Andy Koh told B-Side Guys that he wrote the first song on his debut album at 17, the title track at 58, and is releasing the finished record at 60. “In between came marriage, two sons, and a career in pediatric oncology,” he said. “Music never disappeared, but it certainly got much quieter for a while.” That first song is “The Test,” the first real song of his life, and its lyric predicts that with enough time “this pain will dissolve.” The title track closes the record, so the oldest and newest songs hold the two ends of a span the rest of the sequence fills in, and the through-line is a voice that keeps talking to someone.

“The Test” began as four chords repeating and grew over the years into a song with a complex bridge, a breakdown section and a vocal melody that keeps changing shape while the harmony stays simple. Angular, rhythm-driven guitar and bright hooks carry it, a sound shaped by The Police, the band Koh was obsessed with at 17 and whose “Message in a Bottle” he was trying to match. The lyric holds two feelings at once. The narrator has wished to stab his partner with his own pain, then insists his love remains, and a late passage asks whether she can feel the tenderness that burns in him and the rage that sings. Each chorus ends by repeating “I fail the test,” which turns a confession of failure into a chant. That duality shapes every song after it, and the track order places early and late material side by side so the old songs and the new ones argue the same case.

From there the album plays as a series of conversations, each with a different listener. “My Side” confronts a former partner who keeps turning up where he stands, its refrain a question repeated until it becomes an accusation, with the narrator tired of “games that nobody wins.” “Make It Alright” turns to a woman who hates herself and answers with devotion: he loves her for what she has and what she lacks, asks her to love herself, and follows with a bare “I do.” The hook then reverses the roles, and he asks her to make everything alright for him. “Sing Into Your Heart” casts the relationship as a duet, asking a partner to be his melody and then his harmony because he hates “to sing alone,” a line that carries extra weight from a songwriter whose music went quiet for years.

“Good Things” addresses someone worn down, “living the life of Job,” the biblical figure who lost everything and kept his patience, and it answers with the album’s creed: “Good things come to those who wait.” From a man who held these songs for decades, the line has proof behind it. “Tell Me” stages the same patience as a dialogue, one partner insisting there is only wonder ahead and the other finding it all too bright, the two reaching toward a future where they “will be the light.” A late line asks whether she is a vision or a dream from his lonely times, which makes the song a request for proof that the good thing is real.

“Everything” widens the lens. Life is “oh so short,” every faked smile is a dagger, and the way out is to look into your heart, forgive yourself and start fresh, with a partner promising to play her part. “Fool’s Food” is the record’s one piece of theater, a narrator calling out to Juliet and vowing to be her Romeo for eternity while the hounds close in. Its title puns on “food for thought” and treats hope as a meal worth eating even if only fools order it.

The title track collects what the rest has been building. Written at 58, it drops the hesitations of the earlier songs: the narrator can “see through the show,” the walls are gone, and a late verse admits “Compass downed” and wonders whether he can take flight before settling on “I gotta do what’s right.” The chorus lands on taking the long way home. Bassist Sean Hurley and drummer Jake Reed join a group of top session players on the recordings, and Grammy-winning engineers Darrell Thorp and Michael Romanowski handled mixing and mastering. Koh told B-Side Guys he held the album until the songs sounded “the way I’d always heard them in my head,” and that working with those musicians and engineers “finally made that possible.”

He calls putting the songs out “a little nerve-racking,” since listeners who have never heard them will decide whether they connect. At 17 he bet that time would dissolve the pain, and Taking the Long Way is what that bet sounds like after four decades of waiting.

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Taking the Long Way is out now on all streaming platforms.