A Year At Home

A year at home will show you
You're not as cool as you thought
You're still the dorky kid you've always been

A year at home will show you
Your parents are still growing yeah
They still make mistakes, they're learning too

And a year at home will tell you what you forgot
Your childhood mirror shows you all the things that you're not

Back when digging holes and skipping rocks
Weren't just figures of speech
And you swore that you could hear the ocean
In a shell on the beach
And everything you wanted to become, you became
And it's nothing like you thought that it would be
That's what a year at home did for me

I wrote a song I hated so I tossed it and rewrote it
I slept a lot and grew out a bad haircut
Another Michigan summer in the books but that winter's
The months you really gotta gut up for

And a year at home will expose you
Cause the world's a little simpler where you grew up

Back when footstep's on the stairwell
Meant everybody got home
And you can all finally go to sleep
And the dishes on the counter
Could wait until the morning
Cause there's a party still goin' in the backyard
I can still hear their voices in the ground
A year at home brought them back around

And after I live seven different lives any given year
I still come back and they just need to live one here
Something in these walls keeps telling me to stay
But I got a place down south it's by the train and by a lake

Now I've got dishes on the counter
And hard-earned full-time hours
And don't even get me started on the landlord
But when that night train rolls through
I close my eyes and hear you
And something tells me that I won't regret this

Back when I loved people for free
Unconditional and easy
And it never really took much to convince me
And anytime I called home
I didn't have to stay long
Catching up only took me a cup of coffee

And a year at home made me slow down
I fought tooth and nail to settle down
To build me back up from the ground
And that's how a year at home
That's how a year at home
A year at home brought me back around