The Night We Met

One of my favorite feelings in the world is when I’m listening to a song and I can feel what the artist is trying to convey. 

When I feel the emotion that went into a song, it makes me happy because I know a lot of thought was put into it as well. The Night We Met is a perfect example of a song that makes you feel an overwhelming amount of emotions because of a way the lyrics were written.

The Night We Met was written by Lord Huron, an American folklore band, in 2015. Ben Schneider was the founder of the band and also the man that actually wrote the song. 

Schneider was inspired to write The Night We Met because he liked the idea of teen romance and 50’s pop music due to the way the lyrics and the music intertwine. 

One of the main ideas of this song is that Schneider wanted to tell a love story where both of the people regret something in the end. It’s a story that you wish you could go back to the start of so you could take a different path, and hope that things turn out better.

Not only do the lyrics pour into your heart, the music grabs your soul. When the song starts, there are background vocals that sound almost ghostly, and this was no accident. 

Schneider was captured by the idea of thinking about the memory of people in terms of ghosts. Schneider explained in an interview with Lucy Harbron, “It’s very ingrained in us to come up with things like that to process how we feel, and I think ghosts are such a beautiful metaphor for the way the memory of someone can hang around and haunt you.”

In my opinion, these vocals are one of the reasons the song is so incredible. It reminds me of the kind of music you would hear in the soundtrack of a really sad movie, which is what makes the song so vulnerably beautiful. 

The first verse follows after the alluring echoes, “I am not the only traveler, who has not repaid his debt. I’ve been searching for a trail to follow again, take me back to the night we met.”

What this verse is saying is that he’s not the only person that is carrying baggage. It also seems that he is trying to move on with his life, but that he wishes he could go back to the start of everything so he has a chance to fix what was broken.

The next verse goes, “…and then I can tell myself, what the hell I’m supposed to do. And then I can tell myself, not to ride along with you.”

This verse is a continuation of the first one. He’s explaining what he would do if he had the chance to go “back to the night we met”. He would tell himself what to do to be happy again, even if it means not pursuing the relationship, in order to keep things like how they were at the beginning.

The chorus is what follows the second verse, and I believe it is amazing how a string of words can be so heart wrenching. It goes, “I had all and then most of you, some and now none of you. Take me back to the night we met. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, haunted by the ghost of you. Take me back to the night we met.”

This chorus is one of my favorites because it shows how slowly but drastically things can change. 

The people this story is about start out by being totally infatuated with each other. But then slowly, as the relationship progressed, he could see he was slowly losing her. 

The second part of the chorus is a cry for help because he doesn’t know how to deal with the fact that she is gone and can’t stop thinking about her. All he wants is to go back and change things so he can be with her again, but with different circumstances.

Following the chorus is the third verse, “…when the night was full of terrors, and your eyes were filled with tears. When you had not touched me yet, oh, take me back to the night we met.”

This last verse is talking about the moment when their relationship took a turn. She was crying, and I feel like at this point in time she had lost feelings for him.

It’s hard to tell someone how you feel, so it would make sense why she was crying. This is when he wishes that he could go back to that first night and do things all over again, but better.

The song ends by the chorus following one more time.

This song is one of my favorites of all time. It tells a story that is realistic to the things we face today, which makes it easy to relate to. From the writing of the lyrics, to the beautiful vocals and instrumentals in the background, this song leaves you wishing he could go back to the night they met.