B-Side Guys

“The dog on the bed and a good fire going / and the music played / Chieftains and The Bothy Band / you took your last breaths to the sound of the bow.” That sequence is what separates “Sunlight” from most songs about losing someone. Malia Rogers doesn’t reach for abstraction. She gives you the room, the animal, the specific records playing, and lets the grief live inside those details rather than around them.

Rogers wrote the song on Ireland’s coast on the anniversary of her grandfather’s death, and the Celtic influence runs deeper than atmosphere. The Chieftains and Bothy Band are in the lyric itself, the music that was actually in the room when he died, which gives the song’s folk instrumentation a continuity with the scene it’s describing. The clawhammer banjo and fingerstyle guitar that characterize her Nova Scotia-raised, Ottawa-based sound carry that lineage naturally.

The lyric moves across time with unusual ease. Kid hands disappearing into his at the field guide pages, watching her walk across a graduation stage with both of them dizzy with pride, the grandmother’s hair falling out under a favorite brush. Each image lands as a specific memory rather than a representative one, which is why the cumulative weight of the chorus hits the way it does.

“The beauty of words is the love they contain / that’s a line I stole from you” is where the song becomes most self-aware about what it’s doing. Rogers is writing a tribute using language her grandfather gave her, which means the act of writing is itself a form of continuation. The Irish goodbye in the second verse, slipping out when nobody was looking, gets answered by the song’s final pages: nobody was ready for the party to end, but the gratitude for how it ended is real and specific and earned.