Listening to Harry Kappen’s “Be Brave If You Can” is like finding a note someone left for themselves on a foggy bathroom mirror. As the third single from his album “Four”, it’s a quiet turn inward, a personal reminder scrawled in the steam of a hot shower after a long, wearying day. It doesn’t shout for revolution in the streets; it suggests one inside your own ribcage.
There’s a therapeutic steadiness here that makes perfect sense when you learn of Kappen’s work as a music therapist. The track doesn’t offer solutions or grand, cinematic catharsis. Instead, it feels like a steadying hand on a trembling shoulder, acknowledging that sometimes survival isn’t about winning the fight, but simply staying on your feet with a degree of grace until the bell rings. It’s a message that values endurance over explosive action, stillness over noise.
The whole composition has the painstaking patience of someone building a ship in a bottle. The art-rock sensibilities—think the subtle, intelligent chord shifts of late-era Bowie—are the intricate rigging, meticulously assembled within the transparent, vulnerable glass of a deeply personal singer-songwriter ballad. It’s a contained epic, a grand internal drama played out on a miniature stage. The focus isn’t on the storm outside, but on the unwavering craft required to hold oneself together within it.
Kappen isn’t asking us to charge into battle. He’s proposing something far more daunting: the courage to sit quietly with our own vulnerability and find it to be a source of profound strength. What if the bravest thing we can do is not to change the world, but to finally learn how to inhabit our own?
