I Try

“I Try” feels almost painfully unprotected. It does not present trying as noble in some polished, inspirational sense. It presents it as compulsion, devotion, bewilderment, and emotional exposure all at once. The repeated opening phrase — I, I try — lands less like a statement of confidence than like someone admitting the one thing they cannot seem to stop doing.

That is what gives the song its psychological force. Beneath the tenderness is the feeling of a self bending toward love so far that it begins to lose its own shape. The strange, disarming image of becoming “just a little mashed potato on your plate” matters because it says what ordinary language often avoids: the longing not just to be loved, but to be kept close at any cost, even if closeness requires becoming smaller, softer, more consumable, less fully oneself.

The song never resolves that ache. It stays inside it. The repeated wondering — I sometimes wonder why — gives the whole piece its spiritual undercurrent. This is not simply romantic confusion. It is the sound of someone trying to understand why the heart remains loyal to what leaves it uncertain. In that way, “I Try” becomes a song about the sacred exhaustion of reaching: the way love can feel like prayer, like self-erasure, like hope, and like survival, all in the same breath.