(click the image above to go straight to the song)

January 2026 was a difficult time. Just before new year’s, I began having severe pains in my breastbone, like my bones were being dissolved in acid. A scan revealed cancer, not just in my breastbone, but also in my ribs, my right femur, and my L3 vertebrae. The cancer was causing cracks and holes in the bone.

My prostate cancer oncologist broke it to me bluntly (at my request). The metastatic prostate cancer I thought I’d beaten, despite only having a 30% chance of doing so, had apparently gotten into my bones. This is quite common, especially for the hyper-aggressive type that I had. He said that I maybe had two years left to live and each day of that two years would be worse than the day before. My bones would become so brittle that everyday tasks would become impossible. They could help manage the pain, but that’s all they could do.

I asked the doctor, “what if it’s lymphoma? I’ve had follicular lymphoma for more than 20 years and it was found in my bone marrow.” The doctor said, “it’s not. Your lymphoma has been dormant for 20 years and none of your scans show that changing. It’s the prostate cancer for sure. But we’ll do a biopsy on your sternum to make sure, just as a technicality.”
When I pressed him on giving me the odds that it might be lymphoma, he said, “2% chance of that, and that’s generous.”

I had written a song about my previous cancer journey, where I thought I’d beaten the 30% odds I was given.

That song is in two parts - the first part being how I had reacted to the cancer diagnosis and the second part about Pete and Bas and how Pete’s example of living life to the fullest despite having to fight cancer had turned my life around.
I wanted to add a third part to it, angry and defiant, screaming at the unfairness of the world, but determined to live life fully in the days I had left.
I contacted 91Shots, one of the two guys who make all the beats for Pete and Bas, to see if he’d supply the music for this new chapter.
We worked out a price, then put the project on the back burner. I wanted to wait for some more test results to come in before I started writing.
Jo (his actual name) said no worries, we can start whenever.

My husband Rob was very supportive, as always, and I knew I’d be relying on him to help me through this. But complications from an outpatient procedure landed him in hospital with two potentially fatal kinds of sepsis at the same time. The infected blood got into his brain and caused delirium, making him unable to distinguish reality from fiction and was often unaware of where he was or who he was with. I stopped worrying about my own condition and spent my time attempting to keep Rob in the real world and trying to figure out how to run the household, something that Rob had always done in the past.

They did the biopsy on my sternum. In spite of the 2% odds, they didn’t find any prostate cancer, only lymphoma. The doctor was shocked, but insisted that the prostate cancer was surely responsible for at least one of the other places they’d found cancer, so he ordered a full body scan… and it only turned up lymphoma. I had beaten the cancer that had tried to kill me. This one that I was now dealing with was much less severe and treatable. There’s still no cure, but with treatment, I can live another 20 years or more.

I contacted 91Shots and told him that I wasn’t going to need to add to my song after all, as things had changed and the project as I had envisioned it no longer made sense. He replied that his laptop had crashed and he couldn’t make music at the moment, anyway. So that all worked out.

I talked to my lymphoma oncologist and we set up a schedule for my chemo treatments. Once every 28 days, I’d go in on back-to-back days and they’d drip a litre or more of “good poison” into my body to kill the cancer. Fun.
I sent Pete a message asking him for any tips or advice on what to expect, as I know he’s been through chemo himself. He gave me lots of advice and that eased my nervousness a bit.

A few days later, out of the blue, he said that I should check out some new music that his mate Ryan was making. He thought I’d like it. So I found it and had a listen…

There are moments where my concept of what music can be is suddenly changed forever, and I can divide my musical life into “before I heard this thing” and “after I heard this thing.” This was one of those moments. Ryan managed to blend at least three genres of music into a new thing entirely and the more I listened to it, the more I got from it.
And, true to my nature, I instantly started working out a handbell arrangement for it.
I contacted Ryan, introduced myself, explained that I’d been turned onto his music by mutual friend Pete, and that I loved the song so much that I wanted to adapt it for handbells.
Now, I know from experience that this request is often met with “what?” or simply ignored because they don’t think it will work - or they don’t know enough about me to know that I could do their music justice on bells.
So I suggested to Ryan that he talk to Bas, since I’d already adapted two of Bas’ piano pieces for bells and he was quite happy with the results.

A few days later, I got a note from Ryan saying that he’d had a chat with Basil, who had very good things to say about me. Apparently, Bas said that I was a man of “exceptional character.” Wow. I’m still humbled by that, especially coming from Bas, who I could say the same about.
Ryan said that he talked to the bigwigs at his record label and they said it was OK to go ahead with a handbell arrangement.

I got it written, brought some bells home, and spent a day filming all the parts, then stitched them all together.

Ryan’s mind was blown by this and that kicked off a string of email conversations about all kinds of things. I had felt a connection to him from the first few seconds of “Next to You” and as we became more acquainted, I finally asked him about his backstory. I said that I could hear in his voice that he’d been through some tough times, but he made it out the other side and was thriving. I said that I needed that example in my life at the moment, as I was about to go through chemo while my husband was hanging on for his life in hospital as well.
“He’s been through some tough times'“ is a huge understatement. His story is harrowing, heartbreaking, and filled with bad decisions. But he made it and now he’s got his life on track and making some amazing music. I absolutely needed that example for myself. Our situations were very different, but just as dire, and he gave me hope that I too could find the light at the end of the tunnel.

That brought me back to the idea of writing a song - but not a continuation of my previous one. This one felt like a new thing, something that was less angry, more hopeful. And I knew I’d need a new beat maker, as 91Shots does angry and defiant really well, but joy and hope seem to have escaped him, at least in the music I’ve heard him produce. But Ryan’s music was full of hope, even though you could clearly hear the struggle in there. But would a multi-platinum artist with nearly 400 million streams to his name even want to work with a rank amateur like myself?

Around this time, Ryan let me know that he had just gone through a huge family crisis, and while I will not divulge the specifics here, I’ll say that I can’t even imagine the level of grief he must’ve been going through. When he told me what had happened, it felt like a punch to the gut. I felt physically ill from hearing about his pain. That kind of connection has only happened to me once before (hi, Jimmy!) and honestly, it freaks me out a little.

At first, I thought that I’d better put my song project on hold and give Ryan a chance to recover from his grief. But then I thought that if he’s like me, this kind of project is the sort of thing that could help him work through the grief, using music as a distraction and therapy. So I contacted him, pitched my idea, and acknowledged that it might be much too soon. He immediately sent me his phone number and said, “call me".

I was on my way to an acupuncture appointment at the time, but we chatted for about half an hour. Some of that half hour was me asking him to repeat things, as his Irish accent is quite thick and I wasn’t used to it yet. But we talked about the song, what kind of vibe it should have, what it would be about, and we settled on a price. I hung up just as I walked into my appointment - and one hour later, I already had a video in my WhatsApp of the hook with him singing on it (bonus!!!) as well as a bit of nonsense-syllable rapping to give me an idea of what kind of flow might fit the beat. Amazing that he got this together so quickly.

Full disclosure- I loved the beat, but I wasn’t sure that it was “me.” I’m a 1980s synth-pop kinda guy and this beat was pure funk. But Ryan explained that he made it while picturing me leaving the clinic with clean test results and strutting with this look on my face like, “I am back, baby!”
And that’s all it took. A few more listens and I could absolutely imagine myself hopping on this beat and doing something with it, even though it was way outside my comfort zone. I went home and started writing lyrics.

I’ve written two other rap songs in my life. The first was a song about handbells, which I used as the opening for the Classic Bronze handbell festival. I performed that literally one week after being on stage with Pete and Bas, rapping “Bish Bash Bosh” with them. My song was much, much easier than that and it got a great response at the festival.

The second song was the “F Cancer” song I linked to earlier. I wrote that over two afternoons on a handbell cruise to Alaska.
And honestly, if I had just been doing this song myself, I’d have probably done it in a few days as well. But I was working with a professional and the level of quality needed to be much higher to justify his involvement. Also, I knew a bit more about the craft of rap lyrics by this time and I understood how and why things are written certain ways. I can also tell you that writing rap lyrics isn’t that hard, but writing well-crafted rap lyrics is insanely difficult.

I wrote, re-wrote, edited, changed, shifted, altered, and tweaked the lyrics for several weeks, even right up until the day before they were recorded. I go back and look at the early versions and I cringe a bit. The story was there, but it was rough, haphazard, unpolished.

This was the first verse of the song in the early days:

Step back.
Have a look at the scene, I said
Get back.
I need some room to breathe, and these
Setbacks
Tryna bring me down, I don’t
Wanna hear the odds, they just a number to me.

That’s how the song started. I was never really happy with it, but I couldn’t figure out how to make it better.
Then Ryan sent me an instrumental track to practice delivering the vocals and he accidentally put four bars too many at the beginning. Rather than have him re-do it, I wrote four more bars in front of my existing lyrics, setting the scene in the doctor’s office, explaining the story’s origin. That led to the original first verse becoming something I was telling the doctor, not just abstract words. Much better. Then I altered some lines so they were easier to sing and made more sense. Then I spent a couple more days honing those into something even better. This is what it became:

Funny how I thought that everything was alright
Then my body veered left when it shoulda gone right
So I headed to the doctor to discover my plight
He said, “cancer again” and turned my day into night

But I stepped back. Had a look at the scene, I said,
“Get back, doc, I need some room to breathe, with these
Setbacks, always tryna tell me the odds
Like they was some kinda gods
They’re just a number to me”

Better storytelling, easier to sing, and I even got an internal rhyme in there with "odds” and “gods”. That process went on through the whole song, micro-analyzing every word, every rhyme, every syllable.
I absolutely hate that part of the writing process, whether it be lyrics or a novel. Writing is therapy for me and when I’ve gotten the story down, I feel the benefits of getting it out of my system and the last thing I want to do is revisit that and put it back into my mind.
But I remember a conversation I had with Pete about writing and I complimented him on his lyrics to their song “Goodfella” and how easily they roll off the tongue and he told me that he re-wrote those bars more than twenty times until they were that good. He figured he might have to perform it live, so he didn’t want anything in there that would trip him up on stage. Then he dropped this on me: “If you do the hard work at the beginning, it makes everything easier for you later.”

July 26, 2025. That was the day I learned a valuable life lesson from a 74-yr-old gangster rapper.

Once the lyrics were in place, it was time to get in the booth and record them. I’d searched online for studios in Calgary, read the reviews, and chose SAD Entertainment (SAD is an acronym for “serving artist’s desires”). The studio was a nice setup, clean, with some good equipment. I was impressed that in addition to modern digital equipment, they also had a great collection of old-school analog stuff. I wouldn’t be using any of it, but it signalled to me that these people were serious about their music and respected the history.

And as a surprise bonus, Adrian, the sound engineer, turned out to be a big Pete and Bas fan!

I gotta tell ya - recording the vocals was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done. I mean seriously fun. Like the kind of fun that if I had the money, I’d just book studio time and go in there and just record whatever, just for the experience. I think at some point, I would like to get in the booth and do proper recordings of the handbell rap song and my “F Cancer” song with proper mixing and engineering, but my wallet is going to need to recover a bit first. Studio time is not cheap - even though it was the cheapest part of this whole process!

And yes, that’s me and Pete on my t-shirt. I told ChatGPT to make a photo of the two of us in black suits, looking like gangsters, standing next to a Rolls Royce in front of a hospital. I loved the result enough to put on a shirt. Pete plastered it all over his social media accounts. I got him a shirt made, too, which I’ll give to him when I see him next in Vancouver.

So the vocals all got sent to Ryan back in Northern Ireland and he assembled all the parts, added some more vocals, did a bit of mixing, shifted the backing music around a bit so it better matched the mood of the lyrics, then sent that off to New York to a guy named Dom. who has a bunch of Grammys and has worked with John Legend and other artists I’ve heard of. He added a killer bass guitar line, some Hammond organ, and a hot piano riff on the third verse. He’s friends with Ryan, which is how an amateur like me ends up with a Grammy-winner doing the final master of his song.

It really is all about who you know, innit? I know Pete and Bas. They know Ryan. Ryan knows Dom.

One last thing we needed was for Pete to record himself yelling “POW!”. That eventually got done, the files were sent to NYC, and then everything was in place. I got the final master while in the car, driving Annie, Kevin McChesney, and his assistant Samantha to Canmore after picking them up at the airport for a series of handbell workshops we’d hired Kevin to give. That was fun, hearing it for the first time with three other people for whom I have deep respect. Everyone loved it!

I got a membership to SOCAN (the Canadian version of ASCAP) and registered the song with them so it can collect royalties when it gets played on Spotify or Apple or wherever. That’s important, since the proceeds will go to a local cancer charity.

Now all that’s left is to make a video!