Punch Another Hole

Song story & origins

Introduction

Punch Another Hole appears on Letting the Sunlight Back In (2010). I wrote it in the wake of two things that collided in my head and heart. First was an old parable: a group is crossing the water together in a wooden boat when one man pulls out a hand drill and starts boring a hole beneath his own seat. When the others protest, he says, “What’s it to you? I’m drilling under my spot.” Of course, the point is that we’re all in the same boat; what any one of us does to “our spot” on this small, fragile planet affects everybody. The second spark was the Deepwater Horizon disaster: the explosion that (as I recalled then) killed “seventeen and maybe more” people, followed by those terrible weeks of watching a live undersea video feed as oil poured into the Gulf of Mexico, coating beaches for miles while experts tried to figure out how to cap the flow. Even apart from catastrophes like that, the song asks why we reach for violent, hole-punching solutions—lashing out because we have the power—when those moves often “solve” today’s problem by creating bigger ones tomorrow.

Where the song came from

The opening chant—“Oh, this ship’s a-sinkin’”—frames the parable: we’re in one boat. The first verse lifts two lines from the playful camp song There’s a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea and turns them into a horror image—not a children’s round, but a live feed of oil billowing from a wellhead. That verse is about our addiction to petroleum: not only the ecological damage of extraction and burning, but the deeper bind of building modern life on a finite resource and then chanting “Drill, baby, drill.” We punch another hole because we can, and don’t face what that choice costs.

The chorus names a posture: closed fists and closed eyes. With fists clenched, every problem looks like a chance to explode; with eyes shut in the dark, we see only one solution—punch another hole.

The second verse pivots to money—holes in our pockets and market share—and to the desperation and predation that follow: the bookie who’ll take your bet “anytime, anywhere,” the “sucker born every minute,” the shiny shovel we use to dig our own hole. That connected, for me, to the political moment as we were heading into an election year: candidates furiously raising funds because that’s the game, and billionaires advancing on the strength of deep pockets alone. Money can do good; it can also store violence and fund it. The line also sent me back to Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex: once a huge slice of the economy profits from war, we start looking for the next war to buy, losing sight of what that violence is because we’re hooked on the economic boost.

The third verse turns to literal weapons: “a hole at the end of the muzzle,” missiles, drones. I wrote (and later sang the song again) with current events in my ear: in January 2020 the U.S. killed Qasem Soleimani with a missile strike; Iran fired missiles at a U.S. base in Iraq (thankfully with no casualties), and then—amid fear and chaos—a Ukrainian passenger jet full of civilians was shot down. Regardless of how one judged the initial strike, the question remained: did punching that hole make anyone safer, or did it set off a string of unanticipated harms?

What the song is saying

This is a song about means and ends. The refrain argues that when we default to force we train the wrong part of ourselves. I talk about the amygdala—the fight/flight (or freeze) system that floods us with chemicals for quick survival responses. It’s useful if something is attacking us in the dark. But if we practice living there, we shut down creative, compassionate frontal-cortex thinking. Practicing hole-punching becomes a practice of not being empathetic, not imagining better ways forward. The alternative the song longs for is eyes open, hands open, hearts open—solutions that don’t sink the boat we share.

Music and arrangement

This record was my first deliberate rock album—an angry/protest set. I leaned into electric guitar, built instrumental breaks, and let myself “play rock star” a little. I’m no shredder, but it was fun and fitting for the subject. I grew up on Led Zeppelin, Yes (prog), Rush, Kansas—and a bit of that DNA sneaks into the tone and arrangement. The track is music-forward; the lyric rides the groove so the energy matches the urgency of the questions.

Why it stays with me

Because the refrain is still a check on my instincts. It keeps me asking whether I’m drilling under “my spot” and calling it a solution—whether in energy, money, or politics—and whether I’m training my amygdala or my imagination. The song doesn’t end with answers, just with the chant that brings me back to the boat we all share.

Source: New Music Memoir (1).docx