Track 26: A Song for My Father: He Drank Himself to Death. I Wrote Him Back to Life

(Why Out of Tears Plays When the World Ends. Because there’s always a point in the story where the hope dies first. Where the light doesn’t dim, it vanishes. Where resurrection feels like a fairytale and survival feels like a joke told too late. That’s where this song lives. That’s where we drop "Out of Tears." It’s not just the soundtrack. It’s the fucking epicenter. Because there are no tears left. No words. No light. Just the fucking Stones. Just that goddamn piano. And a man who’s finally out of everything… except the truth.)

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I didn’t write this script to impress anyone. I didn’t write it for Hollywood. I didn’t write it for the industry, or my agent, or the algorithm, or whatever trending trauma makes us momentarily clickable.

I wrote it because my father took his own life on March 8th, 2010.

I wrote it because silence has weight, and his absence has been screaming in my ear for fifteen years. I wrote it because I never got to say goodbye. Not the movie version. Not the bedside confession, or the hug that lingers a second too long, or the redemptive tears just before the screen fades to black.

No. I got the version with a phone call and a wrecking ball. I got the version where a nurse tells you, flatly, that your father is brain dead because he drank himself into oblivion. That kind of news doesn’t “sink in.” It detonates. Over and over again, every time you wake up and remember he’s gone.

This film is that goodbye. Written one scene at a time, with shaking hands and a heart full of unfinished conversations. It’s everything I never said. Everything I couldn’t. Everything I wish he had heard before he made that final, quiet decision to vanish from this world.

And maybe, just maybe, it’s a way to bring him back, even if only for 90 minutes on a screen.

The Lyrics Never Lie

The film isn’t about my father. It’s about the echo he left behind.

I didn’t want to write some tragic, dad dies and boy makes peace story. That’s been done. That’s safe. And grief, real grief, doesn’t care about story structure. It’s messy. It’s nonlinear. It skips the arc and just throws you into the third act, mid collapse.

So instead, I dropped it into the world he worshipped: the music industry. Because my father didn’t believe in much, not in religion, not in therapy, not in any kind of redemption arc. But he fucking believed in music.

Like, really believed. Like music was his church, his ritual, his addiction, his medicine.
He treated lyrics like scripture. He’d pause a song halfway through, rewind it, and go,
"Did you fucking hear that? Did you hear what he/she just said? That line? That’s it. That’s everything.”

And then he’d look at me like the universe had just given us a secret, and only he had the decoder ring. “Always listen to the lyrics, son. Always listen to the music.” It was his goddamn mantra. His legacy. His last fucking words. And of course I put them in the script. How could I not? You don’t bury lines like that. You resurrect them. You light them on fire and let them burn through the celluloid.

There’s fiction in this film. Sure. But underneath the plot and the polish and the production schedule, there’s something that’s as raw and real as it gets: A son trying to make sense of a father who made more sense in song lyrics than he ever did in life. Because music tells the truth. Lyrics never lie. And sometimes, the only way to say the thing you could never say out loud is to put it in a scene, give it a soundtrack, and roll the fucking cameras.

Wrecking Ball Dialtone

You always think you’ll know. That if something truly terrible happens, your body will give you some kind of early warning, an internal siren, a slow motion moment, a cue. It fucking doesn’t. It comes as a phone call. A short one. With one sentence too big to fit inside your ears.

"Your dad. He’s brain dead. He drank himself to death."

That’s not a sentence. That’s demolition. It doesn’t go through your mind. It goes through your skull. It’s a wrecking ball with a ringtone. You can’t cry right away, because your nervous system files it under “not real.” You walk around like someone just unplugged your reality and handed you a fake one still loading. And then, slowly, the words find a way in. They don’t knock. They batter-ram your chest and move in without asking. They echo. They rot. They become everything.

See, the thing about death, about that kind of death, is that it doesn’t end anything. It just begins a new language you’re forced to learn. And the first phrase you memorize is: Why the fuck didn’t I say more?

But you can’t scream that into a voicemail. So you write. You write to survive the silence. You write because no one warns you how loud absence can get. You write because it’s either that or let the grief calcify into a version of yourself you don’t want to meet.

Living Is The Hard Part

Dying gets all the press. It’s the martyr move. The cinematic exit. The final blackout. Cue the swelling music. Fade to black. Bullshit. Dying is easy. Dying is escape.
It’s a trapdoor in the middle of the stage you fall through when the weight gets too heavy and the lights get too hot.

You know what’s hard? Staying. Living through it. Getting up when you’d rather liquefy into the floor. Making breakfast when your insides feel like a funeral. Answering emails with a heart that's been evicted.

Living is the hard part.

Because living means carrying shit you can’t drop. It means sitting in the crater after the bomb went off, sweeping up the shards of a life that will never go back together the same way. Living means showing up, for people who still need you, even when you're running on empty and duct tape. It means remembering their birthday, signing the fucking card, and meaning it. It means being kind when the world is cruel. It means choosing to keep your heart open even though it makes you a moving target.

My father didn’t make it. I don’t say that with judgment. I say it with love. Because I know how heavy the world can get. But this film? This story? It’s me saying: I stayed.
I’m still here. And I’m gonna scream into the silence until it gives me something back.

So if you're reading this, breathing this, dragging your ass through one more goddamn day: You’re doing the impossible. You’re doing the hard part. You’re living. And that, my friend, is the most defiant thing you can do.

The Myth, the Dream and the Dead Ends

Let’s talk about the American Dream. That glittering lie we keep on layaway, telling ourselves that greatness is just one lucky break away. If you work hard. If you hustle. If you’re “discovered.”

But behind the curtain? Only three major record labels own two-thirds of all music consumed in the U.S. Fucking Three. They don’t just sign the talent. They engineer it. Control the charts. Buy the airwaves. Hijack the algorithms. They decide what gets heard. Who gets paid. And who gets left to rot in analog purgatory. The entire middle class of the music world, session musicians, indie labels, old school producers, has been crushed under this holy trinity of monopolistic fuckery.

Daniel Alvarez is one of them. An analog purist in a digital hellscape. A brilliant arranger nobody calls anymore. He’s broke. Behind on child support. Maxed out emotionally and financially after years of trying to keep his sister clean. He can’t see his daughter, and not just because he’s busy, because shame has claws.

Then comes Jordan Moss, former 80s megastar, current cultural relic. She’s lost in a world of auto-tune, TikTok trends, and influencers making beats in their boxer briefs. The sound that made her a goddess is now considered “vintage.” She's got the name, but not the relevance.

And yet, there’s a whisper in the industry. Nostalgia is making a comeback. And for a certain kind of soul saturated music, the kind that bleeds, the kind that breathes, there might be a window. A comeback. A resurrection.

Enter: Jordi Maddox. A mythical 70s rock legend who did the most rockstar thing of all, he faked his own death and vanished. For decades, he’s been a ghost with a guitar, living off the grid and out of reach.

Until now.

His long-lost children, yes, Fucking Daniel and his daughter Paula, thought to be scattered by the world, have resurfaced in the States. And the news hits like thunder. For the first time in years, Jordi wants back in. Not for charts. Not for fame. To fucking rewrite his legacy. To find his kids. To face the silence he created.

So now you’ve got three broken humans: One washed-up. One worn-down. One long gone. And fate, for whatever godforsaken reason, throws them into the same room.

This isn’t just a story about chasing a dream. It’s about surviving the machine. It’s about what happens when people who’ve been crushed by the industry, by fucking life decide they’re not done. Not yet. Because the dream doesn’t die. It gets buried. And sometimes, when you dig deep enough, you find a new sound underneath all that silence.

And you play it loud as hell.

The Script Was My Resurrection

I didn’t write this script to be clever. Or commercial. Or to finally get that meeting with someone who once took a selfie with Scorsese. I wrote this script because I was dying. Not the obvious kind. The slow kind. The kind where grief doesn’t kill you, it just leaves you half-alive and rotting in plain sight.

And I had two choices: Become the ghost of the man I used to be. Or write like my fucking life depended on it.

So I wrote. I bled into Final Draft. Scene by scene. Word by word. I clawed my way through memories I’d sealed shut with alcohol and sarcasm and bravado. I wrote the shit I never got to say to my father. I wrote the pain I inherited. I wrote the truth I spent a decade running from: That sometimes love isn’t enough to save someone. But it might be enough to save you.

This script is my resurrection. Not because it’s perfect, but because it’s true. It’s the version of me that finally stopped pretending I was okay. It’s the version that looked grief in the eye and said, "Fuck you, I’m still here."

And if we do this right, if we get it on camera the way I got it on the page, then maybe, just maybe, some kid out there who never got to say goodbye…will feel a little less alone.

Maybe someone who’s ready to check out will hear a lyric, or a line of dialogue, or a goddamn guitar solo and think, "Not yet. Not today."

Because this film isn’t just a goodbye. It’s a signal flare. A message in a bottle launched from the wreckage. And if it reaches you, if it lands, then maybe that’s the miracle. Not that I survived. But that I had something left to say.

This isn’t a story about death. It’s a story about what you do with the silence that follows.

P.S.

Written by a son who never got to say goodbye.
For a father who never learned how to stay.
Scored by grief, arranged with memory, recorded in one take, no autotune.
Dedicated to everyone carrying a song they never got to sing out loud.

If you're still here, still standing, still listening, you’re the reason this story matters.

Cue the music.
Roll the fucking credits.