In 2013, I wrote a song called “Nothing Comes Easy.” I was in a different season of life — still fighting, still grinding, still trying to figure out what the next chapter was supposed to look like. I sat down with a guitar and wrote what I was feeling. Recently, I ran that old recording through an AI music tool and heard it fully produced for the first time. You can listen to it here: Nothing Comes Easy
“This time’s not like all the times before. I’m not here to fight — I’m here to win the war.”
I didn’t fully understand what I was writing. I thought I did. I thought I knew what war I was talking about. But 2013 David hadn’t been through his second round of cancer yet. He hadn’t published a novel. He hadn’t started a 280-day challenge to rebuild his habits from the ground up. He wrote the lyric because it sounded true. I’m living it now because it is.
That’s the strange thing about writing something before you’re ready for it. The words sit there, waiting for you to grow into them. You think you’re being honest in the moment, and you are — but there’s a version of that honesty you can’t access yet because you haven’t earned it. You have to go through the thing the song is about before the song actually belongs to you.
Thirteen years later, I know what war I was writing about. It wasn’t one fight. It was the decision to keep showing up — through cancer, through setbacks, through the long stretch of days where nothing moves and nobody notices. Easy doesn’t teach you that. Only the grind does.
I wrote a bridge in that song: “A fire’s burning deep in me. However long it takes, I’ll be free.” I didn’t know it was a promise to myself. But here I am, keeping it.
David Willis 