Making Love (the record, that is)

October 1, 2026

Now that Love is out, I thought I’d say a little more about how the record was made.

The album is part of an ongoing experiment I’ve been calling the Sunophonic Sessions: using generative music tools as part of the process of realizing songs I’ve written.

There are plenty of different ways people are now using generative AI to make music. My own process on this album was quite specific.

For many of the tracks, the starting point was an existing home demo.

Usually that meant me performing the song with an acoustic guitar and other instruments: the lyrics, melody, chord structure, rhythm, phrasing and basic musical idea already there, captured in recordings and more polished home demos.

I then used those recordings as the source material for developing fuller performances.

In some cases, the resulting versions stay remarkably close to the original demo. In others, the arrangement moved in a substantially different direction.

The process involved a lot of fine tuning and very selective choices about which versions best fit the overall sound and vision for the album.

I would generate performances, listen carefully, reject them, try something different, return to an earlier direction, adjust the approach, and continue until I found something that felt right.

The closest analogy I can think of is a term like “musical direction”.

As the songwriter, I knew the song and had a reasonably clear sense of what I wanted it to become. The work was in recognizing which performance captured that and which did not, both individually and together as a collection.

Not every performance was successful. Not every detail in the finished versions is exactly what I would have done if I had complete control over every note. But that is not unlike working with musicians either. Performance always involves interpretation.

What matters most to me is whether the resulting recording brings the song to life in a way that I feel is true to my intent as the songwriter. And, let me be clear: I wrote all these songs on the album. Every lyric on every song. And most of the musical phrasing, with a few exceptions where I felt Suno offered a more exciting or more musically interesting interpretation of a song that I might otherwise have abandoned.

And that has been the most surprising part of this experiment.

My primary interest has always been songwriting rather than proving that I personally played every instrument or sang every note on a finished recording.

Would it be wonderful to take 18 songs into a great studio with exceptional singers, session players, producers and engineers? Absolutely.

It would also cost many thousands, and probably tens of thousands, of dollars.

Independent musicians have always worked within the resources available to them. Home recording, drum machines, digital audio workstations, virtual instruments and inexpensive production software all changed what could be done outside a professional studio.

Generative tools represent another change in that history.

It is now possible for a songwriter to take a home demo and use these tools to explore performances and arrangements that previously might have remained inaccessible.

Over the next little while, I’m going to make that process more transparent by sharing some of the original demos behind Love alongside the finished recordings.

Then you can hear the difference for yourself.

Love is now available on all streaming platforms including Spotify and Apple Music.

Love … the journey begins

September 24, 2026

Love arrives today!

Available on all streaming platforms including Spotify and Apple Music.

There are 18 songs on the record, and while each of them can certainly be heard on its own, this is one album where I’d encourage listeners to resist the shuffle button—at least the first time through because the sequence matters.

Love is organized into three volumes, loosely following a three-act dramatic structure.

Act I, starting with “What You Know” begins with attraction, discovery, desire and intimacy. Gradually, however, familiarity gives way to uncertainty, strain and finally separation.

Act II, “Love (The Turn)” takes place in the aftermath: loss, disorientation, hitting bottom, rebounding, looking backward, and beginning to come to terms with what has happened.

Act III “Love (The Return)” turns outward again. It is about recovery, hesitation, renewal and the delightful feeling of opening up to love again.

The album isn’t intended as a definitive statement or story about love. As a concept album, it is more about what love does over time: how it begins, how it changes, what happens when it fails, what remains afterward, and how those experiences become part of whatever comes next.

Today, streaming has made the individual song the dominant unit of listening. We hear tracks in playlists, on shuffle, out of sequence, often separated entirely from the albums they came from.

And that’s fine. The songs on Love can live that way too.

But the record wasn’t really made that way.

The ordering of the songs became part of the composition. A song can mean something slightly different depending on what precedes it and what follows it. The three acts have their own internal movement, and the album as a whole is meant to trace a journey.

So when Love arrives, I’d encourage you to try listening to it that way.

Put on Act I and let it run.

Then Act II.

Then Act III.

Or, if you have the time, begin with the overture and stay with the story all the way through.

Available on all streaming platforms including Spotify and Apple Music.

An album hiding in my archive

September 17, 2026

I didn’t set out to write a concept album called Love.

In a way, I discovered it hiding among songs I had already written and set aside.

Most of the 18 songs on the album were written over the past ten or twelve years. Some existed as finished songs. Some were home demos I had almost forgotten about. A few had already been released in earlier forms. Others were unfinished pieces that were interesting but mostly abandoned.

At some point, as I started listening back through all of that material, I began to notice connections.

Songs written years apart seemed to occupy different moments in the same emotional journey. One captured the intoxication of falling in love. Another belonged much later, at the point where familiarity had begun to turn into strain. Others seemed to live in the aftermath of a relationship: grief, resentment, rebound, reflection, acceptance.

And then there were songs that seemed to belong to the other side of that experience—the gradual reopening to the possibility of love.

The creative challenge became one of curation.

Which songs belonged in this particular story? Which didn’t? Where should one act end and another begin? What happens if one song is placed immediately after another? Could an older song take on a different meaning simply because of where it appeared in the sequence?

That process became one of the most enjoyable parts of making the album.

Songs I had thought of as separate works began to feel like scenes. Lyrics written years apart started answering one another. Material that had once felt incomplete suddenly had somewhere to go.

Eventually, I started seeing the project less as a conventional album and more as something akin to a Broadway musical.

There is no script behind it, no fixed cast of characters, and no stage production notes. The songs suggest encounters, departures, confrontations, reversals, private reflections and resolutions. When I was working on it, I liked to imagine lighting and staging, and how they might be performed by different actors.

That was when the three-act structure really started to make sense.

The first act moves through attraction, intimacy and eventual fracture. The second occupies the uncertain territory after the collapse. The third begins the movement toward renewal and the possibility of loving again.

It is not meant to tell one literal story, and I’m not especially interested in telling listeners exactly who is speaking to whom.

I’d rather leave some of that open to my listeners.

So, I guess sometimes you set out to write an album. Sometimes, apparently, you find one. Love comes out September 24.

The instant grat track and opening song “What You Know” is now available on all streaming platforms including Spotify and Apple Music.

Something special is on its way

September 3, 2026

On September 24, I’ll be releasing my fifth album, Love.

This one is a little different.

Love is an 18-song concept album organized into three volumes, loosely following a three-act structure. It’s a series of vignettes organized around a classic story arc, beginning with attraction, discovery and falling in love; moving through tension, separation and the difficult period that follows; and eventually arriving at recovery, renewal and the possibility of falling in love again.

The first song I’m sharing from the album is “What You Know,” released September 3.

It’s an adaptation of a song I released previously, but in the context of Love it takes on a different role. I think of it almost as an overture: an opening into the emotional world of the album as it unfolds across the three acts.

One of the unusual things about Love is that all of these songs were written at different times over a period of several years. Some are songs I’ve already released but revisited and rearranged, but many were finished home demos in my archive. A few others were incomplete sketches of songs that I finished for the album.

The concept album idea emerged late last year, when I began revisiting a bunch of my old material and realized that there was a thematic line running through them that could serve as a collection.

The real challenge of making this record has been deciding what songs to include, giving it a consistent feel musically, and deciding how the songs should be ordered so that they formed a dramatic arc.

Over the next few weeks, leading up to the album release, I’ll write a little more about that process—how the songs came together, how the three-act structure emerged, and why I eventually began to imagine Love as something almost like the score to an imaginary musical.

For now, “What You Know” is the instant grat track. Available on all streaming platforms including Spotify and Apple Music.

Riding the Canadian: A Musical Journey Across Canada

July 1, 2026

For Canada Day 🍁, I’m excited to share my song “Riding the Canadian,” an epic adventure(!) about travelling across the country on VIA Rail’s legendary train, The Canadian. Available on all streaming platforms, including Apple Music and Spotify and YouTube Music.

Back in 2020, I was booked by VIA Rail Canada to do an Artist on Board tour from Toronto to Vancouver before everything was brought to a halt by the pandemic. While preparing for that tour, I wrote this song to serenade passengers on board — a kind of musical travelogue for a journey across the country.

The writing process started with the VIA Rail website of The Canadian route and then used a more detailed route guide. I worked my way through the stops along the line and tried to connect different places with interesting pieces of Canadian history and culture. It was an ambitious writing challenge: to create a song that could cover that kind of distance, geographically and culturally, while working within the constraints of a folk pop structure. In the end, I am really happy with how it turned out.

Listen for references to famous hockey players, musicians and bands, cultural and historical moments, and a little bit of history about The Canadian itself. It’s both a shout-out to the journey and a tribute to Canada, wrapped into one.

For those who are curious, the original demo is available on Bandcamp. This new release is part of my Selkirk Range Songbook series, featuring songs I wrote and demoed over the years, now newly produced as part of my Sunophonic Sessions.

And just for fun, there’s also an unreleased hip-hop version of the song you can listen to here.

Enjoy — and vive le Canada! 🇨🇦🚞🎸🏒✨

Duty Courage Truth — Out February 19, 2026 🎶

February 12, 2026

I’m excited to announce that Duty Courage Truth will be released on February 19, 2026.

This album brings together songs written over the past dozen years—lyrics that were demoed, set aside, or never fully realized at the time. Revisiting them gave me the chance to hear them differently and to finally bring a number of these pieces to completion.

Duty Courage Truth is the second release from my Sunophonic Sessions, and stylistically it leans more toward pop-folk than my previous album Hired Gun, mixing elements of country with folk pop. The collection is a bit eclectic by design, shaped by the lyrics and my vision for the songs rather than strict genre boundaries.

Several tracks stand out as highlights on the record: “The Needful Thing,” “Brave,” and “No More Secrets” each explore different facets of responsibility, resilience, and honesty—threads that quietly run through the album as a whole.

I know the creative approach behind this record will invite curiosity—and perhaps a little skepticism 🤔. All I ask is that you listen to the songs for what they are: performances carefully curated to honour the words written by my hand.

Thanks for listening—and for staying curious 🙏

The story behind the song – “Two Nights in Toledo”

January 23, 2026

“Two Nights in Toledo” is the fourth track on my latest album, Hired Gun. I’ve been delighted to see it getting a bit of play—though I haven’t spotted it turning up in Toledo itself yet. In this post, I want to share a bit about how the song came together, and why it’s a good example of what I enjoy most about songwriting.

So, what comes to mind when you think of Toledo? Toledo, Ohio, that is—not the one in Spain. Before writing this song, I honestly didn’t know much about the city, apart from the fact that in the fall of 2014 I was scheduled for a short work trip to the University of Toledo.

If you’d asked me back then what I knew about the place, my first reference would have been the character Max Klinger (played by Jamie Farr) from the long-running TV series M*A*S*H. Many of you will remember him as the cross-dressing corporal who tried every trick to get out of the army and back home to Toledo. I might also have mentioned the minor-league baseball team, the Mud Hens, mostly because I recall Klinger wearing their jersey in a few episodes. Beyond that, Toledo was a blank space for me.

Leading up to that work trip, I remember coming up with the title “Two nights in Toledo” during a late-night songwriting session. It felt promising, and I started riffing on it. Shortly after came the phrase “could make you a different man.” Now I had a complete line—but no idea where it was heading.

A lot of my songwriting begins this way: something small catches my attention, but without a clear sense of the story behind it. The challenge is to tease out the possibilities—to find a narrative or at least a set of images that might support a lyric. One of the tools I use at this point is the internet. Not as a shortcut, but as a way to gather raw material. Facts, places, details—anything that might help an idea take shape.

So I started reading.

I learned that the Maumee River, which runs through Toledo, had once been a major Indigenous trade route and later became part of the Great Lakes shipping system during the industrial era. Toledo grew into an important port for grain, coal, and iron ore moving through the region. I didn’t know any of this, and I wasn’t sure how it might fit into a song, but the detail stuck with me. Sure enough, the river ended up finding its way into the lyric later on.

Then I found myself reading about the country hit “Lucille”—written by Hal Bynum and recorded by Kenny Rogers in 1977. The opening line—“In a bar in Toledo, across from the depot…”—is the connection. Everyone remembers the hook, “You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille,” but that Toledo reference anchors the song in a very particular way. I give a nod to it in my own lyrics—if you listen, you’ll hear it.

But the real turning point came when I stumbled on a website that mentioned Caesar’s Show Bar. It was a ’70s nightclub run by Joseph C. Wicks, complete with a lighted dance floor, ambitious staging, and a reputation for featuring female impersonators—a distinctive fixture of Toledo’s nightlife at the time.

It’s long gone now, but something about it clicked immediately. Suddenly the line “could make you a different man” had an angle—an unexpected twist, to be sure, but now there was a through-line for the song.

Caesar’s Showbar (c. 1975)

Once that happened, the song pretty much wrote itself. That’s usually how it works for me. You follow the idea wherever it leads. You stay open to surprises. You let your muse be the guide.

The version on Hired Gun is different from the original demo, but I like how it has turned out. It’s got a little of that old school Bryan Adams energy to it, which I don’t mind at all, being a long time fan.

The story behind the writing of “Two Nights in Toledo” is a great illustration of how I work. I might start with almost nothing, a fragment of a lyric usually, but if I stay curious, keep digging, and trust the process, the song usually tells me what it wants to be.

The story behind the song – ‘Can’t Take It Back’

January 9, 2026

Songwriting workshops have a way of concentrating creative energy and nudging ideas toward completion, which is often the hardest part of the writing process.

The 2016 Songwriters Association of Canada (SAC) Challenge was an important experience for me. It gave me focus and follow-through, resulting in a number of songs that I’ve since recorded. ‘Wear Anything!‘ (aka, the hat song) from Seeing the Sun Again emerged from that workshop. So did two tracks from Hired Gun—‘Good Man Down’ and the focus of this post, ‘Can’t Take It Back.’

I wrote about it at the time, including a nice comment on the song from The Northern Pikes’ Bryan Potvin:

Selkirk Range’s “Can’t Take It Back” is killer country music. Country has always been a genre that relies on ‘the story’.  This tune totally delivers, complete with a gorgeous melody and heartfelt performance.

The song owes as much to the SAC session as it does to a songwriting course I’d taken with Pat Pattison at Berklee College of Music. For anyone who hasn’t crossed paths with him, Pattison is something of a legend—one of Berklee’s most respected instructors and the person who helped shape the lyric craft of artists like John Mayer and Gillian Welch.

Berklee is a terrific resource for musicians looking to sharpen their craft, but Pattison’s influence in particular stuck with me. He made a simple but profound point: a song shouldn’t fight with itself. The story, the mood, the language, the melody, the rhythm—they all need to pull in the same emotional direction.

This is sometimes known as prosody—the principle that every word, every musical choice, and the structure itself must work together so the song’s meaning and its musical elements are completely aligned.

‘Can’t Take It Back’ is built on that principle.

The theme naturally lends itself to a kind of emotional time travel: doing something in a relationship you can’t undo—one of those moments that hits so hard you wish you could rewind the world by five minutes, or even five seconds.

To capture that feeling, the song opens at the flash point—an irrevocable act—and then works backward. Each verse rewinds from present to past, exposing bad choices and the betrayal of something sacred.

Photo by Batuhan Doğan on Unsplash

Each of the verses conveys a set of images as we venture back in time with the character:

  • Verse 1, minutes before – The “lines of force” in a cracked mirror. Damage done and only himself to blame.
  • Verse 2, hours before – Bolting out the front door mid-argument, knowing nothing good will follow.
  • Verse 3, years before – A lover’s note tucked into a coat pocket. A tiny time capsule from a cherished moment. And the stark admission that he had “burned it to ash” through bad decisions.

And while the storyline is fictional, the core feeling is familiar to almost everyone. We’ve all had that moment—big or small—when we said or did something we wish we could take back. When the words escaped before we could reel them in. When a rash decision set something in motion we couldn’t stop. That universality is meant to be the song’s anchor.

It’s a song about tragic mistakes, yes. But it’s also about the humanity in the hurting.

Blue December: The tradition of sad holiday songs

December 12, 2025

Holiday music isn’t all sleigh bells and sentimentality. Alongside the familiar standards runs a quieter, older tradition: the sad holiday song.

From Elvis’s Blue Christmas to Joni Mitchell’s River, these tracks acknowledge a truth the season often glosses over—this time of year can sharpen loneliness just as easily as it inspires joy. They’re songs built on absence, distance, and the emotional weight that settles in when everyone else seems to be celebrating.

That tradition was the starting point for me when I wrote ‘Longest Night of the Year (Christmas Tears)’, a song rooted firmly in an Alberta experience.

The story follows a father working in the northern oilsands, alone on a subarctic winter night. Temperatures push past minus forty. The sky is clear enough to see the aurora cutting across the horizon. From the cab of his truck, he watches the lights and thinks of home—of the family he’s providing for but can’t be with.

This new Sunophonic regeneration leans into the grit of the story. The vocal is rougher, more expressive. The arrangement folds into a folk palette, with a big sounding middle section that settles into the final refrain.

I think this new arrangement really suits the moment and the landscape—dark, cold, and brutally honest.

A new single – “Meet Me in Montreal” – and the story behind It

November 28, 2025

I’m pleased to share the new single, “Meet Me in Montreal,” which is among the most personal songs I’ve ever written. I wrote it in memory of close friend lost twenty years ago—a tragedy that happened far too young, and one that, sadly, many families know all too well. This song is a way to honour his memory.

The lyric grew out of a real trip we took together in our early twenties. He was driving across the country at the time, and we arranged to meet in Montreal. From there, we travelled to Quebec City and, thanks to a bit of luck, got our hands on tickets to see a Nordiques–Canadiens rivalry hockey game.

Later on, we boarded the Amtrak to New York City, wandered Manhattan aimlessly, eventually making our way to the top of the World Trade Center. I still have a photo of the two of us from that day—a picture of two young adults on top of the world.

In some ways, this song is about a destination, a journey, and how certain places carry the emotional weight of the people we shared them with. The imagery moves through a Canadian landscape: Sault Ste. Marie, Georgian Bay, ending at Île Ste-Hélène. The refrain “Je me souviens” serves as a nod to the Quebec license plate motto we see on the highway, but also quietly reinforces the act of remembering that motivates the song.

There’s a even reference to Expo 67. I’ve always been drawn to that moment in Montreal’s history—the optimism, the architecture, the cultural energy—even though the fair took place the year both of us were born. Île Ste-Hélène was the location of the Expo, and it serves as the setting for a poignant moment in the song, where pent up anticipation confronts pending disappointment.

Arial view of l’île Sainte-Hélène et de l’île Notre-Dame during Expo 1967. Source: Archives Montreal

The original version was a finalist in the 2015 Untapped Newcomer category of the Ship & Anchor Songwriting Contest in Calgary. I can still remember driving down from Edmonton to perform it in a packed pub. My friend’s parents were in the audience. They know who the song is about, and I’m eternally grateful we were able to share that moment together.

This Sunophonic Sessions version takes the song in a different direction from the early demo. There’s a fragility to it that didn’t come through in the earlier recording. Suno picked up on the “Je me souviens” refrain that was tucked into the original lyric and foregrounded it. That change seems to unlock something. It gives the song more urgency and a clearer sense of purpose.

I’m excited to finally release “Meet Me in Montreal” more than ten years after it was written. I’m grateful it’s finally ready to make its way into the wider world.