Music Notion

Words: A. Murray.

Look, I’ve sat through a lot of blues rock over the years. Bar stages, festival fields, sweaty club rooms where the PA was held together with gaffer tape and good intentions. Most of it washes over you. Some of it sticks. “Gone Since Texas” sticks.

Nathan Bryce is the real thing. There’s no posturing here, no chasing a sound because it’s fashionable. This is a man who’s lived inside this music long enough that it just comes out of him naturally, the way it did with the players he’s clearly spent years listening to.

Candace Crockett turned those raw feelings into a lyric that landed finished on the first pass, written on a flight to Vancouver Island in one go. You believe it. The song has that quality where nothing feels placed or constructed. It just feels true.

Musically this is exactly where I want blues rock to go. The guitar has soul without showing off. The rhythm section keeps things steady and warm, the kind of playing that holds space for the vocal instead of competing with it. Bryce sings like a man who knows restraint is more powerful than volume, and he’s right.

The line that gets me every single time is “I’m in misery, while she’s in Missouri.” That’s old school songwriting. Economy. Precision. A whole relationship crumbling inside one rhyme.

Blues rock at its best has always been about feeling something true and transmitting it without flinching. That’s what this track does. No drama, no resolution, just the slow ache of realising you were already losing something before you even knew to hold on tighter.