This much is no secret: Billy Conway played the drums. Over the course of four decades in American music his distinctive and profoundly musical style animated and elevated the work of Treat Her Right, Morphine, Twinemen, Kelly Joe Phelps, Jeffrey Foucault, Chris Smither, and a seemingly endless discography of others. He was an outsize influence – musically, existentially – on the players he worked with, offering a complete investment in the moment, and radiating a tangible joy.

Less widely known is that Billy wrote songs, quietly but steadily, throughout his life. He recorded a few here and there, and released a full album (Outside Inside) in 2019, but most of what he wrote – freewheeling songs about love, dogs, horses, dreams, booze, trucks, America, strange characters, old friends, his Grandma, the weather –existed only on four-track cassette demos, beer-party field recordings, or, in the case of some of the latest and most poignant, voice memos from within the shadow of a terminal cancer diagnosis.

A few months after Billy’s death in December 2021, his wife and musical partner Laurie Sargent gathered some of their musical comrades for a kind of working wake. Assembling a makeshift studio in the rambling old New Hampshire farmhouse where he’d spent his last few years, taking turns singing lead, the group of friends poured their love and grief into a collection of the remarkable songs Billy had left behind. 

From shambling rock ’n’ roll numbers to wry gospel, weeper ballads to darkly driving R&B, these songs form a portrait of a beautiful soul. They telegraph the free-range nature of Billy’s mind, the heaviness and lightness which he wore in hard-won balance, turning always toward wonder. The songs overflow with gratitude, humility, willingness to laugh, and celebration of community: the central pillars of the life he made and shared. 

I’m gonna go now 
Somewhere I don’t know how
No shadow cast, I guess I’ll disappear
But it helps if you know 
The river will flow further on
A little further on