B-Side Guys

There’s a version of this title everyone already knows, the one that got away, singular, a person you lost track of. Northcote’s version adds a letter. “We’re the ones that got away,” Matt Goud sings, and that single “s” relocates who actually went missing, the pair itself, a specific version of two people that only existed together.

The evidence for that missing pair is all physical detail. A gas needle sitting on empty outside her house, headlights passing on a drive nobody wanted to end, a midnight run home from a place called Amigos. They danced alone inside a crowded room once, too, a lifetime folded into one song, which is its own kind of evidence for how much got built in a short amount of time. They wore each other’s clothes, liked the same bands, smoked out the window of her studio, and made a specific promise, never settle down, a stated pact they apparently kept long enough to build a whole shared identity around before it stopped being something either of them could return to.

“Got Away” comes from To Cherish, Goud’s seventh full-length as Northcote, recorded with producer Jesse Gander after the end of a real long-term relationship. The duo touring setup he’s built his career on, mostly just his voice against Stephen McGillvray’s guitar, translates directly here: nothing to hide the two central pronouns behind, no full band to soften how exposed “we” sounds by the last chorus. Eighteen years and a thousand shows into his career, Goud finally put a name to something that never quite had one: losing who you were with someone, a loss most language skips right past.