When I started writing the song "Boys Between Your Heart," I was experimenting with a weird tuning I had used for another song on the album, "Saving Grace With A Ghost." I found myself playing the same pattern over and over again, which in turn became the intro/verse of the song.  I came up with the first lyric, "Even God knows that you're a liar" and just ran with that idea.  It primarily focused on a family during wartime, in my mind, World War II.  I painted a mental picture of what the conversation would be like for a mother speaking to a recruiter for the military when her son had previously tried to enlist at 17 years old. I pictured the motivation for this boy was to follow in the footsteps of his older brother who was already fighting overseas.  This is mainly what fueled the overall theme for the lyrics.  There are references to a locket that I imagined the mother wore around her neck, essentially the literal embodiment of the "Boys Between Your Heart."  

Overall, "Boys Between Your Heart," as a song, became so much more than I initially thought and as the "Everglow EP" began its infancy as a concept album.  With this in mind, I updated the meaning of the song to be more of a modern day story.  This led to me to put the song first in the sequence of events and allowed a background to form around the girl that is featured on the cover of the CD and referenced throughout the album. In this rendition, I imagined a similar story, but this one set in the present day.  The lyrics also reflect that the girl has a boyfriend, who tells her that he has enlisted in the military prior to his eighteenth birthday.  "I know it's hard to let go, but it's time to let me go," which is featured in the last line of every chorus, is the perfect example of what I thought would be the last thing he says to her before the story eventually turns into the next song, "Everglow." 

-Matt