On Friday, January 19^th, 2024, Nate Silas released his new single called “Wandering Lunacy”. Silas is a singer-songwriter and folk music artist from Langford, British Columbia, who uses lyrics as a way of storytelling. This song is his first time collaborating with a producer, and focuses on the story of his late friend, Shaunah. All proceeds made by the single will be donated to the international organization for grieving families, The Compassionate Friends.

Silas is connected to Peterborough through his parents’ experience at Trent. They had met on their first day of university and have now been together for 44 years. The beginning of their love story was set in Peterborough, and they even held their wedding reception at the Pig’s Ear tavern. Silas remembers getting an annual “Peterborough tour” while visiting family each summer growing up, but hasn’t been to Ontario in about a decade.

While he did his undergraduate degree at the University of Victoria, Silas was—on a technicality—also a Trent University student for a short period of time, as he studied abroad in Freiburg, Germany, through a program organized by Trent, but contributing to his degree in BC. Convoluted, he admits, though his parents were ecstatic at a second generation of the family attending Trent, if even for one semester and only in name.

After graduating, Silas did an internship in Berlin and, upon returning to Victoria, he quickly realized that he didn’t feel that he was challenged in his career there and moved to Korea to teach English for a year. As a product of this travel-based “escape velocity”, he moved to London, England, where he would go on to live for seven years before his recent move to the Cornwall region.

As part of life in the U.K., Silas works in education as his “day job” while continuing to pursue his career in music. He started putting his music online after a breakup in the summer of 2016, establishing a routine of writing, recording, and posting a song on YouTube at the end of each month. In 2022, his wife got him studio time as a Christmas gift, which he used to create “Anonymous”—a song about the figure of “divine feminine”.

He started taking singing lessons from there, which led him to his music mentor Polly Scattergood, who inspired him to promote this upcoming single.

When asked what he enjoys most about creating music, Silas replied “honestly, probably, all of it.” In our discussion, he emphasized music’s limitless elements, and the possibility that the medium provides for connection. 

“Even as one person, I’ve enjoyed doing three-chord Blink-182 songs with my friends in a garage, and playing a folk session with people in their 70s”, he told me.

To fully understand “Wandering Lunacy” there are some basics of Silas’s past one needs to know. Silas’s hometown of Langford, on Vancouver Island, has doubled in population since his childhood spent at the “edge of Suburbia”— as he liked to call his parents’ cul de sac. The “Dukes of Hazzard-esque scene” of his formative years fostered a “weird identity” due its short distance from Victoria, while still keeping a smaller community. “So many people, in Canada especially, relate to the idea of the not-quite-small-town but not in the city,” Silas said.

He felt like an “outsider” growing up, especially in middle and elementary school. Silas wasn’t able to form deeper connections with a “close circle of friends” until high school, when he gained more of an interest in music and learned to play the bass. Making music started as a “bit of a reaction” to his peers’ interest in rap music—a taste that he did not share at the time. 

At 13, he and his friends formed their own pop punk band, which led to them being defined as the “rock kids.” His involvement in jazz, concert, and rock band throughout his high school years became “all-consuming” and “dictated [his] timetable.”

Music also established the “action” in downtown Langford—the site of all-ages shows. Older local bands, or the occasional small band on a low-budget tour, would take the stage at pubs each weekend, which became a staple for Silas and his friends. 

“For a lot of people, teenage years are the absolute worst time of their life,” but Silas holds “positive memories of high school being a really inclusive time.” He now recognizes that he was either “extremely fortunate” to have this experience, or had been “too clueless to notice” the downsides of his time in high school.

Having “played it safe” growing up, Silas’s teenage years served as a “time of taking chances”; an era of trial-and-error to see what fit. This not only applied to his courage to perform and participate in music, but also to putting himself out there to get to know people.

He saw the packed halls of his overpopulated school as a “sea of peers”—“a natural environment in which you can connect with people.” Silas attributes the depth of these relationships to the unconscious vulnerability involved in connecting: “you let yourself be vulnerable with your peers as a teenager, in a way that you don’t even realize.”

Along with this philosophy, Silas highlighted the novelty associated with many teenage interactions. “So many [of the] conversations you have as a teenager, you’re having for the very first time”—conversations that will eventually be repeated enough to become formulaic.

Earlier in his high school career, Silas met Shaunah—an “old soul” who he bonded with after recognizing their “kindred spirit of thinking of other times and other places.” Shaunah was a “charmingly perky”, yet unassuming, “quick-witted” individual who loved the culture of the late sixties and early seventies. She also “wasn’t a one trick pony”; along with her musical interests, she played an active role on her school’s soccer team and was known for her vintage Peugeot bike. 

He shared that their analog friendship was fuelled by sharing physical music. Silas remembers lending copies of CDs to each other as something incredibly meaningful for their connection. Though “passing a medium back and forth” subjected the albums to damage over time from multiple owners, these blemishes contribute to a disc’s “sentimental value” in a way that today’s predominantly digital method of sharing music can’t replicate. 

Silas learned of Shaunah’s passing while on a video call with a friend, after which he needed to “convince [himself]” by typing her name into his search engine. This experience caused Shaunah’s death to change from an “abstract concept” to a devastating reality. He vividly recalled crying heavily after seeing photos of her online, which he described as a sudden realization “that this was someone [he] was never going to see again, other than in photos.”

Silas shared that he seems to have, what he calls, a “narcissistic tendency” when it comes to thinking of the lives of people he has connected with. He went on to describe this phenomenon “when [he doesn’t] see people, they’re in the last place [he] saw them, living their own life, and that [they] could pick up where [they] left off.”

Based on the fact that he and Shaunah had fallen out of touch over the years, he took a while to come to terms with the reality of her death. Silas that coping with the deaths of people he saw on a regular basis had an “immediate effect” in the grieving process, while the distance in Silas’s friendship with Shaunah “initially made it seem not real”—making it much more difficult to accept.

Not only does their lack of communication over the years cause a lack of immediacy, but Silas described the experience of grieving a teenage friend as creating “an emotional scarcity”: “the value of the memories goes up, because there won’t be any more produced.”

Silas’s experience in education has given him the reflex to find a lesson in every situation he goes through, which led him to the “cheesy, ‘Hallmark’” rule that “you should treat every interaction like you might never see that person again.”

Silas says that creating the song became a part of the healing process of grieving the death of his friend, as knowing that he had created something for her had “stopped [him] from getting into a deeper sadness.”

He hopes that the meaningful lyrics are able to lift people's spirits, and believes that sharing “Wandering Lunacy” will be a “force for good.” Rather than “dwelling on sadness and loss”, this single is “meant to be as uplifting as possible. Acknowledging that sadness, certainly, but also just being enriched by those memories, having had that connection.”

In making “Wandering Lunacy”, Silas wanted all elements of the song to be “true to Shaunah”, and accurately portray that the lyrics are “about a real person who was born, and lived, and died.” The song references Shaunah’s tendency to messily cut her own brown hair, the “crumbling school” that they met in, and their evenings spent dancing together at Langford’s famed all-ages shows.

Even the song’s title is inspired by a part of Shaunah’s life—her personal email address. During Silas’s “experience of crying very hard when [he] saw the old photos on MySpace”, he noticed her email address linked on the page.

In Silas’s eyes, the title conveys our general uncertainty about death. “No one knows for sure what happens when we die, whether that’s just it, or we become ghosts, or if we ascend to a heaven, or a nirvana.” Silas continues, “I liked the idea that your spirit, your particular lunacy can kind of wander—whether it’s here on Earth, through the universe, or through the pearly gates.”

Silas admits that he “[wishes he] could take more credit for it”, and believes that the combined metaphorical meaning and connection to Shaunah makes “Wandering Lunacy” the perfect title. He joked that “you can’t pay someone to give you a better title than that.”

The outlier in the single’s truthful lyricism is “grabbed a pen and tried to draw you, then I remember how bad I am at drawing”, which is coincidentally Silas’s favourite line from the song. He admitted to not being very artistically-inclined when it comes to the visual arts, but sees the lyric as a way to “bring in humility and humour”, and added that the line itself was potentially “a joke to cheer [himself] up.” 

Though the line isn’t based in a real experience, it alludes to Shaunah’s real passion for art. One of her drawings is even featured in the right corner of the single’s cover art on blue paper. Silas thought that this specific piece was a fitting portrayal of Shaunah’s “delightfully mad” personality and the influence that surrealist artists, like Salvador Dali, played on her personal art style.

Silas credits his wife for the photo used for the cover of “Wandering Lunacy”, as it was the standout shot of three different photoshoots done while visiting family in Langford. It features mountain scenery, along with a “reflective” expression on his face that encapsulates the melancholic subject matter of the song.

The playground setting was “older, more familiar, and had more character” in comparison to the “more bland” modern additions to Silas’s hometown, and was also a part of the “old Langford” that Shaunah would have recognized.

Along with the setting, Silas’s outfit is a hint towards his high school self, while also featuring the Trent logo. The vintage, collared Trent shirt was a staple in Silas’s teenage wardrobe, and the multicoloured, striped coat is directly from an inventory sale at his former high school’s drama department.

A mutual friend, Sasha, “inspired [Silas] to do more with the song” by showing it to Shaunah’s mother, who responded with gratitude and support. This “’green light’ from Shaunah’s mom filled [Silas] with a lot of confidence”. Silas explained, “I worry a lot about doing wrong by people, I always want to make sure that my actions are having a positive impact”, which is why he hadn’t shown Shaunah’s mom earlier, as he was anxious that it would be upsetting for her.

Any proceeds made from “Wandering Lunacy” will be donated to Compassionate Friends: a “true” not for profit organization for parents who have lost a child at any age. Silas chose this organization specifically because their available supports have been really vital for Shaunah’s mom after Shaunah’s passing, and he added that “it’s against the natural order for the old [to be] burying the young.” The international component of Compassionate Friends made it the perfect fit, due to his distance from his family in Canada while he resides in England.

“Wandering Lunacy” serves as an ode to Silas and Shaunah’s platonic love filled with shared interests and “artifacts” and shows Silas’s unique ability to convert such intense grief into something so beautiful. 

As someone who has experienced a number of losses in the past year or so, “Wandering Lunacy” is a song that really resonates with me, as it provides a comforting lens on something so dark. In talking with Silas personally, his understanding of grief is striking and incredibly relatable, and I believe that his lyricism in this song is able to convey his experience of loss in a very genuine way.

‍“Wandering Lunacy” is now available for streaming on Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube Music, and all major streaming platforms.