Scattered Pieces (Live)

"Scattered Pieces" is the second single currently being showcased from the band’s upcoming live album, "The Straggle is Real, Live”. The song was written by founder Gary Antol. He notes that like things in nature, the timeline of human life seems to be cyclical. Good times are always followed by bad times, and there is a constant ebb and flow of positive and negative in the way that we experience the world around us and how we respond to it. “Scattered Pieces” is a meditation on this age-old concept.

At the time this song was written, Gary notes his personal life was in a state of extreme flux. But at first,
he had a straightforward criterion for the foundation of a good song: would it make a toddler dance?
After spending the day outdoors with the young child of a close friend, he grabbed a piece of paper and wrote the poem that became the song. It took all of 5 minutes, except for the very last line with which he struggled for a month or two.

Driving near an old, collapsed bridge, Gary saw a concrete barrier meant to keep people from wandering up to the remnants of the structure. He noticed that someone had spray-painted on the barrier with bright orange reflective paint and it read "Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt." I]He thought that was the best possible caption for the "picture" of destruction he was looking at, and the phrase had the perfect number of syllables to fit into the last line of this song! The vaguely familiar phrase turned out to be an epitaph on a gravestone in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.

This song arose from a significant crossroads in the composer’s life when he was faced with making choices that might possibly govern the rest of his life. Everybody weathers life’s storms differently, but we are all still the same, and the pattern repeats again and again. Antol thought that the best way to weather the storms in his life was to write things down in a way that might help others weather similar storms. He can only hope that it helped someone do just that.