Falling Inside The Black

Skillet's "Falling Inside the Black" is written from the bottom of a pit. The narrator is alone, the sorrow "takes a hold," and the one whose touch "used to give me life" has gone quiet. He admits he has "traded everything that I love for this one thing" and now sits "stranded in the offering," a confession that makes the darkness feel self-inflicted as well as inherited.

The chorus keeps circling the same descent: "Falling in the black / Slipping through the cracks." Each pass asks the same question, "can I ever go back?", and the closing minutes shrink the line to a repeated "Can you hear me?" until only fragments of "the black" are left. Nothing in the lyrics resolves it. The cry from the abyss is the whole point.

Read next to Scripture, that cry has precedent. Psalm 130:1 begins "Out of the depths I have cried to you," and Psalm 40:2 describes being lifted from a horrible pit and set on a rock. The song stays in the pit, but the question it keeps asking, whether anyone hears, is the one those psalms answer.