“This album felt like making my first album, because that’s how nervous I was,” Boy Golden told the crowd at a show in Brooklyn, New York, in November 2025, months before the release of his fourth album, Best of Our Possible Lives. Any concerns were understandable for Boy Golden, the moniker of the Winnipeg-based singer, songwriter, and producer Liam Duncan. Best of Our Possible Lives opens a book of songs that took years for Duncan to find.
An exercise in self-discovery as a songwriter and an artist, roused by spiritual points, life lessons, existential and transitional revelations, Best of Our Possible Lives is filled with storytelling, says Duncan, who tapped into his own conceptions of reality, background, and philosophy of life, one grounded in Buddhist and Taoist beliefs.
“Once I had all the songs, it almost surprised me how much my worldview and my philosophy are woven through these songs,” shares Duncan, prompted by Buddhist texts, poems, and Zen Sanghas.
Duncan’s stories read like a heartland book of poetry from opening “Suffer,” opens on the first noble truth of Buddhism, or dukkha, the philosophy that suffering is fundamental, unavoidable, and a inevitable point that ultimately unites.
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A passage urging for presence, vulnerability, adaptability, and perseverance, “Like a Child” grazes world rhythms and Duncan’s dulcet tone with a reconstructed nod to Tom Petty—Well, I won′t back down, won’t back down again—and was inspired by a concept pulled from the core principles of Taosism, Dào Dé Jīng, stating that the softest thing that rushes over the hardest is water. “In that way, softness is harder than hardness,” says Duncan.
The message continues on the country-blues “Matter at Hand,” and “dealing with what is in front of you as reality,” while the only ballad on the album, “Eyes,” is fixed around the loss of Duncan’s friend and musician, Jory Strachan, who died in early 2025.
“The most universal spirit experience of all is loss,” says Duncan, who found out about Strachan’s death days before he was scheduled to record the album. “Not to be depressing, but you lose everything in you life. You can’t hold on. You can’t grasp anything. I find people moved by that song and connect with the feeling of confusion at all the loss that we have to deal with.”
By the midway point, “Cowboy Dreams” delivers a funkier, free-spirited gallop, cracking open connections and seeing oneself in others. One of two tracks co-written and featuring Ontario singer-songwriter Cat Clyde, the music video features both on horseback, something Duncan made believable by taking a month of riding lessons.
“Basically, the concept was riding horses and looking as cool as hell,” joked Duncan before performing the song at his Brooklyn show. “But to do that, you kind of have to know how to ride a horse.”
Another Clyde collaboration, the bluegrass-tipped “Moontan,” shifts between an older and younger versions of it describes the often long wait for something to happen—Come over / Darling, come over … Lord, you make me wait / I’m getting older.
Duncan felt a freedom to let these songs loose resulted by working with producer for the first time. Always his own producer, and helming projects for other artists, including fellow Winniepg artist, William Prince, Duncan tried something different with Best of Our Possible Lives, enlisting the help of Grammy-winning producer Robbie Lackritz (Robbie Robertson, Jack Johnson, Feist).
Of the 80 songs Duncan had filed in a demo folder, Lacritz picked 12 and also helped Duncan align with arrangements, and pulled legendary bassist Pino Palladino, who has worked with The Who, Elton John, Adele, and D’Angelo. “We argued about a couple of them,” says Duncan, “but ultimately, I think he won all the arguments. Sometimes you’re just not the best judge of your own work, and I trusted him. I’ve always self-produced my own albums, and I don’t know that I’m going to do that again for a while.”
After some pre-production with Lacritz, Duncan temporarily relocated to a converted garage hideaway in Nashville to finish off the songs and says he wrote 20 more songs during his retreat.
Best of Our Possible Life is as much about letting go as it is latching on to what’s most important. “I really like all of the things I’ve made so far, and putting them all out into the world,” Duncan says. “I had a goal earlier this year to do fewer things and do them better.”
Songwriting is also not as laborious as it once was for Duncan, who recently spent some time in Seattle with Clyde writing a song a day. “I don’t care if I write a bad song,” he says. “It doesn’t bother me. I’ll probably write another one tomorrow.” Strengthening his songwriting muscles, Duncan typically tries to write a song a week but generally produces more. “You just have to let go of your genius complex,” he says. “You’re gonna have days where you write some bad, sh—y, funny, silly stuff.”
Between his first album, If I Don’t Feel Better (2019), and his debut at Boy Golden, Church of Better Daze in 2021, Duncan is more relaxed around writing. “I still write songs that are meaningful and sometimes heart-wrenching,” he says, “but I don’t have to wring them out of myself.”
Growing up in Brandon, the second-largest city after Winnipeg in Manitoba, also guided Duncan musically. Before going solo, Duncan played as a side musician for several bands, including the Bros. Landreth and his first band, Middle Coast, which both left an impact. Though the music scene wasn’t as expansive in Brandon as it was in Winnipeg, he says it left him with an “alien’s eye view” of music, one that pushed him into exploring blues—slipped into tracks like “Bad Habits,” “Meadowsweet,” and “You Got It”—folk-rock, perhaps a touch of Creole and more genres. Duncan’s warm vocals also slip through some R&B on “Chickadee.”
“All the music I like is a lot of southern music, a lot of black music, a lot of music that has nothing to do with me,” he says. “I really connect with it, and then I make my version of that.” It’s something that confuses some people and even surprises him. “I can’t really figure out what this music is, because it’s a kid from Brandon trying to make a New Orleans-style groove. It doesn’t make sense, and I didn’t grow up with that.”
Closing on the title track is a reflection on love and how it’s often a work in progress. “I sometimes have trouble giving myself to another person, and I have trouble letting go of my own independent life,” he says. “The verses in that song are ‘Don’t complicate my life. I won’t tell a lie. I don’t like to compromise.’ And that’s me, but if you’re okay with that, come with me.”
Duncan continues, “It’s saying that in the best of our possible lives, we’re together, but that’s not always going to be the case. In an ideal world, we could be together all the time, but you’re not always going to want to come with me, and I’m not always going to want to do what you’re going to want to do. There’s some sort of acceptance in there that I’m still working on.”
More evidence of Duncan’s newfound freedom of expression and artistry is clear on “New Orleans.”
“That’s maybe my favorite song on the album, because it sounds the most like me,” he says. “To me, it’s [the song] is a place. That song is about the feeling of being so affected by the world around you that you don’t know if your dreams and aspirations are your own. I feel like that’s something we all deal with on our phones, on our little glowing boxes of horror.”
Often phased by an inundation of algorithms promising betterment, from supplements to pressures around getting fit or improving one’s career, a remedy appears for everything, which can take a mental toll. If Best of Our Possible Lives has taught Duncan anything, it’s that the small things, the simple accomplishments, and dreams, are part of the bigger picture.
“It’s hard to keep it clean, staring at a screen,” Duncan says, reciting a line from the song. “I want to dream my own dreams,” says Duncan, “and I know that my own dream has been to go to New Orleans. That’s mine. I keep that one in my heart.”
Photo: Paige Sara
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