Friends,

I’ve been trying to complete the song I’ve just released today since 2013.

It can be very difficult to release painful memories and emotions into words, to give voice to those words, and then to find the courage to share that voice with the world. Each song that I’ve shared from this new album has been a similar kind of trust fall: trusting myself enough as a communicator of my own story, and trusting you all to have open ears and hearts to hear it. But this song in particular is especially delicate because it’s about the year I lost my father to brain cancer.

Those traumatic months, and the months that preceded and followed, are chronicled in these three minutes and 38 seconds.

But my hope—my intention—is that the subject matter here doesn’t turn you off. Death is a part of life, and as you will hear, I did my best to capture not just the emotional arc of my father’s passing, but the fullness of this journey we all are on—the happy bits, the sad bits, the triumphs and defeats and everything in between.

If I’ve learned nothing else from my dad transitioning at such a young age, it is that a single year, a single week, a single moment, can completely reshape the trajectory of your story. Living through those unexpected transformations is a challenge to be sure. To have my life—my faith, my plans for my future—rocked so suddenly, so traumatically, and so unfairly will always be a source of great sorrow for me. Yet, it is what we make of such devastation that matters most, and this work requires courage, imagination, and help.

If grief has touched you recently, or if you’re like me and still processing a loss from some time ago, I hope this song can provide some of that help.

​“The Year That Changed Everything” is from my forthcoming album Ripples of the Past, which you can preorder now on Bandcamp (digitally and on physical CD) and iTunes and pre-add on Apple Music. The album will be available everywhere September 12. Lyrics are below.

With utmost gratitude,

- Ray