The last time I saw Daisy, I had no idea it would be the last time. I kissed her head, hugged my mom, and went back to college. We knew she was sick, but I had such complete faith that she would pull through. That’s what Daisy did. She was such a light and such a force of pure joy that I could hardly imagine mortality could touch her, much less so soon. For four short years, she was the glue that held our family together. She died that evening, and I wasn’t there.

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It was an awful night. The sun set, and then it rose the next morning, and the world continuing to turn didn’t make it better. Nothing made it better.

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So I wrote about her. It’s all I really know how to do, when confronted with something that feels too big for me. I rearranged words over and over, hoping that some perfect configuration might make it make sense; maybe if I could immortalize her with enough precision, somehow everything would fall into place. I wrote about a half-dozen songs in the months that followed, but none of them came close to bottling the waves of grief. Given three and a half minutes to work with, what could?

 

Then I found Laika.

 

Laika was a stray dog launched into low Earth orbit by the Soviet Union on November 3, 1957, becoming the first living creature to orbit the Earth. Her story has often been told as a milestone in space exploration, but there was something heartbreaking to me in the fact that her journey was never meant to bring her home.

 

Her story became a lens through which I could look at my own grief. Space gave me the distance I needed to understand, to pull the emotions far enough away from me that I could see them more clearly. The vastness of the cosmos became a metaphor for that harrowing, relentless feeling of watching someone you love drift farther and farther away until they are beyond your reach.

 

Lullaby for Laika is a ballad, a prayer, and a conversation across that impossible distance, asking the questions we ask whenever we lose someone: Were you afraid? Are you somewhere beautiful? Did you know you were loved? And at its heart, the song is driven by an earnest longing: I wish I could bring you home.

 

Production-wise, I wanted the song to live somewhere between grounded warmth and cold vastness. I worked with my dear friend Sam Swinnerton to build the song on a foundation of acoustic guitar and banjo, with shimmering strings and atmospheric layers opening it up into something larger and more weightless. My hope is that this song feels both deeply personal and recognizable to anyone who has ever had to say goodbye.

 

I couldn’t bring Daisy home. I couldn’t make sense of her leaving. But I could write a song and send it into the distance after her.