Today, we are pleased to present to your eyes and ears the exclusive track-by-track breakdown/commentary on Brighter Than A Thousand Suns’ latest EP The Way Out, penned by the band themselves! As always, each track is embedded for the betterment of your audio/visual experience. Enjoy!

“The Upside Down”

I don’t  believe [that] we ever really stumble into or “find ourselves” anywhere- we purposefully go there, whether we realize it or not. As we think, we do. What you focus on is what you’ll get. Often times, the temptation of darkness is too good to pass up- it keeps your focus easily because it lets you be the victim at your own sanction; it lets you off the hook. It’s a lot easier to tell yourself that things happen to you, rather than you  happening to them.

I took these ideas and channeled them through the imagery offered by the series Stranger Things.

“The Way Out”

We get easily caught up in the stories we tell ourselves. We can get locked into the narrative and live our lives as if we’re just acting out a ready-made script. While we’re directing the scenes that make up our lives, anything that comes along and breaks away from the screenplay, anything that doesn’t match the story we tell ourselves, is discarded, even if it’s exactly what we need to hear. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve been given was to “get out of your own way”. I see this as learning to find your way out of your narrative. A few years ago, I had fallen into a deep depression which I couldn’t find my way out of. I had lost my true north, my pinpoint of light to guide me out of the endless story loop. This song shines a light on one aspect of this concept: the learned helplessness you feel while trapped inside these loops.

“Hole In Your Heart”

More and more, our society is consumed by consumption. Having known a few people in my life who’ve given a lot of their happiness to the acquisition of material objects- and having experienced this myself for a long period- I began searching for a mindset that would help me break away from that practice. A continuing concept through these songs (and many more of ours) is the ease with which we can assign responsibility to other people and circumstances outside ourselves. Hoarding and being possessed by our possessions is no different. A friend of mine once said, “Everything you’ll ever need is everywhere you’ll ever go.” After hearing that, it all started to come together and allowed me to step outside [of] myself, and look back at what I and a few others close to me were doing.

“What’s Inside”

We live in a quick-fix society. We’ve come to expect instant communication from nearly anyone, anytime, anywhere. And with this, I fear our assessment of the value of people who might be outside our comfortable social circles is also made more quickly. Here again, we are faced with the endless chatter of people’s internal narratives. With their own feedback loop constantly running, they don’t see you for who you really are – they take you for who you are only as it might apply to them. This is what causes all the unquestioned societal standards we have that squelch and squander a lot of human potential. Having been taken at face value many, many times, it concerns me how far behind we are in the consideration and acceptance of those different than us.