A Hard Day’s Goodbye: Why We Are Retiring From Music
The stage lights are a kind of sun. For twenty-five years, I have stood in their orbit, feeling their heat bleach my hair and burn my skin, transforming the sweat and effort into something golden, something larger than life. The roar of a crowd is a physical force; it hits you in the chest, a wave of pure, undiluted emotion that you catch and, if you’re lucky, send echoing back, amplified by your own heart. This has been my life. My air. My religion.
And now, we are choosing to walk away.
The decision to retire from music is not one that came in a single, dramatic moment. It was not a slammed door, but a slowly setting sun. It is the hardest, most bittersweet, and ultimately the most peaceful choice we have ever made. To understand it, you must understand that it comes not from a place of lack of love, but from an abundance of it.
The music, itself, has not aged. It is as vital and screamingly alive as it was the day we first wrote it. The need to create, to take a raw, screaming feeling and forge it into a melody, is a fire that still burns in my belly. The connection with our fans—the people who have tattooed our lyrics on their skin, who have found strength in our songs to face their own battles—that connection is a sacred trust. Leaving that behind feels like a kind of betrayal, and that is a ghost we will have to learn to live with.
But the vessel for that music—the human machine required to deliver it—is not immune to time.
A life on tour is a beautiful paradox. It is both incredibly expansive and claustrophobically small. You see the world, but often through the window of a moving bus, the landscape blurring into a tapestry of gas stations, venue load-ins, and anonymous hotel rooms. Your family becomes the crew, your bandmates, your manager. They are your everything. And your actual family—the partners, the children, the friends who anchor you to a reality outside of the roar—they pay the price for your absence. They are the ones who make the real sacrifice, and that debt grows heavier with every passing year.
I look at my daughter’s face on a video call from a dressing room in Tokyo, and I see a milestone I missed. I feel the phantom ache of a home I haven’t slept in for months. The glamour of the road fades when measured against the profound, simple beauty of a family dinner, of watching someone you love grow day by day. The body, too, keeps a ledger. The sleepless nights, the time zone jumps, the physical toll of pouring every ounce of your soul into a two-hour performance—it all accumulates. The recovery takes longer. The voice demands more care. The spirit grows weary.
We are not the same people we were when we started. The young artist is fueled by a furious, desperate need to be heard, to prove themselves, to scream into the void until it screams back. There is a beautiful, reckless abandon to that. I am proud of that firebrand. I love her. But I am not her anymore. The lessons life has taught me—of loss, of profound love, of survival—have settled into my bones. The need now is different. It is less about proving and more about being. Less about screaming and more about speaking a quieter, truer truth.
And what truth could be truer than knowing when a story has reached its perfect end?
We have been so unimaginably fortunate. We have lived our dream. We have screamed into microphones and had thousands scream back. We have felt the hairs on our arms stand up as a choir of voices sang our own words back to us, making them theirs. We have created art that mattered, if only to a few, and that is everything. To continue past the point of inspiration, to become a tribute act to our own past glory, would be to betray the very essence of what we built. This music was born from authenticity, from a raw and real place. It deserves to bow out with the same integrity.
This is not an end. It is a finale.
We are not disappearing. The music will remain. It will live on in playlists and worn-out CDs, in concert videos and lyric books. It will be there for you, as it always has been. And we, the people who made it, will finally get to be just people. I will get to be a mother, a partner, a gardener, a woman who drinks her coffee while it’s still hot and watches the seasons change in her own backyard. There is a whole other life waiting to be lived, and the curiosity to explore it is a new, exciting kind of creative energy.
This goodbye is the hardest day’s night we have ever faced. It is a farewell to an identity, to a family of fans, to a purpose that has defined us for our entire adult lives. There is a profound grief in that.
But beneath the grief, there is an immense and overwhelming gratitude. Thank you. Thank you for every ticket bought, every word sung along, every tear shed, every fist raised. You were not just spectators; you were the other half of the circuit. You completed the energy that allowed the music to live and breathe. You gave our lives meaning.
We are closing this chapter not because the story wasn’t good, but because it was perfect. We are leaving the stage with the music still ringing in our ears and love in our hearts, on our own terms. And that, in the end, is the most beautiful encore we could ever hope for.
