There are songs that come from memory.
There are songs that come from emotion.
And then there are songs that come from imagination.
Towers is one of those songs.
Not because it isn’t real — but because it lives somewhere between reality and possibility. Between what is, and what could be.
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Setting the context
We live in a strange time.
It feels like every day there’s another headline that makes you stop and think: How much longer can this go on?
Wars that don’t end.
Empires flexing their muscles.
Governments making decisions that feel completely disconnected from everyday people.
Cities becoming tighter, louder, angrier — more fragile.
And closer to home, places I know well — like Dublin — struggling with broken systems, failed policies, fear, division, and people being pushed further and further to the edges.
I don’t say this to be dramatic.
I say it because it feels present.
Like something we can all sense, even if we don’t talk about it out loud.
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The imagined world of Towers
Towers is not a song about how the world will end.
It’s a song about how the world might look after something has already ended.
When I wrote it, I imagined cities I know — places I’ve walked, lived in, loved — long after people have gone. Buildings still standing. Infrastructure still there. But no one left to maintain it.
Paint peeling.
Metal rusting.
Nature slowly reclaiming what we thought we owned.
The towers in the song are real to me. They’re inspired by the old chimney stacks in the Dublin docks — industrial monuments to a time when progress meant production at any cost.
In the song, they’re still there.
But abandoned.
Silent.
Witnesses.
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Why the song feels empty (on purpose)
Musically, Towers is intentionally sparse.
There’s space.
There’s air.
There’s restraint.
That wasn’t an accident.
I wanted it to feel like walking through an empty place — where sound travels differently, where footsteps echo, where everything feels slightly slowed down.
That emptiness isn’t despair.
It’s absence.
And absence makes you listen more closely.
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The chorus — where hope enters
The heart of the song lives in the chorus.
While the verses observe what’s been left behind, the chorus listens to something else entirely: nature.
In the song, nature doesn’t shout.
It doesn’t demand.
It whispers.
But it keeps whispering — long after the noise of civilisation fades.
That’s where the hope is.
Not in rebuilding the same systems.
Not in replacing one tower with another.
But in remembering something older than all of it.
That living in balance — with land, with seasons, with each other — has always outlived greed.
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The question at the centre of the song
At its core, Towers asks a very simple question:
What if we left?
What if we stopped feeding systems that no longer serve us?
What if we stepped away from endless growth, endless consumption, endless urgency?
What if we chose enough?
I don’t ask that as a solution.
And I don’t ask it as a judgement.
I ask it as an invitation to think.
Because I sometimes wonder — is that what I did? When I left the city. When I moved to the countryside. When I chose slowness over scale.
I don’t have a definitive answer.
But I know this: the further I get from the noise, the clearer the signal becomes.
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Not escapism — a different kind of resistance
This isn’t about running away.
It’s about refusing to accept that the current way of living is the only option.
It’s about asking whether participation is the same thing as complicity.
And whether choosing a smaller, quieter life might actually be a form of resistance.
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Closing thought
Towers isn’t a warning.
And it isn’t a manifesto.
It’s a thought experiment.
A quiet one.
A “what if” that lingers after the song ends.
And maybe, just maybe, it’s a reminder that when everything else collapses — nature remains.
And so does the possibility to live differently.