Some songs spend decades quietly doing their job in the margins of the culture, waiting for the right century to be listened to properly. “Will of the Wind”, written by Jim Photoglo and Greg Barnhill, is one of them. It is not a chart monster or a festival singalong. It is a gentle, reflective ballad about change, the sort of thing you might hear in a car on a long drive and find yourself still thinking about three towns later. Its message is simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker and strange enough to take years to absorb: you cannot control the wind, so you had better learn to sail.
The songwriter’s songwriter
Jim Photoglo is one of those figures the music business seems to produce in quantity and then forget to celebrate. Born in 1951 and raised in Inglewood, California, he began as a soft rock singer, and his debut single, “We Were Meant to Be Lovers”, reached number fourteen on the Adult Contemporary chart in 1980. A very respectable start, though not the kind that guarantees a career. What came next was more interesting. Beginning in 1984, he made repeated trips to Nashville at the suggestion of the songwriter Wendy Waldman, and eventually he settled into the city’s famously collaborative songwriting culture.
That decision gave him a second career as a writer for other people. He co-wrote “Fishin’ in the Dark” with Waldman, which became a hit single for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in 1987, after Ed Bruce had cut a version the year before. Almost three decades later Photoglo would join that same band, taking over the bass duties. There is a lovely circularity in that: the songwriter who handed a hit to a group eventually became part of the group. Along the way he wrote a song about change, and the story of his own life reads like an illustration of it.
What the song argues
The opening of the lyric is a confession. The singer says that he spent half his life trying to understand why things must change and the other half trying to keep them the same. It is an unusually frank admission, a person describing two entire eras of effort, one spent asking why and the other spent resisting. Neither worked. Love, he notes, faded the way summer slides into autumn, with no dramatic break and no clear reason, and the whole thing made no sense to him at all.
Then comes the pivot, and it is the heart of the song. Rather than rail against that fading, the chorus turns to the image of the wind. You cannot see it, the singer suggests, but you can feel it, and it passes by blowing steadily, coming and going on a schedule that only God knows. The advice is practical rather than mystical: keep your sails ready, take what you can when the wind arrives, and make a friend of it rather than an enemy. The song does not promise that the wind will be kind. It only insists that fighting it is a waste of a life.
Sailing as a philosophy
I love the choice of sailing as the metaphor, because it quietly corrects a common mistake. People hear that you cannot control the wind and assume the lesson is passivity. But a sailor is not passive. A sailor trims the sails, reads the water, adjusts the angle, and uses a force that cannot be mastered to go precisely where he wants. The art is to cooperate with something larger than yourself without being destroyed by it. That is a much more interesting prescription than simple acceptance, and it is what the song is actually recommending.
The old Stoic philosophers would have nodded along. Their central idea was that some things are up to us and some are not, and that peace comes from knowing which is which. The song puts that into a gentler, folkier language: the wind is not up to you, but your sails are. It is also worth noticing the double meaning in the title. The word will can mean the force that drives the wind, or the wish of the person who feels it, or, with a religious ear, the will of a higher power. All three readings hover over the song at once.
The sadness underneath
It would be a mistake to treat this as a purely cheerful motivational song, though that is how it is often used. The opening lines tell a personal story. Someone has been in love, and the love has faded, and the singer is trying to make peace with a loss that he could not prevent. Some listeners hear a man whose partner stopped loving him. Others hear something broader, a general grief about time. The philosophy of the chorus is, in other words, what a person builds in the rubble. It is consolation rather than celebration.
That is why the song feels trustworthy. A philosophy of acceptance that comes from someone who has not lost anything is cheap. This one has weight because it clearly comes after a defeat. The singer is not telling you to relax from a position of comfort. He is telling you, from the far side of something painful, that you can survive the wind and even learn to move with it. The tenderness of the delivery is the tenderness of someone who has paid for his wisdom and would like to spare you the bill.
A second life far from home
Songs have strange afterlives, and this one has had an especially lively one in the Philippines. A version by the Filipino singer Jamie Rivera, produced with the broadcaster ABS-CBN, is credited on streaming services, and Filipino listeners have kept the song in circulation for years, sharing it, translating it and singing it back. Short videos with captions in Tagalog turn up regularly, as people explain what the title means to them and what it has helped them through.
More recently it has found another audience through social media, where creators use it as a mantra for letting go. One typical clip describes trusting the will of the wind as surrendering control and believing that every shift in direction is leading somewhere you are meant to be. It is a bigger claim than the song makes, perhaps, but it shows how readily the words attach themselves to different lives. A soft rock ballad from another era has become a small portable philosophy, carried around in pockets by people half a world from California.
Learning to sail
So what does “Will of the Wind” mean? It means that change is the one reliable feature of a human life, and that the sensible response is neither denial nor despair but readiness. It means that love, like seasons, may fade without anyone being at fault, and that grief is a form of respect for what was there. And it means that the best use of the time between gusts is to get your sails in order. The next time life blows in from an unexpected direction, put the song on, take a breath, and ask the only question that matters: where would you like to go?