Page 60 - 08_Oct-2025

We let it go during the lockdown, leaving behind
almost everything we made there, ghosts of songs
I now hope haunt the place. A few weeks after the
lockdowns started, loneliness drove me out to the
garage with an acoustic guitar. Soon enough, I was
writing new songs. But they were incomplete some-
how, inhospitable. They needed Colin.
Swept up in the now-or-never aftermath of COVID,
I asked if he’d consider preparing them for a studio.
His only question was, “Why didn’t we do it before?”
I think I know the answer: the moment you truly
understand what it will mean to lose something is
just before it’s taken from you. It’s a tragedy of being
human that we’re incapable of preparing for such
permanence. Or maybe the tragedy is mine alone.
No matter what I know is coming, I’ll never be ready.
T
hat album, Anomalies, came out in
November 2024 — and no, I haven’t quit
my day job. There’s been no Billboard
charting, no world tour. We’ve had a
handful of shows in venues no further than about
100 kilometres from home, a few songs on listener-
supported radio, a single positive review in a local
zine. That’s all. But the album makes me feel like we
accomplished something just the same. Colin built
homes out of the shacks I made, places where a
listener could live comfortably for a few minutes of
their lives. But more than that, he gave me, and the
world, a record of his talent that will outlive us all.
In return, I want to share his talent as widely as
possible — but it’s not that simple. Most promoters
aren’t eager to book a quartet of middle-aged
musicians with little social media savvy and no real
following to show for it. I struggle to align the band’s
schedules or ambitions enough to rehearse as often
as we should, and I’m constantly juggling the band’s
demands with the needs of my own family. The
industry doesn’t help either — it’s broken. We’re just
a faint whisper in the deafening roar of terabytes
flooding music streaming platforms. Still, I feel like I
owe Colin a debt I’ll never be able to repay.
If so, Colin has forgiven that debt.
Since the album was released, he believes we’ve
done more together than we ever did in the decades
previous. For him, it’s not how many shows we play,
it’s what happens after each one. People buy T-shirts
we had made, some even part with 10 bucks for a
CD that they probably have no way of playing. But
what stands out most to Colin are the people who
approach us after a show to say how much they
appreciated the music, that hearing it meant some-
thing to them.
“It gives me something to be proud of,” he says.
“That’s all I need.”
Which is to say that Colin’s perspective, just like
his playing, has evolved faster than mine. Maybe
60 EDify. OCTOBER.25
quantity — of shows played or songs recorded or
streamed — can’t be the goal. That can’t be controlled.
But quality can. Rarely can we choose our circum-
stances, but maybe we can choose how we see them.
For Colin — for all of us — there’s no need for a
Rolling Stone feature or a Coachella slot. Just making
the effort to share our music, even with the few who
stop to listen, feels like enough. We’ve spent more
than half our lives nurturing this talent and our love
for it. In that sense, we’ve already “made it.”
B
ack at that rundown northside bar, Colin
rallies in time for the show just like he
said he would. He plays every song with
fewer mistakes than any of us. He breathes
life into music, and music, it seems, is breathing it
back into him.
A few weeks later, we’re back at work on new
material at Guy’s house, in a room so small I some-
times set up just outside of it, poking my head
in the door. Colin sits in the corner, improving a
sketch of a song I’d brought in. I watch as his
fingers find a melody on the fretboard as if it had
been there all along. Then, for the first time, I notice
his right cheek twitch, a slight and rapid pull and
release, like a note bent on a guitar string.
The moment you truly understand
what it will mean to lose something
is just before it’s taken from you.
No matter what I know is coming,
I’ll never be ready.
It stays with me for being so ephemeral yet so
deeply rooted in something absolute. Is time like
that? The whole of it too big to comprehend, leaving
us the also impossible task of trying to make sense
of a single moment. Here and gone, here and gone,
and then just gone.
But for now, at least, it’s here. So we give it our
best, playing through a crescendo ending. I think
Colin gets that. He hears those moments, and their
potential, in our music in a way that the rest of us
don’t. “We all keep getting better,” Colin says — and
that, he adds, is rare at this point in life. “You’d think
there’d be a decline in whatever we do. We’re getting
old and tired, but the music gets better. It’s weird.”
That sketch I gave him turns into one of our best
songs, a piece about, perhaps ironically, the unabashed
confidence of youth — more mature and confident
than almost anything on that debut album. In fact, it
reinforces Colin’s hopes for a sophomore release, and
that, together, we will, in his words, “do this as long
as we can.” There’s more music in him, and in us,
just waiting. ED.