Now, Then...

There’s something my grandfather, Don Midgley, used to say so often that it became part of the rhythm of being around him.

“Now, then…”

It was his transition between thoughts. His way of moving from one idea to the next. It showed up in conversations constantly, almost like punctuation, but warmer.

At some point, I remember telling him—half joking, half completely serious—that one day it would be carved in stone.

And it is.

It’s on his tombstone now.

That phrase has lived in my life for a long time, but it took on a completely different weight in 2021, when he was in the hospital dying of COVID.

That was when Big Train started to take shape.

When I was a kid, I remember laying on the living room floor next to him watching Wynton Marsalis perform Big Train on PBS. I didn’t fully understand it at the time, but I felt it. It was one of those moments that quietly imprints on you before you have language for why.

So when everything started to shift, when I was facing the reality of losing him, that memory came back.

The idea of the train. The movement. The journey.

The fact that it keeps going. No matter what.

I wasn’t sitting down thinking, “I’m going to write a song about my grandfather.”

I was sitting in the middle of something I didn’t know how to process, and this was the form it took.

There’s a line that kept coming back as I was writing:

Now, then…

At that point, it was everything.

The past and the present sitting in the same place. The version of him I grew up with and the version of him I was about to lose. The memory of being a kid on the floor and the reality of being an adult trying to make sense of what was happening.

That phrase became the bridge.

The song came together from there, but not by itself. Liz Aday helped bring it to life in a way that felt aligned with what it needed to be. There’s a beautiful moment where something personal gets to become something shareable, and having the right person in that process matters more than I can probably articulate.

When it came time to release it, I had a choice.

I could have chosen the day he died.

But I didn’t.

I chose his birthday—September 25—because it felt more true to what he taught me.

Not to anchor everything to loss… but to movement. To life. To what continues.

Looking back, I can see that Big Train isn’t just about loss.

It’s about what continues.

About how something can move through generations and still feel immediate. About how the things that shape us don’t disappear just because the person is no longer physically here.

“Revere the journey” is something I understand differently now.

It’s something my grandfather used to say in his own way, long before it ever became a lyric in a song.

Not as advice.

Not as something to aspire to.

But as something I’ve actually had to live through.

And maybe that’s what he was always doing when he said “Now, then…”

Moving forward, while still holding everything that came before.

🎧 Listen to Big Train