Sleeping at Last, Saturn, and Sharing Beautiful Things

The concluding line — “How rare and beautiful it truly is that we exist” — hits hard.

Readers know that I occasionally share music on this platform.

I often listen to soundtracks when I write or edit. It’s important for me. Sometimes it’s inspiring. Other times it just has a way of uplifting my soul.

A couple years ago, I discovered a band called Sleeping at Last, a musical project of singer-songwriter and composer Ryan O’Neal. I don’t even remember how I discovered the band, but I do know the first song I heard wasn’t an original. It was a cover of “All Through the Night,” the 1983 hit song written by Jules Shear that was popularized by Cyndi Lauper.

It’s not often I enjoy a cover more than an original hit, but the song landed for me. So I put it on some of my playlists. (Listen below)

Over time, I started to hear more songs by Sleeping at Last and learned a little more about the band. Originally formed in 1999 in Wheaton, Illinois, by O’Neal and his brother, Sleeping at Last broke up in the 2000s. But Ryan O’Neal kept the rights to the name and continued as a solo endeavor. He tours today under the name.

O’Neal’s sounds are unique. A lot of his music (and his covers) is deeply emotional, and he blends indie rock and orchestral arrangements like few other bands I can think of.

One of the songs I can’t stop listening to is Saturn, released in 2014 as part of O’Neal’s “Atlas: Year One” project—a sprawling compilation that explored human experience in the cosmos.

The song, I told my wife, feels a bit like Benson Boone’s In the Stars colliding with a Christian gospel choir at Christmas, with a touch of Basil Poledouris. It’s at once intimate and universal, cinematic and spiritual.

Here are the lyrics.

You taught me the courage of stars before you left
How light carries on endlessly, even after death
With shortness of breath
You explained the infinite
How rare and beautiful it is to even exist

I couldn’t help but ask for you to say it all again
I tried to write it down, but I could never find a pen
I’d give anything to hear you say it one more time
That the universe was made just to be seen by my eyes

I couldn’t help but ask for you to say it all again
I tried to write it down, but I could never find a pen
I’d give anything to hear you say it one more time
That the universe was made just to be seen by my eyes

With shortness of breath
I’ll explain the infinite
How rare and beautiful it truly is that we exist

The song stirs something in me. Its concluding line — “How rare and beautiful it truly is that we exist” — hits hard and reminds me that life itself is an extraordinary gift. (Something O’Neal himself apparently learned upon saying goodbye to someone he loved.) The modern world, especially in this digital age, has a way of making us forget that — but we shouldn’t.

The older I get, the more I appreciate how brief our time here is. The beautiful things God has given us won’t last forever — not here on Earth, anyway. So enjoy them, and remember to share the good along the way — like a song that helps you remember that this universe exists, somehow, just for us. And that life is full of beauty, not just pain, if we can only learn to find it.