2018 is shaping up to be an excellent year for rock music.  Quite a few great albums have already been released thus far & we’re not even half way through the year yet.  One of those albums is Shinedown’s latest effort Attention, Attention which debuted just this past Friday.  I enjoyed their previous album Threat to Survival but it was definitely not my favorite of theirs largely because it just felt too “soft” to me.  However, Attention, Attention is clearly a return to a heavier sound which I’m really pleased to hear.  Ironically though, it’s one of the lighter songs on the record that has really resonated with me this week.  The song is number twelve on the disc & is entitled Special. 

I’m not sure why this song is speaking to me so much this week but it is.  Perhaps it’s because it’s so easy to get caught up in the anxieties & hassles of life & get stuck in the trap of thinking “I’m the only person who’s ever experienced this,” “No one really knows what I’m going through,” or “Nobody gets me!”  The truth is we are all unique in some ways & yet we are all the same in so many more ways.  We all struggle with the same basic things in life & yet so often we allow our differences to divide us rather than allowing our shared humanity to unite us.

Maybe it wasn’t the intended message of this song but I find it really inspirational to stop feeling sorry for myself for certain things & to just get up, get going, & kick ass like I know I can if I, to borrow a Nike phrase, JUST DO IT.  In the social media age, it’s so easy to compare ourselves to others & feel like other people have things more together than we do but such thinking gets us nowhere; it literally accomplishes nothing.  And there is absolutely no reason to compare our lives anyway.  We all end up in the same grave at the end.  Trying to compete with others is a battle in which no one wins but everyone loses.  

The song’s lyrics are below.  Definitely check it out in the link I posted above.