Ray LaMontagne / Monovision / 2020
We'll Make It Through
tender, weary but hopeful
A quiet reassurance song built almost entirely on repetition, offering comfort to a frightened partner during an unnamed hard stretch. LaMontagne strips the arrangement and lyric down to a handful of phrases, trusting plainness and recurrence to do the emotional work rather than imagery or narrative development.
mutual support fear and reassurance endurance intimacy under strain faith without certainty
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addresses a partner directly, using 'you' throughout; the voice is steady and consoling, though its repeated insistence that they 'always' get through suggests the speaker is also trying to convince himself.
What happens
There isn't a plot so much as a sustained gesture: the song opens acknowledging shared hardship, moves into noticing the partner's fear and sleeplessness, pauses at a bridge that voices disorientation and loss of bearings, then returns to the same comforting refrain with slightly more urgency, ending on a plain statement of intent rather than certainty.
How it's built
Verses are short and largely interchangeable, built around a few recurring end-phrases that function like a mantra; the refrain 'we always do' repeats and expands each time it returns, acting as the song's real engine. A bridge breaks the pattern with questions instead of assurances, creating the only real tonal shift before the song settles back into its loop, ending on a slight variation of the title phrase rather than a resolution.
Section by section
Opening verse
The song establishes its method immediately: weather stands in for unspecified hardship, and the comfort offered is reciprocal rather than one-directional, setting up the call-and-response feel that will dominate the rest of the song.'
Second verse
Fear becomes concrete through small physical detail—restlessness at night—which grounds the otherwise abstract reassurance in something sensory and relatable.'
Bridge
The bridge abandons the comforting refrain for disoriented questioning, evoking loss of identity and direction; the image of hollow faces suggests alienation from a community or self that once felt familiar.
Post-bridge turn
“I turn to you”
After the uncertainty of the bridge, the song answers its own questions not with resolution but with devotion—the speaker locates stability in the relationship itself rather than in any external answer.
Final refrain
“we'll make it through”
The closing lines shift from the repeated claim of habitual survival to a more tentative future-tense promise, subtly acknowledging that this time the outcome isn't guaranteed even as the song insists on hope.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated affirming phrase that closes nearly every stanza accumulates meaning through sheer repetition, turning a simple claim into something closer to ritual or self-persuasion.
- rhetorical questions
- The bridge shifts from statement to question, dramatizing doubt and disorientation before the song retreats to its reassuring refrain.
- parallelism
- Mirrored lines about leaning and holding emphasize reciprocity, making support sound like an exchange rather than something given one-way.
- minimal imagery
- Sparse, almost generic images of weather and darkness keep the song's trouble unspecified, letting listeners map their own hardship onto it.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a direct, unadorned expression of partnership during hard times—possibly inflected by the isolation and uncertainty of its 2020 release, though the lyric itself never names external events. An alternative reading hears the repetition less as comfort and more as compulsive self-reassurance, the narrator repeating 'we always do' almost to ward off the possibility that this time might be different, which would make the bridge's disoriented questions the song's most honest moment.
Context
Monovision was recorded by LaMontagne largely alone, playing most instruments himself, which suits the song's intimate, unadorned quality. Released in 2020, listeners have often connected its themes of endurance and togetherness to the pandemic period, though there is no direct evidence the song was written with that context specifically in mind.
Listen for
- the way the refrain lengthens and multiplies as the song progresses
- the shift from statement to question in the bridge
- sparse instrumentation that keeps focus on vocal repetition
- the subtle change from declarative 'we always do' to the more conditional final line
About Ray LaMontagne
Raymond Charles Jack LaMontagne is an American singer-songwriter and musician. He was born in New Hampshire and was inspired to create music after hearing an album by Stephen Stills.
b. 1973 / United States
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