B-Side Guys

Memory distorts in real time. Ceylon Sailor’s “When I Was By Your Side” captures that peculiar phenomenon where nostalgia begins forming even while the moment being remembered still technically exists. KM Sigel has crafted a song that feels simultaneously ancient and immediate, like discovering a mixtape that somehow contains music from your own future.

The Brooklyn quintet’s commitment to analog recording serves the song’s temporal confusion perfectly. Nothing here sounds digitally pristine—instead, the track breathes with the slightly unstable warmth that comes from tape saturation and room tone. Sigel’s acoustic guitars get pushed through distortion until they achieve that perfect balance between clarity and chaos, while Kieran Kelly’s drums maintain the organic imperfections that make each hit feel like an event rather than a sample.

Ceylon Sailor’s orchestral touches—Dave Long’s trumpet lines weaving through Andrew Wood’s keyboard textures—create layers that reveal themselves gradually, like details emerging from a developing photograph. The arrangement builds through accumulation rather than force, adding elements that feel discovered rather than composed. This mirrors how memory works: new details surface unexpectedly, changing the entire emotional landscape of what we thought we understood.

Sigel’s vocal approach embodies the “painful optimist” persona he describes, finding ways to celebrate connection even while documenting its dissolution. His delivery carries that specific weight of someone trying to convince themselves that things were better than they actually were, or perhaps that they were worse than they actually were—the truth becomes less important than the feeling of having felt something significant.

The song exists in Ceylon Sailor’s sweet spot where indie rock’s emotional directness meets chamber pop’s textural sophistication. They’ve created something that sounds like it could have emerged from any point in the past thirty years while remaining distinctly contemporary in its emotional complexity. The past becomes a country you can visit but never quite inhabit again.