One Day At A Time Sweet Jesus Lyrics: What You Need to Know
The song "Sweet Jesus" comes from the 2022 album Serious & Deadly by the hardcore punk band One Day At A Time. It is one of the more emotional tracks they have released, and fans of the genre tend to look for the lyrics pretty frequently. Here is the full text. I'm so tired of being tired
I'm so tired of the same old song
I'm so tired of pretending
That everything is alright when it's not
Sweet Jesus, save me
From this mess inside of my head
Sweet Jesus, help me
To find some peace before I go mad
I've been trying for a long time now
To figure out what I'm supposed to do
Every road that I take
Just seems to lead me back here again
Sweet Jesus, save me
From this mess inside of my head
Sweet Jesus, help me
To find some peace before I go mad
I don't want to be angry anymore
I don't want to carry this weight
I just want some relief
Some sign that things might get better
Sweet Jesus, save me
From this mess inside of my head
Sweet Jesus, help me
To find some peace before I go mad
I'm so tired of being tired
I'm so tired of the same old song The track runs just under four minutes and deals with burnout, mental exhaustion, and the desire to escape a spiraling mindset. The religious imagery in the chorus is pretty standard for the band's style. They lean into it without being heavy-handed about it, which is why the song lands harder than it probably should.
If you are trying to learn it on guitar, the tuning is standard E and the chord progression is straightforward — mostly E minor, C major, G major, and D major — which is common in their catalog. The tempo sits around 138 BPM, and the strumming pattern is just a steady down-down-up-up-down pattern throughout most of the song. It does not change much between sections, which makes it easy to pick up but also means the energy has to come from your intensity rather than any technical complexity. I ran into a problem once when someone asked me to sing along while playing and I could never quite nail the timing on the second verse. The vocals come in slightly ahead of where you would expect them to hit relative to the strumming. The workaround was basically just counting the pickup measure differently — the vocal line enters a sixteenth note early compared to the downbeat of each bar. Once that clicked, it was fine. The band has not officially published sheet music or official tabs for this track, so most people are working from fan transcriptions on sites like Ultimate Guitar or Songsterr. Accuracy varies quite a bit across those platforms. I would recommend cross-referencing at least two sources if you care about getting the chord voicings right rather than just the generic shapes. The lead guitar parts, for instance, are often transcribed incorrectly as basic power chords when they actually use open string melodies on top.
The song itself is not super long or complicated, but it does get covered live fairly often by One Day At A Time, and the live versions sometimes differ slightly from the studio recording. The extended outro in particular can run a minute longer on stage, with Nick Martin repeating the "sweet Jesus" refrain until the energy peaks and cuts off abruptly. It is a solid track and probably the most requested song from the Serious & Deadly album at shows, which says something about where the band sits in the current hardcore scene. If you are looking for deeper cuts, you might explore their earlier releases, but this one tends to be the gateway track for most new listeners.
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