to the universal. It takes a private moment of reflection and zooms out until it becomes something bigger. A reminder that the feelings we carry around, the ones we think make us uniquely broken, are actually the most universal things about us.
Have you ever stood outside on a clear night and felt simultaneously insignificant and connected to everything? Have you ever looked up and felt your problems shrink?
Tom has. And he wrote a song about it that will make you want to go outside and look up.