A former singer-songwriter couple deals with the end of their 13-year relationship by releasing an album about the split.
Videos by Suggest
In a piece for the CBC, Canadian musician Scarlett Flynn discussed how she and her ex, Kevin Howley, released an album inspired by their breakup.
“For 13 years, we had built everything together: a band, a home, a mythology of love so inseparable from the music that we couldn’t tell which one we were trying to save,” Flynn explained. “When it ended, there was no explosion, only the quiet collapse. It’s strange, the way something can die so quietly you keep tending to it, thinking it’s still alive. The band had always been our shared language — now, it was a monument to what music can’t save. It was a particular kind of grieft.”
Following the breakup, the exes and their band faced another challenge — the pandemic. With the pandemic shutting everything down, Flynn said she had nothing else to do but write music.
“The writing became a study in the aftermath, tracing what had failed and why,” she continued. “The infidelities, the depression, the drinking, the way love curdled into caretaking and caretaking into resentment — and what, if anything, still carried meaning. That’s when I realized there was something there. I was writing from the wound, not around it — not a love-and-leave elegy, but a reckoning. One that chose barbed honesty over blame and found grace where bitterness should have been.”
Flynn produced rough demos and sent them to Howley, creating a new collaboration. Inspired by Flynn’s hometown, Nova Scotia, the group was called Wolfville.
The Former Couple’s Album Ends With the Final Chapter of Their “Story Arc”
While continuing to share details about the album, Flynn said the Wolfville album ends with “Good Bones,” which is the “final chapter” of her and Howley’s “story arc.”
She pointed out that “Good Bones” is a “testament that something doesn’t need to survive to matter.”
” The song isn’t an lament but an act of acceptance,” Flynn also noted. “Two people standing inside what they once built, realizing the structure held more strength than touch routine or the fragile choreography of two lives briefly in sync.”
Although she and Howley didn’t make their relationship work, Flynn said they “almost did” and somehow that “feels like enough” for them.
“Every once in a while, when I listen to these songs, I feel a faint pang,” she added. “But mostly I feel indebted to a love that was never built to last yet revealed the full anatomy of its meaning.”