What happens when a song written about overwhelming odds ends up defying those odds?

In our current existence, life is hard. It seems to take and take and never quite give back enough.

The frustrations and resentments that accrue through our social, familial, political, and civil environments and situations always seem to leave us feeling emptier, or somehow lesser, than we were before. Maintaining the energy and bandwidth to function, much less to care, in life gets increasingly harder. I wrote a song to work through those feelings.

Overwhelming Odds was born out of my own frustration and seemingly impotent anger. I had originally intended to finish the song with vocals in contrasting styles—one Randy Blythe-esque and one Chris Cornell-esque. Unable to connect with the right vocalists I was looking for, I let the song sit idle for a while.

Fast-forward five months. As I was scrolling through Facebook, I happened to see that Derek Sherinian was looking for solo artists for recording and producing. Embracing the spirit of the song, I reached out and sent him the track I had finished structurally and performance-wise months earlier, only to let it languish.

I am not typically a lucky person. I don't gamble. I don't win raffles. I expected nothing to come of this other than an interesting anecdote to tell some of my friends.

But that's not what happened.

Shortly after emailing him, I received a clip of Derek playing over the first minute of the song, saying that he would love to finish it. As a renowned working and session musician, there was obviously a price tag involved in working with him. To my utter disappointment, it was more than I could invest in the song.

At that point, I figured I had at least gotten that minute-long clip—something I would treasure regardless of whether anything more came from it. But again, I was wrong. Rather than letting the story end there, Derek worked with me financially so that we could finish the song together.

Derek didn't overwrite or change the song. Instead, he expanded and polished the existing melodies and structure, bringing his own unmistakable musical voice to something that was already there.

And that is where this experience became particularly surreal for me.

When the burning need to make music first lit up inside me as a teenager, I discovered Dream Theater. They were releasing Falling Into Infinity, and the sounds and playing entranced me. The sound of that album has stuck heavily in my mind as something that informs many of my own musical production choices and preferences.

Now, years later, that vocabulary—the sounds and musical instincts that helped shape my ears during those formative years—was suddenly sitting inside something I had written.

Listening to a musician I respect, and whose playing I had grown up listening to, performing throughout one of my songs is not really something I can describe with words. It was a truly full-circle moment for me as a musician.

But there is something else about the experience that I find even more meaningful.

I wrote Overwhelming Odds because sometimes it feels as though the odds are stacked so heavily against us that simply moving forward becomes an act of exhaustion.

And yet, somewhere in the process of making that song, I took a chance that had every reason not to work.

And it did.

Maybe that's the thing I've come away with from this experience. The odds can be overwhelming without being absolute. There are still things we can't predict, connections we can't manufacture, and moments that only happen because we decided to try.

Sometimes you don't overcome the odds.

Sometimes you just discover that they weren't quite as overwhelming as you thought.