COLLIN CLOWES – “GO”
A SPILL EXCLUSIVE VIDEO PREMIERE
Collin Clowes, the independent singer-songwriter and producer from Gorham, just outside Thunder Bay, has released “Go,” the second single from his debut album Daydreams, out this Friday October 23, 2026. The track arrives with a one-shot music video.
“Go” was written in his early twenties, in a Toronto basement. A liver transplant had sent Clowes home to Thunder Bay, where he had met someone before he left for the surgery, and the relationship started properly once he was back. At the end of that summer he left again for the music program at Seneca College.
“I went to Toronto because I thought I was ready to make music my career and I couldn’t have been more wrong. After I graduated, I was sitting in this terrible Toronto basement in this horrible environment and I truly wished I was back home with this girl, as well as spending more time with my dog.”
The song came out of that, and out of a question he could not put down.
“The inspiration was this overwhelming sense of, what if leaving was a mistake? Leaving someone you love, only to return because you failed, and then having them justifiably not wait, is a painful experience. I find those stories more interesting than your typical love stories.”
It poured out in minutes and was refined over years before he recorded it alone in his bedroom studio in Lappe,
living at his parents’ house on a schedule he had turned around for the winter.
“I would wake up at 7pm and record and produce until 10am the next day. I like to think the songs I recorded
during that time hold this special stillness that you could only feel during those hours in the winter.”
You know I’m leaving,
I’m already gone,
And we won’t believe it,
But somehow we will carry on.
Clowes calls “Go” the first sign he was getting better at writing and at articulating how he feels. Melanie Gail St. Pierre of Casper Skulls reached out to him because of this song, at a point where he had nearly stopped. She’s the reason I still make music. I was ready to stop releasing music and just make it on my own time to keep it to myself, but her reaching out at the time she did, was huge for me.
The video matches the song’s restraint: a single unbroken take of Clowes with his acoustic guitar, sitting, then rising and moving slowly forward.
“Go” leads the release of his debut album Daydreams, a collection of ten songs written across the last decade, years Clowes spent working toward a life he kept postponing. He sums the album up as “a man who worked himself into a hole and lost a life he adored due to his own disappointment with himself.”
Daydreams traces the end of a ten-year relationship with someone he describes as a best friend, and the pressure of building a career against an illness that has never been fully diagnosed.
“I feel like I spent my 20s daydreaming of a life that I wanted to live, and I lost myself in the endless failures and setbacks. When I was in the hospital the first time at 17, I made a promise with myself to always chase my music as hard as possible. I turned 30 and felt so far away from being an artist. It made me feel like I had let down my younger self.”
Clowes was seventeen when he began showing symptoms of an illness his doctors could not identify. It attacked his liver and caused irreversible damage; they settled on an unknown autoimmune disease. After four years playing constantly around Thunder Bay while his health declined, he received a liver transplant at Toronto General Hospital, donated by his oldest sister. Both recovered well. Because the underlying illness was never named, it remains unpredictable. Clowes has stopped treating it as separate from the work. “I want to combine the two, the music and my story, because both of those are core identity at this point,” he says. “I’m not me without these two things.”
Clowes made his earlier records alone in a small home studio he taught himself to run, writing, producing, mixing and mastering four self-released EPs: Sleepy, Lily, Alexithymia, a CION nominee for Outstanding Album in Northern Ontario, and 27. That changed when an audio engineer messaged Clowes out of nowhere about one of the songs and asked to work on it, which gave him the confidence to stop doing every job alone. Two of the songs here, “Go” and “Break This Way,” began as demos Clowes self-released and has since removed from streaming; the album holds the finished recordings. On the upcoming LP Daydreams, Clowes tracked the album himself, with “The T-Shirt Song,” recorded at Orange Lounge in Toronto. It was mixed by Jon Paz Gale and mastered by Kristian Montano at Montano Mastering. Clowes still has drawings from elementary and high school of album
covers and tracklists for records he had not yet made.
Daydreams is the first half of the story. A second album, Sweet Dreams, is recorded and due in 2027.
“My main goal is to have something I feel genuinely proud of that someone can listen to when I leave this planet. Daydreams is my debut album because it’s finally the first project where I can be totally confident in it. I feel like I’ve been trying to make this album my entire life.”
Collin Clowes
Daydream
(Independent)
Release Date: October 23, 2026
Artist Links
SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: BEING DEAD – WHEN HORSES WOULD RUN
SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: EMPTY HOUSES – DAYDREAM
