John Keenan’s ‘Afraid to Try’ lives in that sweet, dangerous space where a club beat makes you move while the words quietly bruise you. I keep thinking about the way he says, “I’ve been afraid to try / Time’s passing by / Can I rise when I’m stuck in the mind.” Say that under a flashing light and your chest tightens; say it on a sober morning and the sheets reek of sweat and cheap vodka. It’s dance-pop that makes you feel seen when you thought nobody was watching.
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Keenan’s backstory sharpens the whole thing. Raised in the middle of nowhere Kansas, he learned to hide behind beats before he learned to trust his voice. ‘Afraid to Try’ first existed as a demo he recorded in 2013, when he’d just moved to Arizona. For twelve years, he kept returning to it, tinkering until last summer when he said he “changed some chords, added the synth lead and tightened up the drums” and finally cracked it. That history matters. You can hear the making and the mending; the track’s gloss is braided with stubborn bruise.
The production opens wide, built on a heavy pulse that drives the track forward, while the synth lead slices through with precision and gives the song its edge. The chorus — “Been working when the heat is on / Leave me lone / I wanna be here by myself / Didn’t get it when they lead me on / Dream is gone” — is deceptively simple, polished bright even while the words stay raw. When Keenan admits, “I wanna be with someone else / Now I’m at it again / And won’t stay the same / gotta admit it,” you feel the push-pull of wanting, the messy human heat behind a very tidy hook.
Lyrically, it’s mostly weathered honesty. He frames the loneliness and the dream’s erosion with small, jagged images: sold everything he owned, roaming roads no one else knows, praying until he breaks. Those lines land harder because he’s not grandstanding. He’s confessing into the mic like he’s confessing into a pillow on a motel bed after an all-night set — breathless, sticky, honest. When he raps about being “trapped in the madness, a loner by nature,” it echoes the way he frames his album Wreckage of the Past. The cover shows him smiling on a bench, a bittersweet image for music that dives into darker waters. He’s described it as being like standing in the rain and deciding to dance — carrying the weight but moving anyway. That tension between heaviness and release runs right through this track.
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There’s an undercurrent of tension that makes the track feel physical. Verse Two’s nervous, violent flicker — “Then move—close my eyes / see it ending in violence” — reads like the fear you get right before something thrilling and forbidden. The music turns that fear into motion. I end up imagining a dark room, bodies pressed close, and the song doing the work of a slow, honest touch: it comforts and it destabilizes at once.
Keenan’s truth is quiet but relentless. He made this record out of years of doubt and refinement, and it shows. ‘Afraid to Try’ makes me want to dance hard enough to forget for a while, then catch my breath outside with the sweat still on me and the song echoing in my head.
