Underway is an autobiographical song about leaving the shoreline behind and beginning deployment aboard the USS Ronald Reagan.
 
There is a difference between knowing you are going on deployment and watching the land slowly disappear behind the ship.
 
Once the lines are released, the engines are turning, and the coastline begins fading into the distance, deployment becomes real.
 
Underway captures that transition.
 
It is about steel passageways, ladder wells, watches, fluorescent lights, machinery, exhaustion, endless stretches of ocean, and the strange experience of living and working aboard an aircraft carrier with thousands of other sailors.
 
Days are no longer measured only by mornings and evenings. They become watches, meals, work, responsibilities, and whatever sleep can be found between them.
 
Meanwhile, life continues somewhere beyond the horizon.
 
Birthdays happen. Holidays pass. Families continue their routines. The people you love remain somewhere on land while the ship continues moving farther across the ocean.
 
I completed two deployments aboard the USS Ronald Reagan, and Underway comes from that lived experience.
People can look at photographs of an aircraft carrier and see its enormous flight deck, aircraft, American flag, and thousands of tons of steel. What a photograph cannot fully communicate is what it feels like to live inside that ship—to walk those passageways, stand the watch, do the work, look across an endless horizon, and understand that home is an ocean away.
 
This song is about that distance.
It is about duty.
 
It is about the sailors beside you doing their own jobs and carrying their own stories.
And it is about continuing forward because the ship does not stop simply because you are exhausted, homesick, overwhelmed, or changed by what you are experiencing.
 
Lines away.

Shoreline fading.

Engines turning.

Open sea.
 
We were underway.
 
And one of those sailors was me.