For every song of mine that people have heard, there are about 10 that no one but me knows ever existed.

I imagine it’s about the same for every songwriter out there.

You never want to tell everyone everything. You have to say just enough.

Sometimes, it’s easy to make the choice to stop at a certain point.

But most often, for me, it’s a complicated, emotional process of deciding where the story ends or which songs I choose to keep and which ones get cut.

When it came time to release my first recordings in “So Long, Lonesome Drunk”, I had to make and struggled with that kind of choice.

See, I meant for the album to somewhat tell the story of my sobriety. For those who don’t know, I was an alcoholic from the time I was about 16 until I was 27. For more than a decade, drinking was my main pleasure in life above all else.

But after losing a close friend because of how much it all had changed me over the years, I finally quit. And as of today, I’ve been sober more than 7 years.

But back in 2019 when the album was released, it had only been two years. And at that time, I was with a wonderful woman who helped me get myself right again. However, the memories and bitterness from the years of when I drank and mistreated and neglected her understandably lingered.

This led to our amicable split and her moving out before the album was ever released.

And sitting in her empty room in our old house, feeling this emptiness in me, I thought about drinking.

Instead, I sat down with my guitar and wrote the song that would eventually become “5 years Gone” (“eventually” because I wouldn’t change the title and actually make a demo until 2022, five years into my sobriety from alcohol).

While I decided to keep it off the album — and have never formally released the song in any way, though a few people have heard the demo — I’ve always had a fondness for it, and appreciated how it got me through that one moment in time when I didn’t know if I would be okay.

You can listen to that demo now in the video below.

Maybe it’ll get you through one of those rough times someday too.

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