B-Side Guys

William Hinson refuses to confine his best friend to memory alone. “Keaton” treats loss not as absence but as transformation—the deceased friend becoming sunshine, wind, the environmental conditions that surround and sustain rather than what’s been permanently removed. For the Winston-Salem native whose In Case of Emergency! album documents life unfolding on the road away from familiar places, this track represents his most personal work, an attempt to preserve not just grief but the laughter and love that grief can obscure if you let it.

Hinson describes the song as his method for keeping memory alive beyond mourning, and that intention shapes the folk rock approach. His broad sweeping sonics pull from The Beatles, John Mayer, and The 1975—artists who understand how to balance emotional weight with melodic accessibility. The track doesn’t wallow in tragedy or sanitize it through forced optimism. Instead, it acknowledges continued connection despite physical absence, the strange phenomenon where someone who’s gone still influences daily experience through persistent presence rather than haunting.

The years spent touring the United States inform Hinson’s understanding of how grief travels. Loss doesn’t stay contained in the place where it happened; it follows you, reshapes itself based on new geography, finds expression through different landscapes and weather patterns. Feeling someone in the wind isn’t metaphor for Hinson—it’s literal description of how certain people remain woven into sensory experience long after they’ve died. His career evolution has played out in real-time through singles released over the past two years, fans experiencing his musical and lyrical development as it happens rather than retrospectively.

Hinson’s folk rock framework provides sturdy foundation for examining loss without sentimentality, treating death as fact that requires integration rather than resolution. The song accomplishes what he hoped—preserving his friend not as frozen memory but as living force that continues informing the person Hinson is today.