Chasing Shadows

There is a specific cruelty to grief that only arrives after the initial shock has settled. It is not the loss itself, but the slow erosion of what you had: the way a person's voice begins to blur in memory, the way their face starts to feel like a composite of photographs rather than a living presence. Alex Warren captured this particular ache in "Chasing Shadows," a song rooted in a mundane domestic moment that expands into one of the most searching grief narratives in recent pop music.

A Dog, a Laser, and the Shape of Grief

Warren released "Chasing Shadows" on December 2, 2022, co-written with collaborators Adam Yaron and Nolan Sipe.^[1] The song arrived little more than a year after his mother's death in 2021, and more than a decade after losing his father to kidney cancer when Warren was nine years old. Those two losses anchor everything in his catalog, and "Chasing Shadows" may be his most direct confrontation with what it means to have outlived both parents before turning twenty-five.

The song's origin is both mundane and piercing. Warren has described watching his dog Koda chase a laser pointer around the room. When the laser was switched off, Koda began pursuing her own shadow instead, whining and circling, unable to stop chasing something she could never catch.^[2] That image crystallized an emotional state he had been living inside for years: the experience of reaching toward the people he loved and finding only the residue of what they had been. He has called "Chasing Shadows" the first song he ever wrote that made him cry during its creation.^[3]

The timing carried its own particular weight. His mother's death arrived with a cruel complication. In her final months, she had achieved sobriety after years of violent alcoholism that had driven Warren from the family home in his late teens, leaving him effectively homeless.^[4] The two had spent roughly three months reconnecting before she died. That brief reconciliation left Warren grieving not just a person, but a future that had briefly seemed possible and was then taken away. "Chasing Shadows" arrives from inside that precise grief: not mourning what was, but mourning what almost was, and what will never be.

Memory's Fidelity Problem

The central metaphor of the song is precisely what its title suggests: the pursuit of something that moves with you, cannot be separated from you, but remains forever just out of reach. A shadow is not an absence. It is a trace, a silhouette, a shape without substance. Warren uses this idea to describe what happens to memory when the person who inhabited it is gone. You can still see them. You can no longer hold them.

The song explores the inadequacy of physical objects as substitutes for presence. Warren describes turning to photographs, to clothing that still carries a scent, to a tattoo bearing someone's name.^[3] These objects exist. They can be touched. But they are proxies for a person rather than the person themselves, and the gap between proxy and reality is where the grief lives. The song does not reach for catharsis. It sits inside the problem, examining it at close range.

There is also a dimension of homesickness woven through the song, but Warren describes longing for a place that no longer exists: not a physical location but the emotional geography of a relationship, the sense of being known and held by specific people. Home comes up repeatedly in his catalog, and in "Chasing Shadows" it is stripped of all physical meaning. Home was not a house. It was two people.

Grief Without Borders

Warren has been deliberate about the song's universality. He wrote it from his own grief but built it to carry beyond that: applicable to the end of a romantic relationship, a broken friendship, or any situation where someone finds themselves pursuing a feeling they can no longer access.^[3] In his telling, none of his music has one single meaning, and listeners are invited to take from it whatever they need. This openness is structurally built into the song. The shadow metaphor works for any kind of loss. Shadows do not belong only to the dead.

The paradox Warren is circling is an old one in grief literature but rarely stated this cleanly in pop music: the act of remembering someone and the act of losing them are not entirely separate events. Every time you try to recall a voice or a face, you risk wearing down the impression a little further. Memory degrades with use. The shadow gets harder to see.

Where the Song Lives in the Album

"Chasing Shadows" was released as a standalone single in late 2022 before appearing on Warren's full debut album, released in complete 21-track form in July 2025.^[5] Warren has described the album's arc as beginning in brokenness, with the first half accounting for the losses that shaped him and the second charting the gradual emergence of hope and healing.^[6] Positioned at track 19, late in the sequence, "Chasing Shadows" sits near the album's narrative turning point. It is not a resolution. It is the reckoning that must precede one.

The album's title track can be heard as a direct response to the questions "Chasing Shadows" raises but refuses to answer. Where this song asks whether the fading of memory means losing someone all over again, the title track offers a tentative reassurance: that surviving loss is not the same as betraying it.

Critical reception for the album was mixed. Rolling Stone gave it three out of five stars, finding it occasionally weighed down by post-grunge convention.^[7] Pitchfork awarded five out of ten, criticizing a tendency toward emotional anonymity. These assessments largely addressed the album's more polished commercial moments. "Chasing Shadows," with its specific biographical weight and its strange domestic origin, operates on different terms: a song that knows exactly what it wants to say and says it without flinching.

Alternative Readings

Some listeners have approached the song through a religious lens, consistent with Warren's broader catalog. He is an outspoken Christian who has discussed faith as a lifeline during periods of depression.^[8] The imagery of chasing something perpetually out of reach resonates with ideas about the limits of earthly attachment. In this reading, the shadows represent any attempt to locate permanence in things that are inherently temporary. In Warren's work, the spiritual and the therapeutic tend to operate simultaneously rather than in opposition.

Others have taken up Warren's own invitation to read the song as a breakup narrative. The emotional architecture holds: a person physically absent but persistently present in objects, scent, and involuntary memory. The shadow metaphor accommodates this reading without strain. A lost relationship casts its own kind of shadow.

The Ordinary Extraordinary

"Chasing Shadows" is not a comfortable song. It does not resolve the problems it raises or offer easy consolation. What it does instead is describe with unusual precision the experience of losing someone in two separate waves: first when they die, and then again, incrementally, as memory begins to trade fidelity for approximation.

Warren wrote it after watching his dog circle the room after something she could never catch. The fact that the image came from such an ordinary moment is part of what makes the song work. Grief is not always loud. Sometimes it is a Tuesday afternoon with a dog running in circles and a man watching her and recognizing himself completely.

The shadows in the song are not the shadows of ghost stories. They are what every shadow is: the darkness cast by something solid when a light falls on it. By the time Warren is writing this, both his mother and his father are gone. The light has moved. What remains is the shape they left behind, real enough to follow, impossible to hold.