i already know

There is a point in healing when asking why starts to become another way of staying where you are.

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I don’t mean that the questions aren’t important. Some of them are enormously important. I’ve spent enough time in therapy to know that understanding why we respond the way we do can be transformative. There is something liberating about discovering that a behavior you spent years criticizing in yourself once had a perfectly reasonable purpose.

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But I’ve also discovered that I can turn understanding into an endless investigation.

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And I’m very good at investigating myself.

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I can take a feeling apart until there are pieces scattered across the table. I can trace a reaction backward through relationships and experiences and childhood and trauma. I can construct twenty different explanations for why something happened, then construct twenty different arguments against each one.

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Give me enough time and I can make uncertainty out of almost anything.

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That probably explains why i already know had to come after the boy in the photograph. Those two songs belong together for me… in fact, it was originally written as one song, but I quickly realized each part needed its own space to breathe and grow.

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the boy in the photograph is an investigation. It looks backward through old photographs and memories searching for the person I thought had disappeared somewhere along the way. I imagined memory as evidence and myself as the detective trying to solve a crime that happened decades ago.

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My favorite line from that song remains:

I kept interrogating memory.
Memory never confessed.

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And eventually I had to ask myself something uncomfortable… what if memory wasn’t confessing because I already knew?

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Not every detail. Not every explanation. Certainly not every answer. But enough.

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Maybe there comes a point when the detective has to stop rearranging the evidence. Maybe eventually you have to decide what you’re going to do with what you’ve learned.

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That’s where i already know begins.

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I’ve spent a remarkable amount of my life preparing for things that never happened. Conversations are probably the best example. Someone else may think we’re having one conversation… inside my head, I’ve already had twenty.

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I’ve anticipated what they might say. I’ve constructed my response. I’ve imagined how they might interpret that response. I’ve revised it. I’ve imagined the misunderstanding that revision might create. I’ve prepared for anger. I’ve prepared for rejection. I’ve prepared for silence.

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Sometimes I’ve prepared for endings…

Yet the actual conversation hasn’t even started.

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For a long time, I thought this was simply overthinking. Now I understand it somewhat differently.

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There is safety in rehearsal.

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If you’ve imagined every possible outcome, perhaps nothing can surprise you. If you’ve already experienced the worst ending internally, perhaps you don’t have to experience the terrifying vulnerability of simply waiting to see what happens.

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The problem though is that the body doesn’t necessarily understand that these things are rehearsals. I’ve lived through arguments that never happened. I’ve felt rejection from words nobody actually said. I’ve mourned endings that existed only inside me. I’ve experienced alternate versions of my life without ever leaving the room.

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That’s exhausting.

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And, at some point, all that preparation stops protecting you and starts preventing you from living.

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There is a phrase I’ve been thinking about a lot: You already know what to do. You’re just negotiating with comfort.

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When I first encountered that idea, it sounded almost empowering. Just make the decision. Stop hesitating. Move.

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But the more I sat with it, the more complicated it became, because sometimes what looks like comfort isn’t comfortable at all. Sometimes it’s familiarity. And familiarity can feel remarkably similar to safety, even when it hurts.

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We know how to survive familiar pain. We’ve practiced. We know where to stand. We know when to become quiet. We know what versions of ourselves the situation requires. We know which conversations to avoid and which parts of ourselves are easier to leave outside the room.

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The unknown doesn’t offer any of those guarantees. So we negotiate…

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Maybe if I wait.

Maybe if I explain it differently.

Maybe if I understand one more thing.

Maybe if I become a little easier to understand.

Maybe if I needed less.

Maybe if I can finally find exactly the right words.

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That last one is particularly familiar to me, because there is always another version of the sentence. There is always another draft. There is always another possibility where everything turns out differently.

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And if your mind is capable of generating a thousand endings, it becomes incredibly tempting to believe there must be one more you haven’t considered. The one where nobody gets hurt. The one where everyone understands. The one where you finally explain yourself perfectly enough that another person sees exactly what you see. The one where nothing has to change.

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I’ve spent a lot of time searching for that version…

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I’m not sure it exists.

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That’s part of what i already know means to me. It isn’t certainty - that’s important.

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I don’t suddenly know exactly who I am or where I’m going. I haven’t solved every mystery the boy in the photograph was investigating. There are things about my past I will probably continue discovering for the rest of my life.

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And there are wounds that understanding doesn’t erase.

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But there is a difference between not knowing everything and knowing nothing. I think I’ve confused those two things before.

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I’ve sometimes treated the absence of absolute certainty as evidence that I wasn’t ready to make a decision. Maybe I needed another conversation. Another explanation. Another insight. Another scenario. Another chance. Another answer.

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But eventually I started noticing something… underneath all those voices debating possibilities, there was another voice. It wasn’t particularly loud. It didn’t argue. It didn’t present evidence. It didn’t need twenty scenarios. It simply knew. And perhaps that’s why I had such difficulty hearing it.

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I’ve spent so much of my life believing that the safest answer must be the one I’ve examined from every possible angle that I didn’t know what to do with an answer that arrived quietly. No committee meeting. No closing argument. No cross-examination.

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Just…

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I know.

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That doesn’t mean acting on what you know is easy. Sometimes knowing is the easy part. Living accordingly is terrifying, because once you admit that you know something, you lose one of uncertainty’s greatest gifts:

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The ability to postpone what comes next.

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You can no longer say you’re waiting for clarity. Clarity showed up. Quietly. Probably much earlier than you wanted to admit. Now you have to decide whether you’re willing to trust it.

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And I think that may be one of the more difficult things healing asks of us. Not simply learning to trust other people, but learning to trust ourselves. To trust that the person who survived everything before this morning might actually recognize what he needs now. To trust that discomfort doesn’t necessarily mean danger. To trust that uncertainty doesn’t necessarily mean stop. To trust that walking away from something familiar isn’t the same thing as running away. To trust that choosing yourself doesn’t require proving that everyone else was wrong.

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Sometimes nobody has to be the villain.

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Sometimes something simply no longer fits the person you’re becoming.

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That’s why the relationship between the boy in the photograph and i already know matters so much to me.

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The first song looks backward. The second begins turning around.

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In the boy in the photograph, I’m standing over the evidence asking, “what happened to me?” By the end, I realize the boy I thought had disappeared had actually survived.

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And then i already know asks the question that realization eventually creates: now what?

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Finding him can’t simply become another thing to analyze. I don’t want to rescue the boy in the photograph only to make him sit through another interrogation. At some point he deserves to leave the room.

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So do I.

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Maybe that’s what I’m beginning to understand about healing. It isn’t the moment when all the voices finally agree. I’m not convinced mine ever will.

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Maybe healing is learning that they don’t have to. The frightened voice can be afraid. The analytical voice can keep asking questions. The part of me that wants certainty can continue drawing diagrams of every possible future. The part that grieves can grieve. They can all come along.

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They just don’t all get a vote anymore.

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Because beneath all that noise, there is another voice I’ve spent most of my life learning how to hear. And increasingly, when everything else finally becomes quiet enough, I recognize him.

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He doesn’t have another question.

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He doesn’t need another scenario.

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He isn’t asking memory to confess.

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He already knows.

the boy in the photograph

Sometimes I look at old photographs of myself and feel like I’m looking at a murder victim.

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I know how dramatic that sounds.

Maybe that’s why the thought stayed in my head for so long before I allowed myself to say it aloud.

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There are photographs where I recognize the place. I recognize the clothes. I remember the people standing just outside the frame. I know, intellectually, that the person looking back at me is me.

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But sometimes I don’t know him.

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Or maybe that’s not quite right… sometimes I know him too well.

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I know things he doesn’t know yet.

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I know which parts of him will become dangerous to reveal. I know which things he’ll learn to hide. I know how good he’ll eventually become at reading a room before deciding how much of himself is safe to bring into it.

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I know how quiet he’s going to become.

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And there is something profoundly strange about looking into the eyes o someone who doesn’t know what you know about his life.

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For years, I think I approached those photographs almost like evidence. If I looked long enough, maybe I could find the moment everything changed. Maybe there would be something in his expression. A clue. A before and an after. Something I could point to and say, “There. That’s where he disappeared.”

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Trauma does strange things to memory. There are things I remember with extraordinary clarity — the kind of clarity where I can still feel the temperature of the room — and other things that seem to exist only in fragments. Images without context. Feelings without dates. Reactions whose origins I can understand intellectually but can’t necessarily trace backward in a straight line.

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So I kept going back. Turning things over. Replaying conversations. Reconstructing moments. Trying to understand whether the person I became was always going to be this person, or whether somewhere along the way survival quietly took the pen and started writing for me.

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That is where my favorite line in the boy in the photograph came from:

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“I kept interrogating memory.
Memory never confessed.”

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Of everything I’ve written in the song, those may be the words that feel most true.

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Because I have interrogated memory.

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I’ve put it under the brightest light I could find and asked it the same questions in a hundred different ways.

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When did this start?

Why do I do this?

Why do I go quiet?

Why does my mind prepare for conversations that haven’t happened yet?

Why can twenty possible endings occur inside me while everyone else thinks we’re having only one conversation?

Why do I sometimes feel safer disappearing inside myself than risking being misunderstood outside of it?

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Memory has offered evidence. It has offered possibilities. It has offered enough fragments for therapy and time and age to help me understand things I couldn’t understand when I was younger.

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But it has never confessed.

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There was never one moment when everything suddenly made sense.

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And maybe that was the mistake..

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I thought healing meant solving the case. I thought if I understood enough about what happened to me, eventually I could draw a clean line from that boy to this man and explain every decision, every relationship, every coping mechanism, every silence along the way.

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But human beings aren’t equations.

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There isn’t always an answer at the bottom of the page… sometimes, there is only understanding. And compassion. Those have been harder for me.

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Understanding why I became certain things is relatively easy. Having compassion for the person who needed to become them is something else entirely.

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For much of my life, I was enormously proud of my independence. My ability to handle things. My ability to keep going when things became difficult. My ability to walk into chaos and somehow figure out what needed to happen next.

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People could depend on me. I could depend on me. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of those things. But OI’m beginning to understand that some of the qualities I thought were simply me may also have been extraordinary sophisticated ways of staying safe.

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The world thought I grew up. The truth is, in some ways, I just grew quiet.

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I learned how to function. I learned how to smile. I learned how to make people laugh. I learned how to succeed. I learned how to be the person who could carry more. And because I was so good at carrying it, very few people ever thought to ask how heavy it was.

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For a long time, neither did I.

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That’s part of why I didn’t want this song to be another quiet piano ballad. Quiet would have been beautiful. It also would have been wrong. My mind isn’t quiet when I look backward. It searches. It argues. It reconstructs. It finds something and immediately finds evidence against it. It opens one door and discovers six more behind it.

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So the boy in the photograph became stranger musically than much of what I’ve been writing lately. Harder. More experimental. At times intentionally unsettled.

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I wanted the music to sound a little like memory feels to me. Not chronological. Not obedient. Not particularly interested in resolving itself just because I would like it to.

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And somewhere in writing the song, something happened that I hadn’t planned.

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The metaphor changed.

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I had begun with a murder victim. That meant I had spent all this time searching for a death. Trying to determine when that boy disappeared. Trying to understand what killed him. Except eventually I had to confront a possibility I hadn’t considered.

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What if nobody killed him? What if he never disappeared? What if all those things I had interpreted as evidence of his absence were actually evidence of how desperately he had fought to remain?

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Maybe the silence wasn’t his grave. Maybe it was his hiding place. Maybe the independence wasn’t proof that he stopped needing anyone. Maybe it was how he made certain he could survive if nobody came. Maybe all those versions of me I’ve spent years examining weren’t the people who replaced him. Maybe they were the people he created to keep himself alive.

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And suddenly I wasn’t looking at a murder victim anymore. I was looking at a boy who had been waiting an extraordinarily long time for someone to recognize him.

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The detective in me still wants answers. I suspect he always will.

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There are questions about my life that memory will probably never answer to my satisfaction.

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There are things trauma changed that healing cannot go backward and undo

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There are versions of my life I will never know. I’ve grieved some of them. I probably haven’t finished grieving all of them.

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But I don’t look at the photograph quite the same way anymore because perhaps healing was never supposed to bring the person I would have been if nothing had happened. Perhaps that is another imaginary person I’ve been mourning

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The boy who actually existed did something much more remarkable.

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He stayed. Quiet. Imperfectly. Sometimes destructively. Sometimes brilliantly. He adapted. He hid. He became whatever he thought he needed to become. And he waited.

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I thought I had spent all these years investigating his death. It took me a long time to understand that I was witnessing his return.

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And now I find myself wondering about something I never thought to ask before.

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Not what happened to him. Not who he might have become. Not even what was taken from him…

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I wonder what happens next.

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Because maybe finding the boy in the photograph isn’t the end of the investigation.

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Maybe it’s the first time in his life that nobody else gets to decide who he becomes.

the one who wrote the songs

Every once in a while, a song arrives that changes something in you. Not because you wrote it particularly well, or because you finally found the perfect lyric, but because somewhere in the process it quietly tells you something you didn’t know until you heard it for yourself.

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That’s what happened with the one who wrote the songs.

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For most of its life, this song wasn’t called that at all. I was convinced it was going to be MY NAME IS TROY. In my mind, it was going to be a declaration — a cinematic moment of finally standing in my own identity after years of surviving, adapting, and becoming whatever each season of life required. It felt powerful. It felt triumphant.

The problem was, it didn’t feel true.

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Every time I tried to make the song bigger, it somehow became smaller. Every attempt to turn it into an anthem pulled it further away from what I was actually trying to say. I couldn’t understand why until one line appeared almost out of nowhere:

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“I just don’t think they’ve met the one who wrote the songs.”

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When I read those words back to myself, everything stopped.

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I realized I wasn’t writing about introducing myself to anyone else. I was writing about recognizing a part of myself that had quietly existed underneath every version of me the world had come to know.

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We all create those versions, don’t we? The dependable one. The strong one. The patient one. The one who always knows the answer. The one who keeps the peace. They’re not dishonest versions of us — they’re often the parts that carried us through seasons we couldn’t have survived otherwise. They deserve gratitude.

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But they’re not always the whole story.

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As I continued writing, I found myself thinking about every song I’ve created over the past several years. I had always assumed they were reflections of my life, snapshots of experiences, relationships, grief, hope, healing. Looking back, though, I began to wonder if I’d had it backwards all along. Maybe I hadn’t been writing songs to explain my life. Maybe the songs had quietly been leading me back to the person who was writing them.

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That realization changed eveything.

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The title changed. The ending changed. Even the music changed. What had started as a declaration slowly became a conversation, and then something even quieter than that. Instead of announcing who I was, the song became an acknowledgment that perhaps the person I’d been searching for had never actually been missing. Maybe I had simply spend so many years becoming what I needed to become that I’d forgotten to look beneath it.

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Ironically, that’s exactly how this song came into existence.

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Normally I rewrite endlessly. I’ll question every lyric, every melody, every phrase. I’ll convince myself something isn’t quite right and spend days trying to improve it. This song refused to let me do that. The first complete version made me cry — not because I thought it was perfect, but because it felt unmistakenly honest. I lived with it for days afterward, listening while I drove, while I ran errands, while I did ordinary things. I kept expecting to discover the line that needed rewriting.

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It never came.

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For the first time in my life, I found myself looking at a finished song and realizing I didn’t want to change a single word.

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That may be the greatest gift this song gave me.

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If you’ve followed my music for a while, you may notice that many of my earlier songs ask difficult questions. They wrestle with grief, identity, trauma, love, regret, and hope. They reach for answers without pretending they’ve found them. the one who wrote the songs feels different. It doesn’t answer every questions those songs asked, but somehow it no longer needs to. It simply sits beside them with a quiet confidence, as if to say, “We’ve come far enough.”

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More than anything, I hope listeners don’t hear this as only my story.

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I hope they hear their own.

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I hope it gently asks what became the question I couldn’t stop asking myself while writing it: Who is the one beneath your survival? Who is the version of you that has been patiently waiting while you became eveything everyone else needed you to be?

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Maybe you’ve never actually lost that person.

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Maybe you’ve simply been taking the long way back.

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When I finished this song, I realized something that caught me completely by surprise. I wasn’t only writing these songs for the people who would eventually hear them.

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Somewhere along the way, they had quietly became the map that led me home.

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And perhaps that’s who the one who wrote the songs has been all along.

honest answer

People asks each other, “How are you?”

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Most of the time, it’s a greeting, not a question. And most of the time, we answer the same way.

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“I’m fine.”

“Doing okay.”

“Can’t complain.”

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Sometimes those answers are true. Sometimes they are close enough. And sometimes they’re nowhere near the truth.

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I’ve spent a lot of my life becoming very good at translating what I actually feel into something that’s easier for other people to hear. Not because anyone asked me to. Not because I wanted to be dishonest. But because it often felt simpler than trying to explain what was really happening inside my head.

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How do you tell someone you’re emotionally exhausted without making them feel responsible?

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How do you explain that your mind has been having the same conversation on repeat for hours — or days — before you’ve spoken a single work out loud?

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How do you put language around a kind of loneliness that can exist even when you’re surrounded by people who love you?

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Sometimes there aren’t words… sometimes there are only songs.

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honest answer came from wondering what would happen if someone asked me how I was doing, and instead of giving the expected answer, I gave the real one. Not the polite version. Not the shorter version. Not the version that protects everyone else from feeling uncomfortable.

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The honest answer.

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Writing this song was uncomfortable. Sharing it feels even more vulnerable, because once something is spoken out loud, it stops being hypothetical. It becomes real. It becomes something another person can respond to — or misunderstand.

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That can be terrifying.

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But I’ve also started to believe something I didn’t always believe: honesty doesn’t guarantee connection. It doesn’t guarantee people will understand. It doesn’t guarantee they’ll stay.

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But without honesty, real connection never has a chance.

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If you’ve ever smiled because it was easier than explaining…

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If you’ve ever answered, “I’m fine,” because you didn’t know where to begin…

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If you’ve ever felt like the version of yourself everyone sees is only a small piece of what’s actually happening inside…

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I hope this song reminds you that you’re not the only one.

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Maybe the bravest thing we ever say isn’t something profound.

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Maybe it’s simply the honest answer.

another version of me

There is a version of me that most people know.

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He’s the one who goes to work, makes people laugh, solves problems, writes music, keeps moving forward, and somehow always seems to have everything under control.

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And then there’s another version.

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The one who lies awake replaying conversations that ended hours, days, or even years ago. The one whose mind never seems to stop. The one who has imagined a thousand different futures — most of them painful — that never actually happened anywhere except inside his own head.

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For a long time, I honestly believed everyone experienced life this way.

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I thought it was normal to carry dozens of conversations at once, to rehearse every possible outcome before speaking, to relive old memories searching for the moment where everything might have turned out differently. I thought everyone smiled while quietly carrying parts of themselves they couldn’t find the words to explain.

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Maybe some people do.

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But I’ve slowly realized that many of us also spend an incredible amount of energy convincing the world we’re okay when we’re not.

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Looking back, I don’t think the hardest part of this past year was my marriage ending.

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It was realizing how much of myself had remained hidden — even from the person I loved most.

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I’ve asked myself the same questions more times than I could ever count: What if I had found the words?

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Would he have understood what was happening inside my mind?

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Would he have recognized that I wasn’t pulling away from him — I was trying to escape the relentless noise inside myself?

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Would he have listened?

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Would he have believed me?

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Would anything have been different?

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I’ll never know.

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And I’ve finally made peace with the fact that I never will.

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This song isn’t an attempt to rewrite the past or to answer questions that don’t have answers.

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It’s simply the first time I’ve stopped pretending that the version of me everyone else saw was the only one that existed.

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What has surprised me most over the last few years isn’t how unique my story is… it’s how common it is.

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Every time I’ve shared something I thought was too personal, too painful, or too embarrassing to say aloud, someone has quietly reached out and said, “I thought I was the only one.”

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Those words have changed me.

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They’ve made me realize that silence doesn’t protect us nearly as much as we think it does.

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Sometimes it isolates us.

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Sometimes it convinces us we’re carrying something no one else could possibly understand.

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And sometimes all it takes is one person speaking honestly for someone else to realize they don’t have to carry their story along anymore.

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That’s what this song has become for me.

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Not a confession, but an invitation.

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If you’ve ever felt like there was another version of yourself that no one really ever knew…

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If you’ve ever smiled while quietly falling apart…

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If you’ve ever wondered whether sharing the truth would make people leave…

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I hope this song reminds you of something I’m still learning myself.

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Being heard is not the same thing as being a burden.

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You deserve to be known.

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And if these songs have taught me anything, it’s this:

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Every voice begins with someone believing it’s finally safe to speak.

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Maybe this song can be that place for someone else.

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Maybe it can be that place for you.

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It certainly has been for me.

the echo between us

There comes a moment when we stop asking what happened.

Not because every question has been answered.

But because we slowly begin asking different ones.

Who have I become?

What stayed with me?

What part of that life still exists inside this one?

That is where the echo between us begins.

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after the quiet

If the quiet between us explored the emotional distance that slowly grows between two people, the echo between us explores what remains after that distance has become part of the past.

The conversations have ended.

The decisions have been made.

Life has continued.

Yet memory has its own rhythm.

Some experiences never truly disappear.

They simply echo differently over time.

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memory changes shape

One of the surprising things about healing is that memory rarely stays the same.

What once felt unbearable slowly becomes bittersweet.

What once felt impossible to revisit eventually becomes something we can hold with gratitude.

That transformation became the foundation of this collection.

These songs are not attempts to relive the past.

They are attempts to understand what the past continues to teach us.

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carrying what remains

Throughout these songs, certain images return again and again.

Open skies.

Echoes.

Fragrance.

Architecture.

Space.

Horizons.

Rooms that feel different after someone leaves.

The invisible outlines people leave inside us.

These are not symbols of loss alone.

They are reminders that every meaningful relationship changes us in some way.

Even when it ends.

Especially when it ends.

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rebuilding through music

The companion warehouse recordings became an important part of this chapter.

Unlike the originals, which often invite quiet reflection, these versions explore movement.

Not movement away from the past.

Movement through it.

Industrial rhythms.

Cinematic synths.

Expansive spaces.

The same emotions transformed into something physical.

The warehouse versions are not escapes from vulnerability.

They are expressions of resilience.

They acknowledge that healing is rarely still.

Sometimes it asks us to dance with what once broke us.

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gratitude without forgetting

One of the ideas that kept returning while writing these songs was that gratitude and grief are not opposites.

They often exist together.

We can miss someone deeply while remaining thankful they were ever part of our lives.

We can mourn what ended while honoring what it gave us.

Many of these songs live inside that tension.

Not because it is comfortable.

Because it is honest.

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the second chapter

Although the echo between us continues the emotional journey that began with the quiet between us, it stands on its own.

This is not an album about returning to the past.

It is about carrying the past forward differently.

The echoes are no longer obstacles.

They become part of the landscape.

Part of the person.

Part of the music.

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what I hope you hear

I hope these songs remind you that healing is not forgetting.

It is learning to live alongside memory without allowing it to define every step forward.

If these songs encourage you to revisit your own story with a little more compassion...

If they help you recognize beauty where you once saw only loss...

If they remind you that rebuilding is possible...

Then they have already found the place they were meant to belong.

Because the quiet may have ended.

But the echo continues.

And sometimes...

That echo becomes the beginning of something entirely new.

the quiet between us

There are moments in every relationship that seem insignificant while they are happening.

A conversation postponed.

A question left unanswered.

A silence that lasts a little longer than it used to.

A room that somehow feels different even though nothing inside it has changed.

Most relationships do not end all at once.

They change quietly.

Almost invisibly.

the quiet between us was born from trying to understand those moments.

Not the dramatic ones.

The quieter ones that reshape everything without announcing themselves.

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an album about emotional distance

At its heart, this album explores the slow transformation of two people who once felt inseparable.

Not because love was absent.

But because understanding gradually became harder to find.

The songs move through memory, longing, identity, grief, vulnerability, hope, and acceptance without trying to simplify any of them.

There are no easy conclusions here.

No heroes.

No villains.

Only people trying to understand one another while carrying different histories, fears, and expectations.

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the language of the album

As the songs developed, I noticed they kept returning to the same images.

Rooms.

Architecture.

Weather.

Open skies.

Shadows.

Silence.

Distance.

None of these were planned.

They simply became the vocabulary through which the music learned to speak.

Over time, those images formed a world that felt larger than any one song.

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writing without certainty

I rarely begin with a complete story.

More often, I begin with a feeling I cannot quite explain.

Sometimes that feeling becomes a melody.

Sometimes it becomes a single lyric that refuses to leave me alone for weeks.

Many of these songs changed dramatically while they were being written.

Others remained remarkably close to their earliest forms.

Rather than chasing perfect answers, I tried to stay honest to whatever emotion first inspired each piece.

That honesty became more important than certainty.

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acoustic and warehouse

Many listeners ask why the album includes warehouse reinterpretations alongside intimate acoustic recordings.

The answer is simple.

Emotions rarely exist in only one form.

Some memories ask us to sit quietly.

Others demand movement.

The original recordings invite reflection.

The warehouse versions transform those same emotions into rhythm, atmosphere, and momentum without changing their emotional core.

They are not alternate songs.

They are alternate perspectives.

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more than a breakup album

Although many of the songs were inspired by the end of a marriage, I never wanted the album to become only about one relationship.

Because, ultimately, it is not.

It is about connection.

About misunderstanding.

About becoming invisible to someone who once knew you completely.

About discovering pieces of yourself after everything familiar has changed.

That is why listeners often tell me the songs remind them of a parent, a friendship, a sibling, or even a version of themselves they thought they had lost.

Once the music belongs to you, your story becomes just as important as mine.

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the beginning of something larger

When I finished the quiet between us, I believed I had reached the end of the story.

Instead, I had unknowingly written the first chapter.

Those songs opened the door to what has become the between series, an ongoing exploration of the emotional spaces that exist between people, between endings and beginnings, between silence and echo, between collapse and reconstruction.

This album will always be where that journey began.

Not because it answered every question.

But because it gave me permission to start asking them.

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thank you for listening

Whether you arrived here because one song found you at exactly the right moment, or because you've listened from the very beginning, thank you.

Music has always been the place where I try to understand experiences that are too complicated for ordinary conversation.

If these songs have helped you remember someone, grieve something, forgive someone, or simply feel a little less alone, then they have already become more than I ever hoped they would.

The quiet between us may have been where this journey began.

But every listener who carries these songs with them becomes part of where it goes next.

the hallway still exists

There are places that quietly disappear from our lives.

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We move away. Buildings are remodeled. Businesses close. Schools are torn down. Homes belong to someone else.

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And yet…

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They never really leave us.

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Sometimes all it takes is a certain smell, a photograph, or walking down a hallway that looks vaguely familiar, and suddenly you’re no longer standing where you are.

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You’re standing there.

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I’ve come to believe that memory doesn’t just live in our minds. It lives in places.

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Certain rooms become forever attached to the moments that happened inside them. They stop being architecture and become emotional geography. They become witnesses.

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That’s where the hallway still exists began.

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For me, the hallway in this song represents a place where something happened that fundamentally changed how I moved through the world afterward.

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Like many survivors, I spent years believing that healing meant someday reaching a point where those places no longer held power over me. But healing, at least in my experience, hasn’t meant forgetting. It has meant learning that I can walk through those memories without letting them define where I’m going.

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One of the reasons I wanted to write this song is because conversations about assault often focus — rightly — on women. But men experience sexual assault, abuse, coercion, and violence too. Far less often do they feel safe talking about it.

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There are many reasons for that. Shame. Disbelief. The expectation that men are always supposed to be strong. The fear that people won’t understand.

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Or simply not having the words.

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I know how isolating that silence can become.

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This song isn’t an attempt to relive what happened. It’s an acknowledgement that trauma has a remarkable way of attaching itself to ordinary places. A hallway. A parking lot. A classroom. A hotel room. A hospital corridor. A doorway.

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To everyone else, they’re just places. To someone who lived through something there, they become landmarks in an emotional landscape that can take years to understand.

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That’s why I wrote:

“the hallway still exists.”

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Not because I want to go back. Not because I’m trapped there. But because pretending those places don’t matter has never been what healing looked like for me.

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Healing has been learning that those places can continue to exist…

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Without continuing to own me.

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For years, I carried this story quietly. Not because it didn’t matter, but because I didn’t yet believe it belonged in the world.

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Then I watched Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testify before the Senate.

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Whatever people’s opinions may be about the events that followed, one thing stayed with me: I watched someone speak publicly about an experience they had carried for decades. I saw the vulnerability it required, the criticism it invited, and the extraordinary courage it took simply to tell the truth as she remembered it.

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Watching her speak didn’t give me my story. It gave me something I hadn’t realized I was missing: the belief that one day it might be safe to tell it.

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Looking back, I think that’s where this chapter truly began.

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Every voice begins the moment someone believes it’s finally safe to speak.

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If this song reaches someone who has carried a hallway of their own — whatever happened there — I hope it reminds you that you’re not alone.

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Some places become more than locations. They become witnesses.

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And sometimes the bravest thing we can do isn’t erase them. It’s to keep walking.

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-Troy

going, going, gone

Some songs begin with a melody. This one began with a single line that I wrote down years ago: “His fragrance filled the air.” It stayed with me because it captured something I hadn’t found any other way to describe.
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Scent has a way of bypassing logic. It doesn’t ask permission before it pulls you backward. For a brief moment, the past feels completely present again — not as a memory you’re choosing to revisit, but as something that simply arrives.
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When I returned to this poem, I didn’t want to explain it away. I wanted to preserve that feeling of uncertainty. Is it grief? Longing? Love? Regret? Maybe it’s all of those things at once. The lyrics leave space for the listener to decide.
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Musically, I imagined an arrangement that felt almost haunted — not frightening, but quietly inhabited by memory. The spaces between the notes became just as important as the notes themselves, allowing the song to breathe and linger the way a familiar fragrance does after someone has already left the room.
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Like many of my songs, this one asks more questions than it answers. Sometimes that’s the most honest place a song can live.
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You can listen to “going, going, gone” in the Music Catalog or on SoundCloud.
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Thanks for listening -
Troy