End of Beginning
Djo · DECIDE
A bittersweet farewell to a younger self
What do these signals mean?
- Edifying: Points the heart toward God, truth, hope, or love.
- Worth Weighing: Real good and real concern together. Test it before you take it in.
- Take Caution: Leans toward what could dull or mislead. Approach carefully.
- Consider Avoiding: Celebrates what Scripture warns against. Little here builds up.
Weighed against Scripture
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
Paul's image of putting away childish things captures the same movement the song describes: a necessary farewell to an earlier self, felt as both loss and maturity.
“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;”
Qohelet's meditation on seasons, including a time to mourn and a time to dance, resonates with the song's gentle grief at transition. The Preacher takes seriously what the song takes seriously: that time passes and something real is lost in it.
This song is about the strange grief of becoming. The narrator returns to Chicago and feels the ghost of a younger version of himself, someone who made sacrifices without fully understanding them, who received reassurances he couldn't yet evaluate. The repeated 'goodbye to the end of beginning' captures that liminal ache: you can't go back, and part of you mourns that even as you move forward. There's no despair here, just honest, earned melancholy about the cost of growth.
No profanity, no explicit content. The language is wistful and impressionistic, built around personal memory and the passage of time.
The song doesn't reach toward God explicitly, but it holds something honest and tender: grief at growth, nostalgia for innocence, and the quiet acknowledgment that becoming someone new means losing who you were. That's a deeply human posture, not a spiritually hostile one.
Djo (Joe Keery) seems to be processing a specific season of his life, likely his years in Chicago before Stranger Things changed everything. The intent reads as honest reflection, not performance or provocation.
When you listen to this song, does the sadness it stirs in you feel like something worth sitting with, or is it pulling you toward a version of the past that's keeping you from where you're headed?