More Than Miles: The Song That Started Harbor Vale

I didn't start writing music because I wanted to be a songwriter. I started because my son was about to turn one, and I wanted to give him something that would last longer than a birthday.

A card gets lost. A toy gets outgrown. I wanted something he could find years from now and actually hear me in. So I wrote a song. It was the first one I'd ever written, and it's the reason I make music at all.

That song is "More Than Miles."

What it's about

The simple version: I can't always be there physically. But I'm still his dad. I'm still present in the ways I can be, and I'm doing everything I can to make sure he knows that.

The song opens on his birthday, from where I was standing:

There's a candle on a cake I couldn't reach You were smiling back at me through a screen

I think a lot of parents know some version of that feeling. You watch first steps in a video someone sent you. You replay the same ten seconds of laughing because that's what you've got. It's a strange mix of grateful and helpless, and I didn't want to pretend it was anything else.

But I also didn't want the song to stay there. The line I keep coming back to is this one:

I didn't lose you, I just changed the way I have to show up every day

That's really the whole idea. Distance changes how you show up. It doesn't get to decide whether you do.

More than the distance

It's more than miles between us now More than distance I can't control

The title came from being honest about that. It is more than miles, and some of it I can't fix by getting in the car. What I can control is how I show up for him, and whether I do everything I can to make sure that distance never becomes a question of how much he's loved. That's the part that matters most to me, and it's where the chorus lands:

You won't grow up wondering if I care You'll always know I do

If he only takes one thing from this song, I want it to be that.

The part I had to own

The second verse is less comfortable to listen to, at least for me. It's about the ways I didn't handle things well. Holding everything in. Thinking that keeping quiet was the same as being strong. It wasn't, and the song says so.

I left it in on purpose. A song for my son that only made me look good wouldn't be worth much. One day he'll be old enough to ask real questions, and I'd rather he hear me admit I was still learning than meet a version of me that never existed.

The bridge is where I made him a few promises. This is the simplest line in the song, and probably the truest:

I'm still your dad, that won't change

Why it still matters

Writing that first song taught me something I didn't expect. Saying something in a song is different from saying it in a conversation. It sticks. It stays where you put it, and it's still there when the person you wrote it for is ready to hear it.

I never expected one song to turn into another, and then another. I certainly didn't expect it to become Harbor Vale. But somewhere along the way, I realized I had more to say. About being a father. About relationships, mistakes, growing older, and trying to figure life out as I go.

That's what Harbor Vale has become for me. A place to put those stories.

If you're a parent living some version of this, I hope it lands the way it was meant to. And if you're not, maybe it reminds you of someone who kept showing up for you, even from far away.

Listen

"More Than Miles" is the opening track on No Looking Back, available on Spotify, Apple Music, and everywhere else you listen.

Listen on Spotify · More Than Miles on harborvalemusic.com

I wrote it for one little boy. If it reaches someone else who needed to hear it, that means more to me than any number of streams.

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