With You By My Side

By early June 2024, I had been making music for a little more than two months. I had already moved through several genres, repeated a few ideas, and learned that country music gave me a natural place to write about relationships. With You By My Side stayed in that lane for a full album.

The songs are built around familiar scenes: rain against a cabin, kisses in a small town, waves under moonlight, a cowgirl moving through an open landscape, and two people watching the sunset. Those images came easily because country music has always known how to place a large feeling inside a small physical detail. I was learning from that tradition while trying to discover which parts of it sounded like me.

The emotional center is partnership. The title track imagines a relationship lasting through seasons, a home built together, and the changes that come with age. Through the Battles moves into harder territory and asks what love looks like when daily life brings conflict, fatigue, and uncertainty. A Love That Grows, which had appeared earlier on SHMILY Vibes and Songs from My Heart, returns because it belonged inside this fuller group of relationship songs.

Looking back, I hear more idealism than autobiography in parts of the record. These songs often reach for the picture of enduring love before naming the specific events that test it. That is honest to where I was as a songwriter. I understood the values I wanted to write toward: loyalty, attention, forgiveness, and the decision to stay beside another person. I had not yet learned how much one remembered conversation or one imperfect domestic moment could carry an entire song.

The album still marks a meaningful step. Earlier love songs appeared among experiments in pop, soul, and indie music. Here I stayed with one emotional subject long enough to see its different shapes. Love could be shelter on a rainy day. It could be playful and physical. It could hold a family together through strain. It could mature over years until the history between two people became part of every ordinary view.

There is also a useful tension between the title and the act of making music. Creative work often happens alone. You sit with an idea, make choices nobody else hears, and keep working until something feels finished. Yet much of what I wanted to express came from life with other people. With You By My Side begins to connect that solitary process with gratitude for companionship.

I would later write relationship songs with more detail and more willingness to admit where I had fallen short. This album comes before that deeper accounting. It holds the first, uncomplicated statement: sharing a life changes what difficulty feels like, and the person beside you matters more than the scenery around you.

For listeners moving through the catalog in order, this record closes the first rush of spring releases. The experiments were becoming albums with clearer subjects. One day later, Hockey Tunes would turn toward a different kind of love, the ridiculous and enduring affection I have for hockey and the people who share it with me.

With You By My Side gave one full record to love and partnership. Hockey Tunes, released the next day, stepped out of the romantic landscape and into the rink, where friendship, competition, irritation, and belonging produced a much rowdier kind of affection.