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.
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.
“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.
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.’
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ever been on a winter road trip where the landscape is the soundtrack? That’s ‘Queen E’ — written with that Alberta highway in mind. Heading south out of Calgary, the Rockies sit to the west in the distance, growing closer as you drive toward the U.S. border.
Fort Macleod is on the map, Ian Tyson and Corb Lund country, with four strong winds carrying the sounds of open prairie. It’s Canadiana: endless highway, where ‘the blacktop meets the blue’ horizon, and with mountains rising like a castle of stone.
One of the songs closest to my heart from the Hired Gun album is ‘This Might Be Love‘. To give you a glimpse into the process, I’m sharing an image of the handwritten lyrics—the very first draft where the song took shape back in July 2017.
You’ll notice a little star sticker on the page—that’s my own reward system. Whenever I finish writing a song, I give myself a star. It’s a small ritual, but it makes the creative process feel like a celebration. 🌟
It’s a reminder that every track starts as words on a page before it grows into music.
I’d love for you to check it out—listen, like, and share This Might Be Love on Apple Music, Spotify, or wherever you stream your music. Every click and share helps bring these songs to more ears. 🎶
Some songs just hit you right in the 💛. ‘What You Do’ is the feature single from the forthcoming album Hired Gun—an easygoing love song that weaves together tender, heartfelt moments into a tapestry of devotion to the ones we hold close, the kind that makes you do it again and again… and again.
Look for the release of Selkirk Range Hired Gun on Spotify, Apple Music, or Bandcamp on August 22. Give it a listen, and add it to your favourites playlist. Every like and share will help this song find new fans 🎊🤠
Selkirk Range presents a classic country-inspired collection of ten original tracks. This is the first of two album-length releases from the Sunophonic Sessions. Drop in to the listening party on August 21 at 7pm (Mountain), chat with the artist, and get a behind-the-scenes look at how the songs came together.
Hired Gun pairs vivid storytelling with melodies that are easy to carry and hard to forget, tracing open highways, small-town lives, and the hard-earned wisdom that comes with time. From upbeat road songs to quiet reflections, the album leans into the traditions of country and folk while adding a modern edge.
Leading the way is the featured single, What You Do — a joyful, heartfelt tribute to all the wild, tender, and ordinary things we do in the name of love. From singing karaoke into the night to standing in the pouring rain or racing home before sunrise, each verse captures love’s everyday devotion. Set to warm, melodic country-folk, the song reminds us that true love lives in the effort—in the silly, sincere, and soulful gestures we make again and again.
🎧 Listen to “What You Do” on Bandcamp, Spotify or Apple Music — and if it resonates, give it some love by liking it, adding it to your playlist, and sharing it with someone who’ll feel it too.
SELKIRK RANGE 
