**The Quiet Power of Logan Brill’s “World Still Round” (2017): A Personal Reckoning with Fear and Hope**
by Kroes den Bock
We all have those years that feel like a set of bruises: purple, yellow, and green, with a dull ache that pulses beneath the days. For me, 2017 was exactly that—my mother had just been diagnosed with cancer, my job unraveling into late-night emails and shame, and the only thing that kept me grounded were long walks around the frozen edges of my town, headphones pressed in so tightly I didn’t hear my own footsteps.
It was on one of those nights that I stumbled—figuratively, but maybe a little literally—into Logan Brill’s “World Still Round.” The track, a modest cut off her 2017 album *Shuteye*, never caught fire with country radio, and to this day you’ll rarely find it on playlists or at karaoke bars. But to me, it wasn’t only a comfort; it was a quiet, clear-eyed map for piecing together the mess of my own life.
Brill’s voice isn’t showy. It’s the sound of knuckles tracing a windowpane, the resolve in someone who has decided not to run from her heartache. “World Still Round” opens over a slow steel guitar, the kind that shivers, not the kind that twangs. The first verse begins:
*“There’s a storm on the edge of the county / And a tear in the seam of the night / I just stare at my hands on the steering wheel / Let the thunder swallow up the light.”*
It’s a lyric that never gets quoted at big country festivals, and yet, for me, it’s the closest thing to truth I have found in music. There’s a storm, and there’s also this tiny, desperate act of staring at your own hands—at yourself—while the world does whatever it will. It’s as if Brill is saying: fear is inevitable, and so is the storm, and so is that feeling of smallness when you can’t move forward or back.
2017 was a year of steering wheel moments. My hands on the vinyl, engine running, phone ringing with news I didn’t want to hear. I related so fiercely to that image I wanted to climb through the speakers and sit beside Brill in her car. I wanted her to know that someone, somewhere, understood exactly what it’s like to feel smaller than your own fears.
The song’s chorus is a soft revelation, voice rising but never exploding. What Brill sings is this:
*“But the world’s still round / Even after you’re gone / It keeps spinning, keeps rolling along / The sun’s gonna rise / Even when I ain’t strong / The world’s still round / The world’s still round.”*
There’s nothing bittersweet here—just bitter, and sweet, both. For someone like me, who wakes up at 3am convinced that loss will break me entirely, these lines become life rafts. See, when Brill sings “the sun’s gonna rise / Even when I ain’t strong,” it sounds gentle, but it’s a brutal, necessary confrontation: the universe is not waiting for you to catch up. That realization, surprisingly, is a relief. My problems, profound as they feel at 3am, don’t stall the sunrise. The world’s motion is a mercy. Even my mother, holding herself together as she waited for test results, understood that truth. On mornings when she could, she would sit in the kitchen with sunlight on her face, and we wouldn’t speak about anything except the ordinary: coffee, toast, the birds outside. The world, impossibly, hadn’t ended.
What separates Brill’s writing from the more commercial fare—those drink-up, shake-off-the-bad-times anthems—is her willingness to sit with what hurts. She isn’t telling us to be strong, or even to fight the night. She’s just saying, very softly: it’s not just you. There’s a line in the second verse that I’ve written out a dozen times in the margins of my journal:
*“If I can just make it until morning / I believe I’ll find my way / The world don’t turn on waiting / But it don’t ever turn away.”*
I can’t count how many nights I have repeated those lines to myself. Like most anxious people, I am addicted to the idea that if I just try hard enough, I can control what’s coming. But here is Brill’s gift: the world isn’t cruel, just indifferent—and that indifference is a kind of grace. The world won’t pause for you, but it never shoves you out, either. It moves on, and eventually, if you stick around, you do too.
Listening to “World Still Round” in 2024 is a little like touching the scar left from an old wound. I have moved cities, my mother has been in remission for nearly five years, and I no longer sleep with my phone under my pillow. But every so often, I come undone and need to remember something very precise: grief doesn’t alter the orbit of the earth, nor does joy. The world just keeps turning. There is pain, yes, but also morning. There is loss, yes, but also an unyielding ordinariness that remains unseduced by heartbreak.
It’s strange to feel so grateful to a song that nobody knows. I have tried to play it for friends—a few of them listen, nod, and tell me it’s nice. But nobody, so far, has experienced the seismic shift I do when Brill quietly intones, “the world’s still round.” Perhaps that is the nature of our most necessary music: intensely personal, almost embarrassing, a secret handprint left on your soul that nobody else can see.
I wish I could thank Logan Brill. I wish I could tell her that the trembling fear in her song became my companion. That her acceptance of light’s return, even after the night, was what nudged me through so many storms. That I, too, now sit sometimes with my hands on the wheel, letting thunder swallow up the light, and trusting—finally—that if nothing else, the world will keep on spinning beneath me until I am ready to move.
“World Still Round” may never haunt the country charts, but it haunted me into a kind of peace. That, I think, is all I’ve ever needed from a song.
—Kroes den Bock