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2025 – Album – Handle Was My Name
Handle Was My Name
A record about love, loss, faith, and becoming
Handle Was My Name is a five-song EP released in 2025, but the truth is that these songs weren’t born all at once. They came from different seasons of my life — some written long ago and carried quietly, others arriving more recently when I was finally ready to say what they were asking of me. What binds them together isn’t time, genre, or volume. It’s intention. This is a record about becoming — not all at once, not cleanly, but honestly.
These songs live in the space between who we were and who we’re trying to be. They are about rebirth, growth, and love — not the polished version, but the kind that costs something. The kind that leaves marks. The kind that changes you whether it stays or not.
The opening emotional thread begins with absence. In Last Time Around, love appears briefly, almost accidentally — a glance, a smile in the rain, a shared warmth on a cool night — and then it’s gone. There’s no villain here, no dramatic ending. Just timing. Missed alignment. The quiet ache of realizing that something meaningful passed through your life and didn’t stay. This song doesn’t argue with that reality; it accepts it. It understands that some connections are real even if they are temporary, and that grief doesn’t always need an explanation to be valid.
From there, the record moves inward, into vulnerability and offering. Confident Love sits at the heart of this EP, wrestling openly with distance, doubt, and devotion. The body and the will don’t always agree. Faith and uncertainty share the same breath. Love here is not casual — it is given fully, even when the outcome is unknown. The phrase “my handle is my name” becomes a kind of confession: identity stripped down to what can be offered, not what can be protected. This song understands that loving deeply means risking disorientation — trusting your heart even when the map doesn’t make sense.
But love doesn’t always stay pure. Sometimes it corrodes. Cold Hard Cash is the record’s reckoning — the moment where tenderness gives way to anger, grief, and clarity. This song refuses to romanticize damage. It names betrayal, addiction, exploitation, and the hollow transactions we sometimes mistake for intimacy. There’s rage here, but also mourning. Not just for a person, but for what might have been. It recognizes the truth that some loves don’t die quietly — they collapse, and they take parts of us with them. And still, even here, there’s prayer. Even here, there’s a hope that something good might survive the wreckage.
Where reality becomes too heavy to carry on its own, imagination steps in — not as escape, but as preservation. Cougar and the Fox uses futurism, sci-fi imagery, and playful invention to do something deeply human: protect memory. This song imagines love surviving beyond time, beyond decay, beyond the limitations of the present. It’s tender and nostalgic, filled with the ache of wanting to move forward without losing what mattered. The future here isn’t about progress — it’s about holding onto connection, even as everything else fades. Love becomes a shared myth, something we tell ourselves so it doesn’t disappear.
And finally, the record turns upward. While I’m Here closes the EP not with certainty, but with surrender. After love has been found, lost, broken, and imagined forward, what remains is faith — small, fragile, and still choosing to kneel. This song doesn’t claim answers. It acknowledges hunger, doubt, and the quiet longing to understand why we’re here at all. It’s a prayer from someone still learning how to believe, trusting that light will come even if it hasn’t fully arrived yet. This is rebirth not as triumph, but as humility.
Taken together, Handle Was My Name is not a loud record. It doesn’t rush. It doesn’t beg for attention. It asks for presence. These songs were written by someone in process — someone who has loved deeply, lost honestly, questioned openly, and chosen growth anyway. They are not trying to entertain for a moment; they are trying to sit with you awhile.
If you hear yourself somewhere in these songs — in the longing, the anger, the hope, the faith that feels more like a seed than a certainty — then this record has done what it was meant to do.
Some things don’t need to shout.
Some things just need to be true.
— Jared
