Waiting for the Drugs to Kick In (Official Lyric Video)

Well, it’s happening finally. Here we are. It’s looking bleak. Are you WAITING FOR THE DRUGS TO KICK IN?

We artists and lovers of music are wondering what to do in a time when hate claims victory. Stephen Jaymes feels your trauma. He really does. His blog readers and his fast-growing TikTok audience know that he’s trying to use awesome American music to save America and the world.

That’s why he released Baby Can’t Be Helped just a few weeks ago. To announce to other empaths: I feel your trauma, I see the angry babies. I am diagnosing Baby Brain Syndrome and prescribing 1,000mL of round-the-clock awesome American music therapy.

That was just a few short weeks ago. But now it’s now. We’re moving fast.

Having identified the phenomenon we need to heal, Stephen turns his attention to addressing your trauma so you can help save America, too. Because we’re not going to get through this if we don’t understand that the endless, senseless, repetitions of disagreement, from the bedroom to the battlefields, cause the kind of trauma that needs to be healed.

Fact is, you cannot witness love being sucked into a black hole of anti-love without a little boost.

Stephen isn’t really saying the drugs have to be actual drugs. It’s a joke, a metaphor.

Whatever heals you, from James Baldwin to Frank Zappa to Martha Graham to Moby Dick to the Bible to meditation to standup. We use our creative medicines to recapture our hope and let it grow again inside, protected from the onslaught of death rhetoric and cruel images.

Reading WAITING FOR THE DRUGS TO KICK IN from the romantic perspective, you can hear a man who’s at the end of a long, repetitive argument that went nowhere and accomplished nothing, other than making it hard for him to love his doll.

Or the needles he sticks in. He can’t love those, either. Again, not drugs, but yes a double entendre. It’s a voodoo doll. Get it? Fighting this void of love with hate, even voodoo hate in good conscience, is just gonna make us all more tired and more defeated. Not the way.

So we have to back up and realize that we’re fighting a psychological condition that is appropriately labeled learned helplessness.

We have to shake off the helplessness that is trying to bury us. The first step is recognizing that we’re not going to engage in debate anymore with that helplessness. We’re going to take care of ourselves now. Fighting the way we’ve been fighting is pointless. Fighting is what they expect, and it literally feeds them. Fighting won’t bring love.

So we switch strategy. Reading WAITING FOR THE DRUGS TO KICK IN from the political perspective, we notice that the arguing about policy is getting us nowhere but more divided. So divided that unelected folks wearing human baby shields boss our president around.

We need a new ending. At the end of time, after all the endless cycles of violence have repeated endlessly to infinity, we need a strategy that wins. So this apocalypse ends in peace instead of death.

So that life wins in the end. Because we waited for the drugs to kick in, and nourished ourselves on the art and gospel that truly guides us toward the light in the middle of chaos——because we did that, in the loving frame of mind, we could reorient and fight this helplessness with the only thing that works: healing.

Musically, WAITING FOR THE DRUGS TO KICK IN feels like a comical bar brawl where everyone laughs and nobody gets seriously hurt. The song plays against a warm, steady rhythm of ambient sounds that recall bottles toppling. It serves up the feeling of stopping in your tracks to realize you’re going nowhere, so you may as well head to the bar to get your strategy straight. You might even say it’s the song you sing to the bartender while you’re remapping your course.

WAITING FOR THE DRUGS TO KICK IN is a track for this very moment in time. Right now. People, especially empaths, are suffering hard. And there’s no way we’re going to get through this without understanding that healing ourselves has to happen first, before we can then unite to heal America. And don’t worry, Stephen’s got a plan for that, too. It’s called VISION2025 and he’s outlined it pretty clearly in his blog and now pretty entertainingly on TikTok.

So maybe saddle up to a fresh brew and have a listen as your soul recalculates its position at the start of 2025. Godspeed, ye empaths.