There is something rather wonderful about old songs refusing to stay dead. Not the ones that should have remained firmly buried beneath several decades of accumulated embarrassment, naturally, but those occasional compositions that somehow survive the passage of time, the changing musical landscape and the inevitable critical reassessment of your younger self.

George Collins has been rummaging through the archives and, fortunately for us, he has found one worth rescuing in “Safe Harbor,” a song originally written when he was just 23 and now given a thoroughly revitalised new life.

It is tempting to assume from the title, and indeed from the stormy maritime imagery running through the lyrics, that this is some sort of seafaring drama; raging oceans, desperate sailors and heroic attempts to avoid being swallowed by the Atlantic. It isn’t. The sea is metaphorical, the storm is psychological and the real danger is the narrator’s own troubled mind.

“Safe Harbor” is about somebody deep in the grip of an existential crisis, unsure where to turn and reaching out towards the one person he believes might be able to pull him back onto solid ground. The nautical language gives the song its visual identity, but beneath it is something considerably more human: fear, vulnerability, uncertainty and a familiar desire to find somewhere or someone, where the noise finally stops.

There is no disguising the fact that the young George Collins was listening very carefully to Bruce Springsteen. In fact, if “Safe Harbor” occasionally sounds as though it has wandered in from the mid-1980s with its denim jacket still on, there is a perfectly good reason. Collins wrote the song during the era when Born in the U.S.A. was everywhere, and he cites “Cover Me” as a likely influence. You can hear the connection in the muscular rock setting and the sense of a narrator trying to shut out an increasingly hostile world, but Collins has wisely resisted simply trying to recreate the Boss. Instead, the influence becomes part of the song’s DNA.

There is a slightly angular quality to the guitar solo that works beautifully here, sounding less like a moment for instrumental showing off and more like the musical equivalent of a warning light flashing somewhere in the distance. Something isn’t right, something is approaching, and the narrator knows it. The horns, arranged by Lou Pomanti, bring a slightly cinematic quality to the track without softening its rougher edges.

What makes “Safe Harbor” particularly interesting, though, is the conversation taking place between the man who wrote it decades ago and the artist he has become. Collins admits that when he went back through his early material while working on New Ways of Getting Old, much of it was, in his own words, “pure drivel.” But “Safe Harbor” survived the test. It needed work, certainly, and Collins rewrote sections of the lyrics, changed chords and adjusted the melody, but somewhere beneath the youthful composition was a song with enough emotional weight to make the journey into the modern era.

And perhaps that is why it works so well now; a song about looking for shelter from your own troubled thoughts is unlikely to become less relevant with age. If anything, the years give Collins a different perspective on the material. What might once have been a young man’s attempt to articulate uncertainty now feels like part of the wider emotional territory he has explored throughout his second act as a songwriter: ageing, change, relationships, vulnerability and the strange business of trying to make sense of the life you’ve ended up with.

There is also something pleasingly circular about the whole thing. The 23 year old Collins heard Springsteen, picked up his guitar and wrote a song about someone desperately searching for refuge. Decades later, the older and considerably more experienced Collins picks up that same idea, tears it apart, rebuilds it and discovers that the younger man wasn’t entirely wrong after all.

“Safe Harbor” is therefore more than an old song dusted off for another spin. It is a conversation across time, dressed up as a driving rock song and delivered with enough guitars, drums and horns to make sure nobody mistakes it for a quiet afternoon by the water.

George Collins is a Prague based singer-songwriter and novelist who returned to music after decades in international finance. Blending classic rock, soul and pop, his songs explore aging, love and reinvention, earning him more than two million Spotify streams and four million YouTube views.

His albums include It’s Been a Long Time, Songs for Grown-ups and New Ways of Getting Old. A former bandmate of future Dave Matthews Band members Carter Beauford and the late LeRoi Moore, Collins also writes fiction, including his debut novel, PLAYING THE CHANGES, a story of love, loss and the possibility of starting over.

Follow George Collins on his Website, Facebook, Instagram, Spotify, and YouTube.