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This song is easily the most powerful and moving song I have ever heard. The beat poetry of Shane Koyczan and the amazing voice of Dan Mangan really do it justice (I like this version more than Shane's original Move Pen Move). I first heard it live at a Dan Mangan show (the one in the video) and it brought nearly the entire crowd to tears. The message of the song is pretty easy to find, and it isn't very complicated, word wise, but it is the most powerful song, in my mind, in existence. The guitar and beat are simple, but the words are what gives this song the emotional power it has.

In a nutshell, it's about somebody who has to watch his mother die. They leave eachother early to travel and go on adventures, their lives "an anthem composed of words like "gotta go." ".

What I can't get over, every time that I listen to this song, is the power of it, and how much it means to me. I haven't ever had such a personal experience, but I can empathize with Koyczan, because his power over the English language really describes the pain of loss.

I landed on this island in a semi lucid dream-like state. A house sits in front of me, desolate, and rotten. Only paint, gasoline, and steel buckets await me. They serve no purpose, and nor do I.A deserted sand path, riddled with jutting rocks, and grimy, drab, water pan out behind the house. A cave, hiding in the darkness, off in the distance, and a light brown pond.d I spread my arms, and the cave opens to me. The weather is cold, dark. In the night time, water laps in to the cave, at a high tide. At a low tide, I can almost make it to the abandoned house, the tide is so low. I burn my books, my belongings, my loves, and my labours inside this cave, as ashes are, Forever lost. They burnt, kept me warm, inside my own mind. Thinking, always thinking.

I walked the land, unknown of this lump of earth's latitude and longitude, barren, as it is, endless and dark inside my own clustered, confused head. I have been here before, perhaps many a time, it is not foreign to me. Twenty-One letters, twenty-one lies, and twenty-one confessions of a once forgotten truth. I folded them up, one by one, into little paper boats. I cast them into the sea, endless in its complexity and watched them shatter; watched them sink into the dark sea. My own armada. I have been here, in this eternal twilight before.

I remember the crash, and I sat there, paralyzed, and as you lay motionless. They cut you out of the car. Blood everywhere. The spiral downward, into and endless hole, a pit, perhaps, of bones and disease. The engine lay strewn onto the tarmac, like an ocean of black seeping out from under an oil drum. I was once fearing for your life. Now I know.