Page 59 - 08_Oct-2025

W
e’re both around 50, Colin and I.
So are the other members of our
band, Daughters of England: Guy,
the drummer, and Brock, the
bassist. Too old to have just released our debut
album, and definitely too old to be performing it
live around town. We could be dads to most of the
musicians we’ve played with.
But we have to perform. I’m convinced destiny is
at play here. Why else would we still be doing this if
it wasn’t? Frankly, it’s silly for guys our age to play at
being rock stars, to entertain dreams of headlining
festivals with legions of screaming fans. But I believe
we’re obligated to acknowledge that, a long time ago,
because of the history that Colin and I share, we
were put on a path to at least try, however remote the
possibilities would be.
Colin and I have been friends since eighth grade,
quiet suburban kids bonding over grunge music
when we should have been focusing on trigonometry.
We begged our parents to buy us instruments so we
could make sounds like the Smashing Pumpkins or
Dinosaur Jr. They did, and then we grew up playing
together.
Musically, Colin grew up faster, often in awe-
inspiring, even irritating ways. While I struggled
with fretting basic chords, he was mastering the
fundamentals of soloing. He insists it was because he
loved the challenge of figuring out a riff. “It made me
feel like I was actually good at something,” he tells
me all these years later.
But that’s too characteristically modest of Colin.
I have another theory. I believe that music was
part of his DNA, like a dormant gene. And when
he touched his first guitar, a gene flipped on like a
switch on an amplifier.
D
NA, however, is also the problem. Along-
side the genes responsible for his talent
were those that would lead to its un-
doing. Colin has Kennedy’s disease, an
adult-onset loss of neurons in the spine and lower
brainstem that slowly weakens all muscles. It’s
extremely rare. Maybe 30 people in Edmonton live
with it. There’s no known treatment.
If there’s an upside, it’s that Colin doesn’t have
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as ALS
or Lou Gehrig’s disease), which is fatal and was his
initial diagnosis around 2007. He lived with that
grim news for two weeks until a second doctor
caught a facial twitch — one of few differentiating
symptoms between Kennedy’s and ALS — and lifted
his presumed death sentence. He could grow as
old as any of us. The question is, will he be able to
enjoy it?
Colin already lives in sharp contrast to his youth.
In high school, when not playing guitar, he’d ride
freestyle BMX or ace me on the tennis court. He’d
easily push 15-rep sets of bicep curls with 25-pound
dumbbells. “Now I can only do three to five pounds,”
he says, which he does to battle muscle atrophy. He’s
told his muscles are weakening at a rate as high as
five per cent a year. He thinks his strength is less
than half what it was in his 30s, before the first signs
of the disease.
Scott
There are other symptoms, too, though Colin is
less inclined to reveal if he’s experiencing them.
Sufferers of Kennedy’s, who are primarily men, may
have trouble swallowing. They can experience a loss
of basic sensation and reflexes. Testicular atrophy
and a decrease in the masculinizing effects of testos-
terone can give way to the influence of estrogen.
What’s for certain is that it will eventually take
Colin’s ability to play guitar.
“I think I’ve got a good couple of years before my
hands start giving me real problems,” he says. The
tradeoff in the meantime, Colin adds, wryly but not
wrongly, is “there’s a possibility I could grow boobs.”
D
uring the pandemic, I realized that I’m a
songwriter the way a framer is a house-
builder. I can rough things out and get
the studs positioned, but I can’t really
make a place where people would want to spend time.
For years, my bandmates and I would meet weekly
in a rehearsal space above a central Edmonton pawn
shop. We’d joke and jam and drink beer and write.
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