Streaming everywhere today is “To Be Loved”, the fist single off of Neither Could Dylan’s debut album “Acceptance” due out in April 2023.

“To Be Loved” is a high energy indie-rock track with folk roots that has an important question weighing on its mind: Do you know what it feels like to be loved?

…okay, I’ll stop writing this like a press release now.

I wrote this song just a couple weeks ago making it one of the last songs I wrote for the upcoming album. I’ve spent a lot of time post-divorce thinking about what it really means to love someone and subsequently what it must then feel like to be loved in return.

It’s one of those things you sort of hope to figure out along the way, but that’s not as easy or as quick as I think many of us would like to believe.

If I ever thought I had some understanding of what it means to love someone wholly, that belief was shook greatly in the fall of my marriage.

Over the last couple years while I worked through all the feelings that come with making the difficult decision to pull the plug on that relationship I found myself falling back into a lot of my favourite albums which mostly centered around similar thoughts and feelings, although typically I’d find the songs from the perspective of someone who had been deeply in love and lost it.

The hard truth I had to face myself was that… I wasn’t exactly sure I knew what they meant.

And no I’m not trying to be dramatic about it, I really wasn’t sure I’d felt the way I imagined it to feel or based on the way it had often been described to me.

“To Be Loved” starts with a reasonably simple question in the face of this realization where in speaking to these records that I’d go to for comfort I ask, “Did you mean it when you said you knew what it felt like to be loved?”. I ask because as a fellow songwriter I know all to well about the creative liberties we sometimes take in our writing to get across a theme or idea and on a human level it’s one I’d love to hear the answer to from those who both believe they do what what it feels like and those that have felt an absence of it.

It’s ultimately an introspective song that calls for a public discussion because with so many people in the world, many who grow up in difficult home environments or faced at early ages abusive or challenging relationship dynamics, it’s a distinction I’m not so sure is as easy to see until you’ve had time to really sit with the idea.

The idea being, what does love look like to you and how do you know you have it? What is it your partner does or doesn’t do that makes you feel safe, secure and wanted? And what quirks or full blown red flags might you be overlooking just because you want so badly to believe that you’re really loved by someone?

In the bridge of the song I flip the question; “Did you mean it when you said you knew what it felt like to love?”.

I think a lot us have our own idea about what it means to love someone and how to show them that we care for them, but the difficulty there again is that we’re relying on our own perceptions of ideas of love and not theirs. Like, bringing someone flowers every week is a great gesture until you find out that they hate flowers, or taking them to see the musical Cats when they hate both musicals and cats and uncomfortable theatre seats.

For me, as of writing this now, I think I have a much better idea of what I need in a partner to feel it, but I’m almost certain I haven’t ever quite found it.

There’s a silver lining in that… it means it’s still out there to be found.

“To Be Loved” is streaming everywhere you listen to stuff, including my bandcamp page.

Read the official lyrics here!

Hope you like it & make sure you follow all my pages so that you catch the next single when it drops!

Thanks very much for listening.