The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I traveled to Louisville, KY to play a show. The venue asked for some local support and I found Hannah McKee on Bandcamp. I loved her work and thought her sound would add some compliment and variety. Her song “November 2nd” has that quality of connecting to memories. Click play and see what you remember as you listen. Read the story behind the song below.
The Story Behind November 2nd
November 2nd is a song I wrote about idealizing people. I’ve found throughout my life that I have a bad habit of forming an idealistic vision of who someone is before I’ve actually gotten to know them. I think we all do that to some extent, especially with people who are “famous”, and it’s always disappointing when we discover that they aren’t who we made them out to be, even if who they really are is a wonderful human.
I jotted down the first shreds of lyrics for this song in the middle of the night on the way back from a concert in Nashville where I had an experience like this. One of my absolute favorite artists (who I had a friend of a friend connection with), was playing a show and it was my first time seeing him headline, not just open for someone. For some reason I had built up this persona in my head of who he was and what the night was going to be like, but by the end of the concert I had realized that a person is just a person. No matter how talented or incredible they are, they’re still human, and it’s unfair of me to expect anything different.
Interestingly, this past summer when I was performing this song in Cincinnati, a friend of mine came up to me after and said that she loved the song, and that it exactly described how she felt about our mutual friend, the guy I wrote the song about! She had no idea at the time that that was who it was actually written about.
I hope you enjoy the song, and if you also find yourself making other humans into something more than just that, I hope you will try, as I do, to show some grace.
Hannah McKee Bio
Hannah McKee is a singer-songwriter from Jacksonville, FL, currently located in Louisville, KY. Her debut album, RAW, which focused on authenticity and vulnerability, sought to fearlessly share the things of the heart, in hopes that listeners will feel understood, and encouraged to do the same. Her forthcoming album, Wash, will be a cataloguing of change. The first single, Is Love Just Feeling Weak in the Knees Because If So I Don’t Want It, has been released on all platforms.