“I don’t write sad songs, I write lonely songs,” declares Slow Leaves in the liner notes to his 2025 album In Solitude, For Company. His assertion could serve as a thesis statement for a body of work with recurrent themes of love, loss, loneliness, memory, and time. Slow Leaves is the project of Winnipeg’s Grant Davidson. Awarded Western Canadian Music Awards Songwriter of the Year, his folk and psych-rock inclinations though rooted in fingerpicking songwriter of the past, roam freely in today’s post-genre landscape. On his newest release and sixth Slow Leaves album of new material, The Ruins of Things Unfinished, Davidson explores his thoughts on ambition and the long setting sun of a life dedicated to art and family. “I’ve somehow made a career of self-perceived failure,” he writes. “I’ve often reflected on whether that mindset fulfills its own prophecy: quite possibly. But I think at heart, I’m not seeking greatness, at least not outside my own little world. Or maybe I’ve simply given up on misplaced ambitions. My ambition now is a life of greatness in small spaces, a private fame in close quarters, a life so intimate it need only whisper its declarations of love and victory.”
