One Saturday night, I was walking home through Trinity Bellwoods Park in Toronto. It was around 1am and I was drunk. The park was vacant. I was listening to a demo I'd made for a song I was working on. It had a slow, gangster, southern-style hip hop beat. I had the melody for the verse and the chorus but no lyrics and I was kind of humming to myself as I stumbled down the dark path towards home. The night was clear, and the moon was out and just a hair short of being totally full. It looked absolutely huge; more gigantic and powerful than the moon had ever looked to me.

All of a sudden I felt very small. I became acutely aware that I would die someday; that I was existing down here on earth, doing this and doing that, but ultimately I would cease to live and another soul would take my place. I'd paused on the path, my mouth open, my body slightly swaying with drunken limberness, the moon's stark, white face glaring back at me. In a weird act of drunken bravado, I blurted this out into the darkness: "you don't care about us do you!?" The moon didn't respond. I thought to myself "this moon's seen so many of us come and go over thousands of years and look up to him for answers how could he care about us? We must seem like ants to him."

This was the basic idea that would become the lyrics to Small Fry. As I thought about it more, the bleakness of this concept really hit home. I started to think of the Moon as this all powerful, cosmic gangster and the stars as his henchmen. Together they dominate the eternal, black emptiness of the galaxy, of which earth is just a small part.

I've always believed that the universe is looking out for me, and that my existence might even be special but, because of that moment in the park, it occurred to me that perhaps I'm not special. Maybe I'm more alone than I realise.