B-Side Guys

Steve Moss spent twenty years away from recording music. In that time, he built a career as a video game artist in Albany, NY, played local shows, and watched the world change in ways that make his new album “Another Go” feel less like a comeback and more like a carefully considered response to time’s passage. Released in December 2024, these ten self-recorded songs analyzes how life reshapes both confidence and conviction.

Minutes into “No Fear,” Steve Moss dismantles his own past certainties. “I used to have no fear / And every morning was the start of an adventure,” he sings, before tracking how that optimism eroded under the weight of experience. It’s a fitting opening for an album that arrives after a two-decade recording silence, examining the ways time reshapes both the art and artist.

“Another Go” measures the distance between youthful boldness and mid-life understanding across ten self-recorded tracks. Moss, who crafted every note in his home studio, brings an architect’s precision to songs about imperfection and doubt. On “Twice As Hard As Yesterday,” he charts the gap between adolescent ease and adult effort, while “One Less Thing (I Have To Worry About)” unpacks the small deceptions we use to navigate relationships.

The album’s emotional center emerges in its examinations of intimacy and vulnerability. “Gun-Shy” captures the precise moment when friendship might tip into romance, weighing desire against the fear of ruining something good. “Will I be rejected if I open up to you?” Moss asks, his hesitation palpable in each careful phrase. This same delicate attention to emotional detail surfaces in “Parallel,” where two lovers navigate their desires within paper-thin walls, their passion constrained by circumstance.

Between these relationship studies, Moss grapples with time’s acceleration. “Lost Along The Way” acknowledges the grinding effects of years while refusing to surrender to them. “The road behind me won’t define the one ahead / I’ll pave the way, and I’ll lay every stone,” he insists, though uncertainty shadows every declaration of determination.

“Overgrown” offers the album’s most nuanced take on self-acceptance, examining how personal quirks and perceived flaws can become defining features. When Moss sings about eyes reflecting back in mirrors and a brain left to admit certain truths, he captures that moment of recognition between who we thought we’d become and who we are.

These themes of time and transformation reach their apex in “Exhausted,” where Moss describes himself as “a train without a station” drifting on faint inertia. The weariness in lines like “hang some life upon these bones of mine” feels earned rather than affected, backed by two decades of lived experience between albums.

Yet despite its preoccupation with time’s passage, “Another Go” never sinks into mere nostalgia or regret. Even in “Silver Day,” with its bitter winds and falling rain, Moss finds alignment between personal emotion and natural world without resorting to tired metaphors. The lean runtime – forty minutes across ten tracks – reflects this economy of expression.

Throughout the album, Moss’s self-production choices support rather than overshadow his narratives. Playing every instrument himself, he resists any urge to overcomplicate arrangements that primarily serve his detailed character studies and self-examination. This restraint allows the psychological acuity of songs like “My Darling” to shine through unencumbered.

Twenty years after his debut, Moss has delivered an album that treats middle age not as a continuation of youth or its antithesis, but as its own distinct territory worth mapping in precise detail. “Another Go” suggests that while fear may replace fearlessness, and simple things might become twice as hard, the accumulated wisdom makes the trade-off worthwhile. In documenting this exchange with clarity and nuance, Moss has created something genuinely rare – an album about growing older that neither glamorizes youth nor romanticizes age, but examines the space between with clear eyes and sharp insight.