A companion piece to Nocturnes for Ordinary People

The demos are on autoplay on this page before I hit the studio, some are different styles but the albums arch is complete. Also another bonus, attached is my lyric book thats constantly being updated, theres more songs than the final playlist playing, but you can see my work through this past month. Final recording will be alot of work in a actual studio with one I signed a licenses deal with. Some of the demos have basic and repeated guitar playing, thats ok its just demos for a arch. Heading into the studio next week to record it all and unify the sound.

Five years gone:

There’s a folder on my phone I’ve stopped opening.

That’s where this one started — not as a lyric, but as a fact. A folder of old photos I couldn’t look at anymore, of a person I couldn’t quite claim as myself. Five Years Gone grew out of the same well as the songs on Nocturnes for Ordinary People, but it needed its own room. It’s less a story than an accounting — the kind you do alone, at night, when you’re trying to figure out exactly where the version of you that used to exist went, and who’s been standing in his clothes ever since.

I’m sharing it here as its own piece, separate from the album but built from the same material. Read it as a companion, or read it on its own.

I.
There’s a folder on my phone I’ve stopped opening,
a shrine to a man I used to impersonate.
The faces in it drift a little further every month,
like a photograph developing in reverse—
getting less like evidence, more like a rumor.
I used to know the exact blue of my own eyes.
Now I’m some rough draft of a person
God abandoned halfway through a sentence,
and I’m the only one left to proofread the thing

II.
Two thousand twenty-one, I think, was the last time
I laughed and meant it instead of just performing the sound.
After that it’s a highlight reel of rented rooms
and receipts I file under Things That Happened To Someone,
a closet full of decisions
that made perfect sense to a man
running on gas-station coffee and the specific
philosophy you develop alone at 4 a.m.,
a philosophy that evaporates, embarrassed,
the second the sun actually shows up.

III.
I keep an album like some private, unglamorous relic—
communion wafers of a man I apparently used to be.
The one who almost finished things.
The one who almost called his mother back
before deciding his silence was more interesting.
The one who was, for exactly one summer,
a person other people actually wanted at their table,
before I quietly excused that guy from every future dinner.
I still sit up some nights doing the accounting,counting the damage like a man reading his own eulogy
and taking notes for the rewrite.

IV.
Somebody asked me the other day what I looked like before,
and I laughed the practiced laugh,
because I genuinely couldn’t tell
if they meant my face or the entire architecture of my life.
Five years is long enough to lose a native tongue in.
Long enough that when I try to speak the old language now
it comes out mistranslated, over-formal, foreign—
some tourist-phrasebook version of myself,
still polite, still smiling,
still asking where the bathroom is
in a country I apparently used to own.

IV-B.
There’s a stranger standing in my clothes now,
doing a passable impression of my posture.
His hands hang off him like borrowed props,
heavier than mine ever were, unsure what they’re for—
an old man’s hands on an understudy who never rehearsed.
He wears my shoulders like a coat
tailored for someone with better posture and a future,
hunched up, private, superstitious, like a crow
guarding something it forgot it stole.
I don’t audition the parts of him I recognize anymore.
I just let him stand there, centerstage,
in the doorway of every photograph—
weeks, then months, then something closer to a career—
and I can’t quite bring myself to walk off either.
It isn’t that I hate the shape of him,
exactly. It’s that I can’t find the stitching,
the seam where the old me
quietly got written out of the script
and this one took over the lease
on a body he clearly never wanted,
reaching for things out of habit now,
never on purpose,
always for whatever’s closest,
whatever’s easiest to lose again.

V.
I keep waiting for a new photograph of me
that looks anything like 2016,
back when I wore my own life
like it actually fit,

like it was tailored, not borrowed,
like I hadn’t yet signed anything away.
But the calendar’s not a negotiation.
It just keeps turning,
and I’m here in clothes some other man wore out,
a bit player in a story
I apparently agreed to write
and don’t remember signing off on,
speaking a language
that used to be mine
in a voice
that used to be mine
about a man
I’m told
used to be me.

Heres a flipbook of songs I have chose from, you can see the ones I didnt choose as well, just too share my process

[doc id=’2333′]

Five Years Gone is a companion piece to Nocturnes for Ordinary People*, coming soon under Fracture & Form. Demos of each song in there own right are available at soundcloud