“Be Brave If You Can”: Harry Kappen’s Quiet Anthem for the Broken and Still Breathing

Harry Kappen doesn’t scream. He sighs. And in a world deaf from the endless din of manufactured outrage and algorithmic dopamine hits, sometimes a sigh is louder than a revolution.

“Be Brave If You Can” is not a song that begs for radio spins or festival shoutalongs. It’s not here to sell you a T-shirt or pump your serotonin with pixel-perfect beats. This song is a shrug. But it’s the kind of shrug that stays with you after the adrenaline wears off—when you're alone, two whiskeys deep, staring out the window wondering if any of this actually means anything.

Kappen, the Dutch music therapist and philosophical songsmith, has spent his career with one foot in melody and the other in the mind. His work—both musical and clinical—has always revolved around the idea that music can heal, reveal, or at least hold the pain for a while. “Be Brave If You Can” plays like the final journal entry of a man who’s stopped fighting the current and started studying the water.

Let’s be clear: this is not protest music. It’s not Neil Young at the DNC or Dylan snarling through Newport. This is the aftermath. This is what protest sounds like after the protest fails and the cops go home. It's the dust settling after the collapse of idealism. There’s no call to arms—just a call to endure.

Lines like “The world keeps on turning / and there’s no turning back” don’t hit like poetry; they hit like a diagnosis. It’s the kind of lyric you don’t want to hear but know is true. Kappen’s voice is unadorned, just like his message: life happens, deal with it if you can, and if you can’t, well... that’s okay too.

The production is minimal but not lazy. There’s intention in the restraint. Ambient textures flicker like ghost thoughts, guitars drift in and out like memories you’re not sure you actually had. There’s a kind of weary beauty to the arrangement—like watching snow fall on a battlefield after everyone’s gone home.

And that’s the heart of this song. It doesn’t glorify suffering. It doesn’t romanticize resilience. It merely acknowledges the quiet nobility of those who show up anyway. The people who don’t storm the castle, but still get out of bed. The ones who cry in parked cars and laugh at funerals. The ones who, against all odds, are still here.

“Be Brave If You Can” made the UK iTunes Top 20 Rock Songs chart, which is both shocking and somehow fitting. Because if enough people are resonating with a song this subdued, maybe we’re all starting to realize that bravery doesn’t always look like noise.

Sometimes, it looks like Harry Kappen, whispering from the edges of the fire, reminding us: this is the meaning of life... maybe. Or maybe not. But it’s a hell of a song to ponder the question.

–Frank Reynolds