He’d spent all of his life with his ears wide open.

In his head, music never stayed in one lane. One moment it was symphonies swelling like oceans, the next it was R’n’B sliding along city streets at midnight. His thoughts jumped from Dylan’s gravelly poetry to a hint of rap, even the glossy noise blasted out on MTV. He never judged it much. But if it had a beat, if it made his body move, it had done its job.

Anything gets me up dancing, he mused one night, tapping his foot against the leg of his chair as he secretly listened to ABBA. As long as it’s got some beat.

When the music hit The spot, he didn’t just dance—he became something else entirely. He kicked and slid, wriggled and writhed, laughing at himself, feeling loose and alive. Like a big bear that didn’t care who was watching. His feet tried to dance like Jackson’s, his legs dared the splits, his hips swung with a hint of Elvis swagger. The kids laughed, and he loved that too. Music, after all, was meant to thrill someone.

But away from the dance floor, in his moments of reflection, he took inventory of himself the way songwriters do.
Those sounds had shaped him, softened him, hardened him, given him ice and given him fire.

But something else kept pulling at him.

When the room went quiet and the dancing stopped, when the lights were low and the world felt heavy, it wasn’t metal or rock he reached for. It was country.

Country didn’t shout at him—it talked. It told stories that sounded like his neighbours, his parents, his own reflection in the mirror. When times were tough, it lifted him up without pretending things were perfect. When he felt low, it soothed him, not with empty promises but with understanding.

There ain’t no use denying it, he finally thought, smiling to himself. Country’s got my soul.

He realised then why it mattered so much. Country could make you dance, but it could also make you think. It could conjure joy and regret, humour and heartbreak, sometimes all in the same verse. It never left him cold. It took him exactly where he wanted to go, even when he didn’t know where it would lead.

He still loved his funk (a bit), his pop (a lot), his Punk (less than Funk). And he would always love rock’n’roll. But when he sat down with a guitar and searched for something honest—something that connected—his fingers and ears always found their way.

Country wasn’t just a genre anymore.
It was the place where he thought he felt at home.

Recorded 2005, macbook, logic pro, solo