Mike Kraus: Wandering Wednesday: Climbing Out From Under the Leaves

Wednesday, October 28, 2026

Wandering Wednesday: Climbing Out From Under the Leaves

Wandering Wednesday

Some songs capture a moment in time. Others take on a different meaning as we grow older. For Andrew Glaser of the Pittsburgh indie folk duo Brinker James, “Under the Leaves” is one of those songs.

Originally written as a poem many years ago, the song reflects a time when Andrew was beginning to understand how differently people can experience the world. Having grown up with relatively little hardship, he found it difficult to understand the experiences of someone he cared about who had endured significant childhood trauma. Their lives had given them very different perspectives, and Andrew found himself confronting a world that was unfamiliar to him.

At the time, innocence felt like a barrier to empathy and connection. But time has a way of changing how we see things. When Andrew revisited the poem while creating Wooden Shield, Brinker James' debut album, he was no longer looking at it from the same perspective. He had experienced some of life's hardships himself. As he put it, he had “climbed out of the leaves.”

His understanding of innocence had changed, too. What once felt like something that kept him from understanding others had become something he realized he should have cherished. As Andrew reflected on how his understanding of empathy had evolved, he offered a little humor alongside the wisdom: “Be careful what you wish for...” followed with humble laughter.

I find that shift in perspective particularly moving. We sometimes believe we need to experience another person's suffering before we can understand them. Experience can certainly teach us things we could never learn otherwise. But perhaps we can also learn to appreciate the good fortune we have known while making a genuine effort to understand those whose lives have been different.

That is one of the things I appreciate about songs that grow alongside their writers. The original words remain, but the person singing them has changed. And suddenly, the song holds something new.