I shared this song with The Farm Hands - Inner Circle a few weeks back. It's a song called The Cabin by the Pond.
This one’s been sitting with me for a while. I hadn’t shared it until now.
Last year, when I first started writing again after a decade away, I set out to build a simple home setup where I could record the ideas that were coming to me. My friend Rory offered to lend me a microphone, and while I was at his place, he wanted to show me his new writing cabin.
At the time, I was in full-on creative mode. After years of silence, it felt like someone had turned the spigot back on, and I was disciplining myself to chase every song idea instead of killing them off before they had a chance… something I’d gotten used to doing.
As he gave me the tour of his little cabin, I picked up his guitar and started singing:
In the cabin by the pond, there’s a man who sings a song, an old guitar strums along, in the cabin by the pond…
I don’t remember the next line. I think I started to take the man outside the cabin in the story. My friend Rory, being a songwriter himself, quickly said, “No, no, no. Don’t take him out of the cabin. Zoom in on him. What else is he doing?”
Then he pointed at me, sitting in a chair next to the large barn door he’d converted into a desk, and said, “He’s in the chair by the desk.”
So I sang:
In the chair beside the desk sits a heart within a chest…
Every beat knows it belongs, in the cabin by the pond…
That was it. I sat down the guitar, took the borrowed mic, and came home.
Although my journey and Rory's are different, we have both found ourselves in a season of transition. Searching and finding meaning it all. Funny how what we find is often not at all what we were looking for.
I finished the song with his advice in mind - to zoom way in for the verses… and zoom way out for the chorus.
But that “zooming out” became more than just a writing tool. It became a metaphor for living, growing, becoming.
The chorus imagines a wide view above the cabin, above the tall oaks that surround it… oaks grown from seeds planted a hundred years ago. Trees that became the desk, the chair, the paper, the pencil, the guitar. The very cabin itself.
But that’s also how songs come to be. The seed of an idea that grows into verse, chorus, refrain, all joined in melody, lifted up and given voice.
For years, I didn’t let those seeds grow in me. After a career in the music industry, the commercialization and critique of what once felt like a calling had drained my soul of the ability to nurture an idea just for the love of it. For me music was once about connecting, but it had become about competing.
In this new season, I’m tending the ground again. I’m letting the seed take root and I'm determined to cultivate connection again.
The tree can become a chair. For another, a desk. Maybe a pencil or a page. The guitar, or the cabin. Just like the tree, I don’t know what a song may become. The song is many different things to all the different lives it touches.
But whatever it becomes, it lives on - long after the tree is gone.
I don’t know how my songs will live on, or what they’ll become for the people who hear them.
But I’m committed to nurturing the seed and letting the song grow.
And I'm just as committed to pursuing a life worth living.
“When I'm gone, it will live on”…
in the cabin by the pond.
written by Warren Barfield / Rory Feek
performed and recorded by Warren Barfield on Rory Feeks microphone.