Raison d'Être

Lyrics

[Intro]
(vibraphone — crystalline notes like ideas forming)
(piano enters with warm jazz chords, a thought becoming a sentence)

[Verse 1]
Sartre sat three tables from where I'm sitting now
And wrote that existence precedes the essence of a thing
Which is a very elegant way of saying
He hadn't decided what to order
And the waiter wouldn't stop hovering

The French invented raison d'être
Before the Japanese gave us Ikigai
Both trying to describe the ventral striatum
On a Tuesday afternoon in July
But one tastes like a question from a man
Whose cigarette has gone out
And the other tastes like a garden
Maintained by someone who never talks about it

[Pre-Chorus]
(accordion, philosophical but warm)
And I have been both of these people
The one who asks and the one who tends
The one who smokes at the café arguing the void
And the one who quietly mends

[Chorus]
(building — strings, vibraphone, warm intellectual groove)
Raison d'être, raison d'être
The French dress purpose in a funeral suit
Raison d'être, Ikigai
The Japanese dress purpose in a gardener's boot
Underneath the wardrobe is the same strange light
The striatum firing when the work and love align
A reason — not the reason — just a reason
And a reason is enough
And a reason is the wine

[Verse 2]
(just voice and vibraphone, crystalline)
Two kinds of happiness — the textbooks split them clean
Hedonic is the sugar and the rush
Eudaimonic is the meaning and the long game
The difference between drinking
And the vineyard and the crush

The hedonic burns like a headline — bright and gone by noon
The eudaimonic burns like a pilot light inside a stove
Nobody sees but everyone depends on
And the kitchen stays warm
And the bread continues to prove

[Chorus]
(full, warm, swinging gently)
Raison d'être, raison d'être
The French dress purpose in a funeral suit
Raison d'être, Ikigai
The Japanese dress purpose in a gardener's boot
Underneath the wardrobe is the same strange light
The striatum firing when the work and love align
A reason — not the reason — just a reason
And a reason is enough
And a reason is the wine

[Bridge]
(voice and piano, confessional)
The ventral striatum doesn't care about the scale
It lights up the same for the symphony and the seed
It doesn't know the difference between saving the world
And sitting with someone in the precise moment of their need

And Sartre never finished his coffee —
I checked, the cup's still here, the foam gone flat
And the waiter is still hovering

(vibraphone returns)

I think my raison d'être has the weight
Of a napkin someone wrote a phone number on
And forgot in their coat pocket
Until the season turned and the coat came on
And the number was still there
And they called
And someone answered

(strings enter — warm)

That's it — that's the whole thing
Someone answered

[Outro]
(the groove gently winds down)
Raison d'être, raison d'être
(softly, smiling)
A reason — not the reason
Just a reason
And someone answered
(vibraphone — a few last crystalline notes)
(a coffee cup placed on a saucer — done)