B-Side Guys

“Bluster” was recorded live in a 1900 schoolhouse using 1940s microphones, and that decision isn’t incidental. A song written ten years after a friend’s death, in a room already carrying a century of other lives, captured with equipment that belonged to a different era entirely: the past is not being avoided here. It’s being inhabited.

Beth Hataway and Johnny Veres wrote the song as part of the Andrew Lewis EP, a tribute to a friend lost to gun violence, and the lyric holds the specific shape of that grief without collapsing into elegy. The narrator arrives at something harder and more useful than mourning: “the best thing I could do for Andrew was to live my life a little fuller for him.” That’s the argument the song makes, and the lyric builds toward it carefully.

The verses move through disorientation and partial dissolution, “perception in a box with all your thoughts and no one else around,” before the chorus reorients around presence and possibility. “When you’re with me I can do anything” is the song’s hinge, the moment where grief becomes fuel rather than weight. The instruction to let go of fear arrives not as comfort but as necessity, the thing that has to happen in order to keep going.

The bluegrass and acoustic folk instrumentation, inflected by the Montgomery, Alabama roots that have always been part of Electric Blue Yonder’s DNA, keeps the production grounded while the harmonies between Hataway and Veres carry the emotional weight. The song earns its final lines: “time may wind down but I won’t lose you in it.” Not a promise to hold on, but to carry forward. There’s a difference, and the song knows it.