End Of Beginning

by Djo

Just one more tear to cry, one teardrop from my eye

You better save it for

The middle of the night when things aren't black and white

Enter, Troubadour

"Remember 24?"

And when I'm back in Chicago, I feel it

Another version of me, I was in it

I wave goodbye to the end of beginning

This song has started now, and you're just finding out

Now isn't that a laugh?

A major sacrifice, but clueless at the time

Enter, Caroline

"Just trust me, you'll be fine"

And when I'm back in Chicago, I feel it

Another version of me, I was in it

I wave goodbye to the end of beginning

(Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye)

You take the man out of the city, not the city out the man

You take the man out of the city, not the city out the man

You take the man out of the city, not the city out the man

You take the man out of the-

And when I'm back in Chicago, I feel it

Another version of me, I was in it

Oh, I wave goodbye to the end of beginning

(Goodbye, goodbye)

Interpretations

MyBesh.com Curated

User Interpretation

# The Bittersweet Geography of Personal Evolution

Djo's "End of Beginning" operates as a meditation on the strange dislocation that occurs when we outgrow earlier versions of ourselves. The song captures that uncanny sensation of returning to a formative place—in this case, Chicago—and feeling like a ghost haunting your own past. The artist communicates something profoundly disorienting about personal growth: that moving forward sometimes feels like a series of small deaths, where we must continually bid farewell to who we used to be. The "end of beginning" itself is a paradoxical phrase that perfectly encapsulates those transitional moments when we realize our foundation phase has concluded, yet we're not quite sure what comes next.

The emotional landscape here is dominated by nostalgic melancholy mixed with cautious acceptance. There's a wistfulness that permeates the track, but it never collapses into pure sadness or regret. Instead, Djo channels that peculiar feeling of recognizing you've been transformed by experiences you didn't fully understand while living through them. The repetition of "goodbye" functions almost like a mantra, suggesting the necessity of ritual in processing change. What resonates most powerfully is the vulnerability in admitting that major life shifts often happen without our full awareness—we're "clueless at the time," making sacrifices whose significance only becomes clear in retrospect.

The song employs compelling literary devices, particularly through its use of specific names and the metaphor of the troubadour—a wandering storyteller who exists between worlds. The Chicago references create a concrete geographical anchor for abstract emotional territory, while the reversal contained in "you take the man out of the city, not the city out the man" becomes a philosophical anchor. This inverted aphorism suggests that our origins remain embedded within us regardless of physical distance. The theatrical elements—characters entering and speaking cryptic reassurances—give the song a dreamlike quality, as though memory itself is being staged and restaged in the mind.

At its core, this track taps into the universal experience of confronting the gaps between past and present selves. Anyone who has returned to their hometown after significant life changes will recognize the vertigo Djo describes. It speaks to the disorienting nature of adulthood, where we're constantly discovering that pivotal moments were happening without proper fanfare or recognition. The song also touches on how places hold versions of ourselves like amber preserves insects—frozen, accessible, but fundamentally unreachable. This connects to broader themes about identity formation, the non-linear nature of personal growth, and how we construct narratives about our lives only after living them.

"End of Beginning" resonates because it articulates something many feel but struggle to name: that growing up isn't a triumphant march forward but rather a series of bewildered goodbyes to selves we didn't know we were leaving behind. The song's indie-pop accessibility makes philosophical weight feel approachable rather than pretentious. In an era of constant self-documentation and performance, Djo offers permission to acknowledge that we often don't understand our own lives while we're living them—and that this confusion is not only normal but perhaps necessary. The track becomes a companion for anyone navigating the strange loneliness of personal evolution, offering the comfort that transformation, however disorienting, is simply part of the human journey.

Posted on Jan 2, 2026 by Athena