Before we begin this week’s Monday Music, press play on the song below.

Seriously. Don’t just read this one in silence. Let the music sit with you while you scroll. Some songs are meant to be heard in the background, but this isn’t one of them.

So Far Away by Avenged Sevenfold is one of those rare songs that doesn’t just play. It lingers. It pulls memories out of places you didn’t realise you’d locked away.

When I first started writing this week’s blog, I thought I was just going to talk about the song and the story behind it. About Jimmy “The Rev” Sullivan and how this track became a goodbye to someone the band loved like a brother.

But the more I listened to it, the more it started pulling other memories into the room.

It made me think about my grandad, who passed away a few years ago. The first real loss I’d ever experienced. The first time someone who had always been part of my life suddenly wasn’t there anymore. He was someone who had been in my life for longer than he’s been gone, which is a strange thing to wrap your head around. You grow up with people like that around you, and somewhere in your mind, you quietly assume they’ll always be there. Then one day they’re not, and you realise how much of your world they quietly helped shape without you ever really noticing at the time.

I’m not fully over that, and if I’m honest, I probably never will be. Grief doesn’t really work like people tell you it does. It isn’t as easy as a 5 or 8 step manual, there is no real 8 steps of grief. It doesn’t disappear once enough time passes. It just changes shape. Some days it’s quiet and distant, like a memory you can look at fondly. Other days it shows up out of nowhere, triggered by something small. A song, a smell, a place, a moment that suddenly reminds you they’re not there to share it with you anymore.

Then the song made me think about a friend of mine who died last year. That one still feels raw because it’s so recent. The kind of loss where your brain still hasn’t fully caught up with the reality of it yet. The kind where you still expect to see their name pop up on your phone or bump into them somewhere random.

And that opened the door to other memories.

Another friend I lost years ago in a car accident. One of those moments that reminds you just how fragile everything actually is. Life can change in seconds, and sometimes there’s no warning, no build up, just a moment where everything shifts and nothing is quite the same afterwards.

Then there are the people who weren’t family or lifelong friends, but who still leave a mark on you in ways you only fully realise after they’re gone. Like the work colleague who taught me a lot about my job when I was still finding my feet. Someone who probably didn’t realise how much they were helping at the time. And another colleague more recently who passed away a couple of years ago, another reminder that the people we see every day quietly become part of our lives whether we realise it or not.

That’s the strange thing about grief.

It rarely arrives on its own.

One memory leads to another, which leads to another, and suddenly you’re not just thinking about one person anymore. You’re thinking about all of them. All the conversations, the lessons, the laughs, the small moments that didn’t seem important at the time but now feel like pieces of something you wish you could step back into for just a few minutes.

And sometimes all it takes to open that door is a song.

And suddenly this song wasn’t just about a band mourning a drummer anymore.

It became something else entirely.

Music does that sometimes. It becomes a bridge between the people we still have and the people we wish we could speak to just one more time.

So take a moment. Let the song play. Let it sit with you for a bit.

And then we’ll talk about why some songs never really leave us.

The Songs That Find You When You Need Them

Some songs don’t arrive quietly, they don’t ask permission or wait until you’re ready to hear them. They just appear, sometimes years after they were written, and settle into your mind like they’ve been there all along. You might have heard them before. You might even know every lyric. But suddenly, at a particular moment in your life, the song changes. Or maybe it doesn’t change at all. Maybe you do.

That’s the strange thing about music. It grows alongside us.

A song you barely noticed ten years ago can suddenly become something deeply personal. A lyric that once sounded like just another line in a chorus can hit differently once you’ve lived a little more life. Once you’ve experienced the things those words were written about.

And sometimes it’s not even the lyrics that get you.

Sometimes it’s the tone of a voice. The way a guitar note lingers slightly longer than expected. The space between two chords that somehow feels heavier than the notes themselves. Music has this strange ability to slip past your defences and sit somewhere deeper than most conversations ever reach.

So Far Away by Avenged Sevenfold is one of those songs.

It doesn’t force itself on you. It doesn’t shout or try to overwhelm you with volume or drama. Instead, it unfolds slowly, almost cautiously, like it understands the weight of what it’s carrying. The opening guitar feels reflective rather than theatrical, and when the vocals arrive, they don’t feel like they’re trying to impress anyone. They feel honest.

And honesty has a way of stopping you in your tracks.

Because the moment you recognise it, something shifts inside you. You stop hearing the song as entertainment and start hearing it as something else entirely. A reflection. A mirror. A reminder of the people who once stood beside you and now only exist in memory.

That’s what happened to me with this song.

I’ve known Avenged Sevenfold for years. Like most people who enjoy rock or metal, they’ve been part of the background of my musical life for a long time. Songs that play in the car. Songs that appear on playlists. Songs that you recognise instantly but don’t always sit down to examine.

But every now and then, one of those songs steps forward and demands a little more attention.

So Far Away did exactly that.

It started as a casual listen, the kind where you let a track run while doing something else. But within a minute or two, I realised I wasn’t focusing on anything else anymore. The room had gone quiet, the distractions had faded, and suddenly the song was sitting right in front of me like it had something important to say.

Loud and honest.

The lyrics are simple, but that simplicity is what makes them land so hard. They don’t hide behind complicated metaphors or abstract ideas. They ask a question that every person eventually faces at some point in their life.

How do you live without the ones you love?

It’s one of those questions that doesn’t really have an answer.

People will offer advice. They’ll talk about time healing things, about moving forward, about learning to carry memories rather than sadness. And some of that might be true. Time does soften certain edges. Life continues, whether we’re ready for it or not.

But the question itself never fully disappears.

It lingers somewhere in the background of your thoughts, especially when something small reminds you of the person who isn’t there anymore. A phrase they used to say. A place you once visited together. A song that suddenly transports you back to a moment that existed before loss entered the picture.

Music has a strange relationship with memory.

It can freeze moments in time without us even realising it. A particular song can become tied to a period of life so tightly that hearing it years later feels like stepping into a room you haven’t visited in a long time. The details return instantly. The atmosphere. The emotions. The people who were there.

Sometimes that’s beautiful.

Sometimes it’s painful.

Often it’s both at the same time.

So Far Away sits right in that space.

It doesn’t try to dress grief up as something heroic or poetic. It doesn’t pretend that losing someone automatically leads to wisdom or growth. Instead, it captures the quiet confusion that follows loss. The strange mixture of sadness, gratitude, and disbelief that settles in when you realise someone who once felt permanent is now part of your past.

And that’s where music becomes more than just sound.

Because when a song manages to capture that feeling honestly, it becomes something people return to again and again. Not because it makes the pain disappear, but because it acknowledges that the pain exists.

There’s comfort in that kind of acknowledgement.

In knowing that someone else has stood in that same emotional space and found a way to express it out loud. That the things you’re struggling to articulate have already been spoken somewhere in the world, even if it was by someone you’ve never met.

That’s the moment when music stops being background noise and becomes something much more personal.

It becomes a companion.

And sometimes, when life quietly reminds you of the people you’ve lost, that companion is exactly what you need.

Jimmy “The Rev” Sullivan

Every band has members who play their role, and then some members shape the soul of the band itself.

Jimmy “The Rev” Sullivan was one of those people.

To many listeners, he was simply the drummer of Avenged Sevenfold. The man behind the kit delivering the speed, power and precision that helped drive the band’s sound forward. But inside the band, and among those who paid closer attention, he was far more than that. Jimmy wasn’t just keeping time. He was helping write the language the band spoke.

He was a songwriter. A vocalist. A creative force that pushed ideas in strange and unexpected directions. The kind of musician who didn’t just sit behind the drums and follow the structure of a song, but someone who helped shape the structure itself. Many of the band’s most memorable songs carried his fingerprints long before the rest of the world ever heard them.

People often think of drummers as the backbone of a band, the rhythmic engine holding everything together. Jimmy was that, but he was also something else entirely. He had a theatrical streak, a sense of musical curiosity that meant he wasn’t afraid to take a song somewhere unusual. Sometimes darker. Sometimes stranger. Sometimes unexpectedly beautiful.

And that spirit became part of what made Avenged Sevenfold stand out.

They were never just another heavy band chasing volume and aggression. Beneath the guitars and the drums, there was always a sense of drama, melody and storytelling running through their music. That combination didn’t appear by accident. It was the result of personalities colliding creatively, and Jimmy was one of the loudest voices in that conversation.

Which is why his death in December 2009 hit so hard.

Jimmy “The Rev” Sullivan was only twenty eight years old.

Twenty eight.

It’s the kind of age where most people still feel like life is only just beginning. The years where friendships are still growing, plans are still being made, and the future still feels wide open. For the band, Jimmy wasn’t just a colleague or a professional collaborator. He was a friend they had grown up with. Someone who had been there from the beginning, long before the success, the tours and the recognition.

They had built something together.

And suddenly one of the people who helped create that world was gone.

Loss inside a band is different from loss in many other parts of life. Bands are strange little families. They spend years travelling together, creating together, arguing, celebrating, surviving the chaos of the music industry side by side. When something happens to one member, it doesn’t just affect the music. It affects the entire structure of the relationships that built that music.

The remaining members of Avenged Sevenfold were faced with a question no band ever wants to ask.

What happens next?

Do you stop? Do you walk away from something that suddenly feels incomplete? Or do you find a way to keep moving forward while carrying the absence of someone who helped define what you were in the first place?

The album Nightmare was already in motion when Jimmy died.

That fact alone gives the record a strange emotional gravity. Some of the songs had already been written. Ideas had already been shaped. Jimmy himself had been part of that creative process before his passing. His influence was still woven into the music that was now being completed without him physically present in the room.

Finishing the album became something more than just a professional obligation.

It became a tribute.

The band eventually brought in drummer Mike Portnoy to record the drum parts for the album. But even that decision was handled carefully. Portnoy didn’t approach the role as a replacement for Jimmy. Instead, he approached it as a tribute, studying Jimmy’s style and doing his best to honour the spirit of how those songs would have been played.

The result is an album that carries grief inside its structure.

You can hear it in the tone, the atmosphere, the emotional weight that runs through the record. Nightmare doesn’t sound like a band simply continuing business as usual. It sounds like a group of people trying to process the loss of someone they loved while finishing the work that person helped create.

And inside that album sits So Far Away.

What makes the story behind this song even more powerful is that it wasn’t originally written about Jimmy at all.

The song began its life in a completely different place.

Guitarist Synyster Gates had started writing it as a personal piece for his grandfather. It was meant to be reflective and emotional, something quieter than the band’s usual material. A song about distance, about memory, about the strange way time separates us from the people who shaped our lives.

But when Jimmy died, the meaning of the song changed.

Suddenly those lyrics weren’t about a distant reflection anymore. They were about someone the band had just lost. Someone whose absence was still fresh and difficult to accept. The song transformed from a private reflection into something else entirely.

A goodbye.

That shift gives So Far Away a unique emotional depth. The foundation of the song was already built around themes of loss and distance, but the reality of Jimmy’s death brought those themes into sharp focus. The band wasn’t writing about grief from a safe distance.

They were living inside it.

When M. Shadows sings the lyrics, it doesn’t feel like a performance. It feels like someone is trying to process something that hasn’t fully settled yet. The voice carries a weight that doesn’t sound rehearsed or theatrical. It sounds genuine.

And maybe that’s why the song resonates with so many people.

Because it wasn’t designed to be a grand statement about loss. It wasn’t written with the intention of becoming a universal anthem for grief. It simply became that because the emotion inside it was real.

Real grief has a way of finding its way into art whether the artist intends it or not.

Jimmy Sullivan’s absence changed Nightmare forever.

But it also left behind something powerful. A song that allows listeners to step into the same emotional space the band found themselves in during that moment. A song that quietly acknowledges the hardest truth about losing someone you love.

Sometimes all you can do is say goodbye.

And hope the music carries the rest.

When A Song Becomes A Goodbye

Some songs are written with a clear intention.

You can hear it straight away. A celebration. A protest. A love song. A breakup song. The emotion sits neatly inside the structure of the music, and the listener understands the purpose within the first few lines. But every now and then a song becomes something more than what it was originally written to be. Life steps in, reality changes the meaning, and suddenly the music is carrying something far heavier than anyone expected when the first chord was written.

So Far Away is one of those songs.

When Synyster Gates first began writing it, the idea was personal but quiet. The early shape of the song was meant as a reflection on distance and family, something written for his grandfather rather than for the stage. It was softer than the material Avenged Sevenfold were known for at the time, slower, more reflective, almost fragile in its tone.

But then life changed the meaning of the song completely.

The sudden loss of Jimmy “The Rev” Sullivan reshaped everything around the album Nightmare. What had been a reflective piece suddenly became something far more immediate. Those lyrics that once spoke about distance now spoke about absence. The emotional weight inside the song shifted from thoughtful reflection to something far more painful and real.

It became a goodbye.

That transformation is part of what makes So Far Away so powerful. The structure of the song was already built around loss and longing, but now those feelings were no longer theoretical. They were raw, recent and deeply personal. The band weren’t writing about grief from a distance. They were experiencing it in real time.

And you can hear that in the performance.

When M. Shadows sings the opening lines, there’s a restraint in his voice that feels deliberate. Not because he’s holding back, but because the weight of what he’s saying doesn’t need theatrics. The emotion is already there, sitting quietly inside the melody.

That’s something many artists struggle to capture.

Grief is often loud in films and television. It’s dramatic, explosive, overwhelming. But real grief doesn’t always behave that way. Often it arrives in quieter ways. It sits in moments of silence. It appears unexpectedly when something small reminds you of someone who should still be there.

The tone of So Far Away reflects that reality.

The guitar work from Synyster Gates feels reflective rather than aggressive. Each note lingers slightly longer than you expect, almost as if the song itself is taking a moment to breathe between thoughts. The melody builds slowly, allowing the emotion to grow naturally instead of forcing it into something dramatic.

And then the lyrics arrive.

“How do I live without the ones I love?”

It’s a question almost everyone eventually asks at some point in their life.

Not necessarily out loud. Not always in words. But the moment arrives sooner or later for all of us. The moment when someone who once felt permanent suddenly isn’t there anymore, and you realise that life will continue whether you’re ready for it to or not.

There’s something brutally honest about that line.

It doesn’t try to dress grief up in poetic language. It doesn’t pretend there’s a clear answer waiting somewhere. It simply asks the question that sits in the minds of people who are trying to understand how the world continues moving when someone important has disappeared from it.

That honesty is what gives the song its emotional weight.

Many songs about loss try to provide comfort. They offer reassurance, hope, or some sense that everything will eventually make sense again. But So Far Away doesn’t rush towards that conclusion. Instead, it sits inside the question for a while. It acknowledges the confusion that comes with losing someone close.

Because when someone dies, the world doesn’t pause to help you process it.

Everything else keeps moving. People go to work. Traffic continues. Conversations carry on around you as though nothing has changed. But inside your own world, something has shifted in a way that feels impossible to explain.

Music has a strange way of capturing that feeling.

It can hold emotions that are difficult to express in everyday language. It can sit with sadness without trying to immediately solve it. It can give people a place to recognise what they’re feeling without demanding that they explain it.

That’s why songs like So Far Away tend to stay with listeners for years.

Because they become attached to moments in people’s lives. A song like this doesn’t belong only to the band that wrote it. Over time, it becomes something shared between thousands of listeners who have experienced their own versions of the same loss.

For some people, the song will always be connected to Jimmy Sullivan.

For others, it will remind them of someone entirely different. A family member. A partner. A friend. Someone who once filled a space in their life that now feels quieter than it used to.

That’s the quiet power of music.

A single song written for one person can eventually carry the memories of many. It becomes a place where listeners bring their own stories, their own losses, their own questions that never quite find answers.

And every time the song plays, those memories return.

Not always painfully, sometimes gently, but always honestly.

The People We Carry With Us

The strange thing about loss is that it never really stays contained to one person.

When someone dies, you think you’re grieving for that one individual. The one you’ve just lost. The one whose absence suddenly feels loud in the quiet spaces of your life. But grief has a way of opening doors to other memories, other people, other moments that you didn’t expect to revisit.

A song like So Far Away has a way of doing that.

You start listening with one person in mind, and before you realise it, you’re thinking about several. Faces appear in your memory that you haven’t thought about in years. Conversations echo back through time. Moments that once seemed ordinary suddenly feel far more important than they did when they were happening.

For me, the first person that song brings to mind is my grandad.

He passed away a few years ago, and it was the first real loss I’d experienced in my life. The first time someone who had always been there suddenly wasn’t anymore. When you’re younger, there’s a quiet assumption that the people who raised you, guided you, or simply existed in the background of your life will always be there. They become part of the scenery of your world, something so familiar that you don’t even question it.

Until one day it changes.

And the world feels slightly different afterwards.

My grandad had been part of my life for longer than he’s been gone. That’s a strange thought when you really sit with it. Someone can exist beside you for decades, shaping small parts of your life in ways you don’t fully understand at the time. Then suddenly their presence becomes a collection of memories instead of a living part of your everyday world.

You carry those memories forward, but something about the rhythm of life changes.

The conversations you might have had never happened. The small updates about your life never get shared. The familiar voice you heard so many times becomes something you can only replay in your mind.

People often say time heals grief, but that’s never quite felt like the right way of describing it.

Time changes grief. It softens the sharp edges. The sadness that once arrived like a wave slowly becomes something quieter, something that sits in the background rather than overwhelming you completely. But it never fully disappears. Every now and then, something small will bring it back into focus again.

A song. A smell. A place.

A memory you didn’t realise you’d been carrying around all along.

So Far Away does that to me.

It doesn’t just make me think about my grandad. It makes me think about a friend I lost last year as well. That one still feels raw because it’s so recent. When someone dies suddenly, your mind takes a long time to catch up with the reality of it. Part of you still expects to see them somewhere. To hear their voice again. To see their name appear on your phone like it always did before.

Grief at that stage doesn’t feel distant or reflective.

It feels immediate.

The memories are clearer, the absence louder. You’re still adjusting to a world where someone who was recently part of your everyday life is suddenly missing from it.

And then there are the losses that sit somewhere further back in time.

Another friend I lost years ago in a car accident. One of those moments that reminds you just how fragile life actually is. One minute, someone is there, living their life like everyone else, making plans and moving through the world like the rest of us.

The next minute, they’re gone.

There’s something particularly shocking about losses like that because they don’t arrive with warning. They don’t give you time to prepare your mind for the change. They simply happen, leaving behind a quiet gap in the lives of the people who knew them.

And then there are the people who weren’t family, and maybe weren’t even close friends, but who still leave a mark on your life in ways you only fully realise later.

A work colleague who taught me a lot about my job when I was first learning the ropes. Someone who probably never thought twice about the small bits of advice they passed along during the working day. But those small conversations added up to something meaningful. They helped shape the person I became in my career.

And another colleague who passed away a couple of years ago.

People you saw regularly. People who were part of the everyday rhythm of work and life. The sort of people you share conversations with, laugh with, learn from, without ever imagining that one day those conversations will simply stop.

When a song like So Far Away plays, all of those people seem to appear at once.

Not in a dramatic way. Not like a flood of sadness or overwhelming grief. More like a quiet gathering of memories. Moments from different parts of your life sitting together in the same space, reminding you how many people have quietly shaped who you are.

That’s the strange thing about grief.

It rarely belongs to just one moment or one person.

It becomes part of the story of your life. A reminder that every relationship, every conversation, every shared experience eventually becomes part of the memories you carry forward.

And sometimes a song opens that door just enough for you to sit with those memories for a while.

Not because it hurts.

But because remembering matters.

Grief Doesn’t Expire

One of the strangest things about grief is the quiet expectation that it should eventually fade away.

Not immediately. People understand that losing someone hurts. In the beginning, there’s space for it. People ask how you are. They give you time. They understand if you’re quieter than usual or if your mind seems somewhere else for a while. The world pauses just long enough for you to catch your breath.

But slowly, often without anyone meaning to, that pause ends.

Life moves on around you. Conversations change. The sympathy becomes less frequent. Months turn into years, and somewhere along the way, an unspoken assumption settles in that enough time has passed for things to be okay again.

The truth is, grief doesn’t work like that.

It doesn’t run on a schedule, and it certainly doesn’t expire. What actually happens is something quieter. The sharp edges soften over time. The overwhelming waves of emotion that once made ordinary days difficult become less intense. You learn how to live your life again, how to laugh again, how to move forward without constantly feeling the weight of what happened.

But the absence never fully disappears.

It simply changes shape.

There will always be moments when it returns unexpectedly. A place you used to visit together. A conversation that reminds you of something they once said. A small piece of advice you wish you could still ask for. The memories don’t vanish, they simply settle into the background of your life until something gently brings them forward again.

Often, that something is music.

Music has a strange relationship with memory. A song can exist quietly in your life for years, playing in the background without much thought, and then suddenly, one day, it hits differently. A lyric lands harder than it once did. A melody feels heavier than it used to. What was once just another track becomes something personal.

So Far Away is that kind of song.

It doesn’t try to offer answers about grief. It doesn’t pretend that time solves everything or that loss eventually becomes easy to understand. Instead, it sits inside the space that grief creates. It acknowledges that losing someone doesn’t simply become a memory you file away and forget.

It becomes part of how you move through the world.

The people we lose don’t disappear from our lives completely. They continue to exist in the stories we tell, the lessons they left behind, the small habits or phrases we picked up from them without even realising it at the time. Their influence stays with us in ways that often become clearer as the years pass.

My grandad is part of that story for me. So is the friend I lost last year, whose absence still feels recent enough that my mind sometimes forgets he’s gone. So is the friend who died years ago in a car accident, a reminder of how quickly life can change without warning. And then there are the colleagues who were part of my everyday routine, people who quietly shaped my working life in ways I didn’t fully appreciate until they weren’t there anymore.

Each of those people occupies a different part of my memory, tied to different moments in my life. But they’re all still there. The conversations we had, the advice they gave, the laughter, the ordinary days that didn’t feel significant at the time but now feel far more important when I look back on them.

That’s what grief really becomes over time.

Not just sadness, but memory.

A reminder that someone once existed in your life and left a mark on it. A quiet acknowledgement that the person you are today was shaped, at least in part, by the people who walked beside you along the way.

Songs like So Far Away remind us of that.

They don’t bring people back, and they don’t erase the pain of losing them. What they do instead is give us a place to sit with those memories for a few minutes. A few minutes where the faces return, where the voices echo again, where the moments we shared with those people step briefly back into the present.

And sometimes that’s enough.

Because grief doesn’t disappear with time.

It simply becomes another way of remembering the people who mattered.

Why Music Holds Our Memories

There is something strange about the way music stores our lives.

A photograph can capture a moment, a place, a group of people standing together in a single frame. But music does something different. A song doesn’t just show you the past, it pulls you back into it. A melody can bring back the atmosphere of a moment, the emotions attached to it, the people who were there and the version of yourself that existed at that point in time.

You can go years without hearing a particular song. It can disappear from your daily life completely. And then one day it plays somewhere unexpectedly, in a shop, on the radio, in a playlist you forgot about, and suddenly you’re standing in a memory that feels as clear as the day it happened.

That’s the quiet power of music.

It doesn’t just entertain us while it’s playing. It attaches itself to moments in our lives, often without us noticing at the time. A song becomes part of a drive somewhere. A conversation. A night out. A moment of happiness. A moment of heartbreak. And once that connection forms, the music carries the memory with it forever.

Years later, hearing the same song can unlock that memory instantly.

The room you were in appears again. The people who were there step back into focus. The emotions you felt in that moment return with surprising clarity. It’s almost like stepping through a doorway into a different version of your life for a few minutes.

So Far Away sits right in the middle of that kind of experience.

For some listeners, the song will always be connected to Jimmy “The Rev” Sullivan and the story behind the album Nightmare. It will remind them of a band losing one of its founding members, of a group of friends trying to process something that didn’t make sense.

For others, the song will carry a completely different meaning.

It might remind them of a parent who passed away, a partner they lost, or a friend who is no longer around. The details of the story change from listener to listener, but the emotional core of the song remains the same. It speaks about absence in a way that allows people to place their own memories inside it.

That’s something music does better than almost any other form of expression.

A book tells a specific story. A film shows a particular sequence of events. But a song leaves space for interpretation. It creates an emotional landscape that listeners can step into with their own experiences. Two people can hear the same song and walk away with completely different memories attached to it.

And both of those interpretations can be equally true.

That’s why certain songs stay with people for decades.

They become more than the original recording. They become part of the emotional soundtrack of someone’s life. A piece of music that grows alongside them, collecting new memories each time it returns.

You might hear a song at twenty years old and connect with it in one way. Then hear it again ten years later and realise it means something completely different now. Not because the music changed, but because you did.

Life has a way of reshaping the meaning of the things we listen to.

A lyric that once sounded dramatic can suddenly feel painfully accurate after you’ve lived through something similar. A melody that once seemed simple can suddenly feel heavy with meaning once it becomes attached to a memory you didn’t expect to carry.

That’s why songs about loss often become the ones people return to the most.

They acknowledge something universal. Every person who listens long enough will eventually experience the absence of someone they care about. It’s part of being human. And when music captures that experience honestly, it becomes something people hold onto.

Not because it removes the sadness.

But because it recognises it.

So Far Away has become one of those songs.

It started as a personal piece written by Synyster Gates, transformed into a tribute to Jimmy Sullivan, and eventually became something even larger than that. A song that now exists in the memories of countless listeners who have used it as a quiet place to remember someone they’ve lost.

That’s the strange journey music can take.

A song written in one room by a small group of musicians can eventually travel across the world, entering the lives of people the band will never meet. It becomes part of road trips, late night thoughts, quiet reflections and moments where someone simply needs to sit with their memories for a while.

And in doing so, the song becomes something far greater than the recording itself.

It becomes a container for memory.

A place where people return, again and again, to remember the faces and voices that helped shape their lives.

Music can’t bring people back.

But it can keep the feeling of them alive for a few minutes every time the song begins.

Still Listening

By the time So Far Away reaches its final notes, something subtle has usually happened inside the listener.

Not always dramatically. Not in a way that suddenly changes your entire outlook on life. But quietly, almost without you noticing it at first, the song leaves something behind. A thought. A memory. A feeling that lingers for a while after the music stops.

That’s often the mark of a powerful song.

The best music doesn’t just exist while it’s playing. It continues living in your thoughts afterwards. It gives your mind something to sit with, something to reflect on long after the final chord fades away.

So Far Away does exactly that.

It begins as a tribute to Jimmy “The Rev” Sullivan, a goodbye written by a band trying to process the loss of someone who helped shape their entire journey. But somewhere along the way, the song stops belonging only to Avenged Sevenfold. It becomes something listeners bring their own stories to.

A family member. A friend. A partner. A colleague.

Someone who once stood beside you in the ordinary rhythm of everyday life and is now part of your memories instead.

The strange thing about memory is that it doesn’t always arrive in grand moments. Often it appears quietly. In the middle of an ordinary day. While driving somewhere. While sitting with a pair of headphones on. A song starts playing and suddenly you’re thinking about someone you haven’t thought about for a long time.

Not in a painful way.

Just in a way that reminds you they mattered.

That they were here.

That they were part of the story that shaped who you are now.

That’s something music has always been uniquely good at preserving. It holds emotional moments in a form that can be revisited again and again. Each time the song plays, the memory returns for a few minutes. Not exactly as it was, but close enough that the connection still feels real.

And maybe that’s the quiet beauty of songs like So Far Away.

They don’t promise to remove grief. They don’t try to explain loss or offer answers to questions that don’t really have solutions. What they do instead is acknowledge something deeply human.

That the people we lose never fully disappear.

They remain in the way we speak, in the lessons they taught us, in the habits we picked up from them, without even realising it. They exist in our memories, in the stories we tell, and sometimes in the songs that remind us of them when we least expect them.

Jimmy Sullivan lives on in the music he helped create.

My grandad lives on in the memories I carry of him.

My friends and colleagues who are no longer here still exist in the moments we shared and the things they taught me along the way.

None of them are physically here anymore.

But the impact they had on my life still is.

And maybe that’s the final thought this song leaves behind.

Life is fragile in ways we often forget while we’re busy living it. People come into our lives, shape parts of who we become, and sometimes leave far sooner than we ever expected. But the connections we make with those people don’t simply vanish when they’re gone.

They stay with us. In memory. In conversation. And sometimes in music.

So if So Far Away reminds you of someone tonight, take a moment to sit with that memory. Not with sadness alone, but with the quiet appreciation that the person you’re remembering once walked beside you in this strange, unpredictable journey we call life.

Because sometimes the most powerful thing a song can do is remind us just how important those moments really were.

And how lucky we were to have them at all.

Featured Music Partner

Supporting independent music isn’t just something I try to do here on Monday Music. It’s something happening across many platforms, and one of those places is The Late Show with Stephen Mac on Bounce Digital Radio.

Broadcasting from Banbridge in Northern Ireland, Stephen’s show focuses on real music, real artists, and giving musicians a place to be heard beyond the noise of algorithms and major label promotion.

If you enjoy discovering new music, especially from independent artists working hard to share their sound with the world, this is a show well worth tuning into.

The Late Show with Stephen Mac airs live…
Tuesday & Thursday – 7pm to 9pm GMT
Saturday – 6pm to 8pm GMT

You can listen live here…
www.BounceDigitalRadio.co.uk

You can also follow Stephen and connect with the show on social media using the links shown in the poster above.

Independent blogs, independent radio, and independent artists all working together is how real music continues to be discovered.

Reader Songs & Indie Artists

One of my favourite parts of Monday Music is the moment when the blog stops being just about my own music choices and starts becoming something shared. Every week, independent artists and readers send in songs they’re proud of, songs they’ve created, or songs by other indie musicians they believe deserve to be heard.

And that’s exactly what this section is about.

Real music made by real people.

Last week was incredible. I had over seventy song submissions from artists and readers all over the place. It was amazing to see that level of support for independent music, but it also created a bit of a problem. Embedding that many tracks into a single blog post completely slowed the page down. Some readers even told me the blog wouldn’t load at all.

So I tried something different and created a separate linked post just for the songs. Even that pushed the site’s limits to what it could comfortably handle.

Because of that, this week I had to put a cap on submissions.

The recruitment post was only open for six hours, and once that window closed, the list was locked. It’s not something I enjoy doing, because the whole point of this blog is to help independent artists get heard. But until I find a better technical solution, it’s the only way to keep the blog loading smoothly for everyone.

The good news is that every single song submitted still gets added to the Monday Music Spotify playlist, even if it doesn’t make it into the blog itself (some music doesn’t make it to the blog due to not being able to find the song on YouTube, yes, another technical issue I need to work around).

You can find the playlist here…
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5gK6iuswSxtugkatGm2CaU

The goal going forward is to keep expanding this part of the project without breaking the blog in the process. More music, more artists, more discovery… just in a way that keeps the page readable and accessible for everyone.

For now, though, here are this week’s indie submissions.

Take a moment to listen, explore, and if you find something you enjoy, give the artist a follow or a share. For independent musicians, those small actions can make a huge difference.

Real music deserves real listeners.

(When moving onto the next song, pause the one you’re listening to and it may continue playing)

THEPLAINANDSIMPLEGUY

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Thank you

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