Album
SHMILY Vibes
Album · 12 tracks · April 2024 · by Mike Baker
Twelve early love songs built around Kellie, our shared language, and the discovery that the most personal material was already close to home.
The story
SHMILY means See How Much I Love You.
Kellie and I have used it as part of our own language for years. It carries affection, history, humor, and the small ways two people remind each other that love is still present during ordinary life. By the time I began making music, SHMILY was already waiting there as a subject.
This album arrived one week after my first release. I was moving fast and still learning how to turn a feeling into a song. Love songs gave me familiar ground because the reason behind them was already part of my life with Kellie. Our history and private shorthand gave the writing somewhere honest to begin.
The earliest songs do not always contain the level of lived detail I would use now. Some lean on sunshine, stars, roads, dancing, and other familiar romantic images. Those images gave me a structure while I learned. Underneath them was a real marriage approaching twenty-five years, three children, moves, work, illness, laughter, strain, repair, attraction, and the thousands of ordinary decisions that make a shared life possible.
The original album description tried to turn SHMILY into a universal slogan for every listener. I understand the instinct. People recognize love even when the details belong to someone else. The stronger story begins with Kellie.
She is the person behind Radiant Kellie, the road trips, the dancing, the rules we learned together, the watching over one another, and the belief that love grows through time. SHMILY works because it belongs to us before it is offered to anyone else.
This record also shows me learning an important lesson about personal writing. A song becomes more generous when it tells the truth about somebody specific. Honest detail gives listeners room to recognize their own feelings without asking the song to describe their marriage word for word.
SHMILY Vibes moved me closer to that understanding. Friends Forever on the previous release had already placed the phrase inside a song. Here it became the organizing idea for a full collection. That shift matters in the larger catalog. Music was beginning to move beyond emotional themes and into the actual relationships that shaped my life.
Several later projects would return to Kellie with stronger writing and greater specificity. Everyday Magic, in particular, would become a more mature love-letter record. SHMILY Vibes is the early chapter. It holds the uncomplicated enthusiasm of somebody realizing that the person he loved could become part of this new creative language too.
The album is affectionate, occasionally over-the-top, and completely sincere. I hear a new songwriter reaching for every romantic image available because he has more feeling than craft. I also hear the beginning of something I would keep trying to do better: paying attention to the person beside me and finding another way to tell her she matters.
If you only have a few minutes
Start here
01Radiant Kellie
The title places Kellie directly at the center of the album. That specificity gives the record its real foundation. This is where the collection stops sounding like a general set of love songs and becomes part of our shared story.
02Third Dance Lucky
The title carries the shape of a memory rather than a general emotion. That gives the song a more personal pull and represents the album's movement toward moments two people remember together.
03Rules of Us
Every long relationship develops its own language, expectations, jokes, repair attempts, and ways of finding one another again. This song moves toward that private structure and makes it one of the album's most useful bridges to my later writing about marriage.
04SHMILY (See How Much I Love You)
The title track explains the phrase that holds the whole album together. SHMILY is small enough to fit inside an ordinary moment and strong enough to carry decades of shared meaning. This song is the clearest introduction to the record's heart.
Tracks
- 01Forever Sunshine
- 02Intoxicated Love
- 03Stars and Sunshine Love's Serenade
- 04Forever Young
- 05Radiant Kellie
- 06Road Trip Romance
- 07Third Dance Lucky
- 08Rules of Us
- 09Watching Over You
- 10SHMILY (See How Much I Love You)
- 11A Love That Grows
- 12You Light My World
Track by track
01Forever Sunshine
A bright opening love song that frames another person as a steady source of warmth and joy.
02Intoxicated Love
This track leans into the rush of attraction and the way love temporarily rearranges your sense of proportion.
03Stars and Sunshine Love's Serenade
An unabashedly romantic song built from the large images I reached for often during the earliest phase of writing music.
04Forever Young
A song about the part of love that preserves play, memory, and the feeling of still recognizing the people you were when the relationship began.
05Radiant Kellie
The album names its inspiration directly here, turning the love-song collection toward the person at the center of my own life.
06Road Trip Romance
A love song about shared movement, time together, and the kind of closeness that grows while two people are headed somewhere side by side.
07Third Dance Lucky
A track with the shape of a remembered story, connecting romance to a particular moment rather than leaving it entirely in abstraction.
08Rules of Us
This song looks at the private understandings that develop inside a long relationship and help two people keep choosing each other.
09Watching Over You
Love appears here as attention, protection, and the promise to remain present when the other person needs support.
10SHMILY (See How Much I Love You)
The title track introduces the private phrase that became the album's organizing idea and one of the lasting symbols of my marriage.
11A Love That Grows
A song about love gaining depth through time and experience, shaped by the life two people continue building together.
12You Light My World
The closing track returns to the album's language of warmth and gratitude, ending with a direct acknowledgment of what another person brings into your life.
Where it leads
SHMILY Vibes brought the catalog close to home. Whispers of the Universe, released the following day, widened the frame again and tested whether songs could hold larger questions about wonder, secrecy, and connection.