Upside Down and Backwards Again

In 1998, I first met a man named Matt Neely. He was the worship leader for a church camp I was attending. Besides his music, I remember Matt for never wearing shoes. I enjoyed his music and purchased two of his CDs. One was the album Again for the First time. The other was Upside Down and Backwards.



This album included a song called Being Single Won't Kill You. It didn't mean much to me at the time. The song I really liked off the album was The Rebel.

Sometime between 1998 and 2009, the CD was lost. Most likely, it was stolen out of my truck when it was broken into in Des Moines, Iowa.

For some reason, I started thinking about the artist recently. I reminisced about several of his songs and remembered what I could of the songs. One song popped out though, Being Single Won't Kill You. Seeing as I have written about my struggles of being single recently, it seems appropriate. I looked online and didn't find many of his songs available but did find his website. I looked on the online store and found most of his albums, however, Upside Down and Backwards was not available. So I searched on amazon.com and found a used copy.

The CD arrived in the mail today. I threw it into the CD player in my truck and skipped to song #8, Being Single Won't Kill You. What a great song it is!

The song starts out with an odd game show like beginning. I don't understand it. But the rest of the song is great.

The song is written to a single woman who is told by life that she must marry in order to be normal.

Matt says that this is a list of the reasons to thank God for her "relationally challenged life."

Matt's reasons include nothing having to make your bed, not having to keep the fridge clean, not having to listen to someone nag, using your toothpaste however you want to, not having to call home when late, not listening to someone snore, not having to pay for a date, and no one stealing your covers.

In several parts of the song, Matt points out the things life tells us about singles. It starts with the mom and aunt asking her if she is dating anyone. My favorite one is that he compares to singleness to some disease that we have that are friends with cute friends know the cure too!

The chorus is an important message that I must remind myself. Being single won't kill you, being married won't cure you. Wherever you are today, just hold on and believe.

The last part of the chorus is probably the most important part. Wherever you are, hold on, be content. Don't just settle with singleness, be content in it.

I wrote about contentment in my 2nd post on the blog, in a post titled What could be better than this? Contentment doesn't mean to just not complain about your life, but to not desire more than what you have at that point. How important it is for me to not desire marriage while I am single and to elevate marriage to a place that it doesn't belong and to remove myself from the present. To be content is very important for me to strive for. This song helps to remind me of that.

After listening to the song, I continued through the album and found that song #4 was The Rebel. I got both songs that I really liked on the same album! A great buy this album was!

I did find one of Matt's songs on YouTube that I knew, it appeared that there were a few other cheesy songs on there as well. This song is a description of Matt's path to where he is. It is called Oz Song and is on the Again for the First Time album.



Thanks Matt for reminding me to be content with my singleness.