By Pops
Cedar Rapids, Iowa — September 16, 2026
Some albums are made because you have songs to release. Some are made because you have something to say.
You Were My One exists because there was someone I needed to remember.
Lisa was my wife. I lost her to breast cancer on September 3, 2025. We did not get nearly enough time together. I suppose nobody who truly loves someone ever believes they got enough time, but ours was especially short.
What we did have mattered.
I don’t know about soulmates. People use that word easily, and maybe there are such things and maybe there aren’t. What I know is simpler: I had never met anybody like Lisa.
She did everything in her power to make my life beautiful, even while she herself was dying.
She was my everything.
She was my one.
That is where this six-song album begins.
You Were My One
The title song is the simplest declaration on the record, and perhaps the most important.
You were my one.
There isn’t much philosophy behind that statement. It doesn’t need any.
Lisa occupied a place in my life that nobody else had occupied before her. Our time together changed me. Being loved by her changed me. Watching her become sick changed me. Losing her changed me again.
The song is about acknowledging what another human being can become to you when the barriers come down and two lives genuinely become intertwined.
It isn’t about pretending our life was perfect.
It is about knowing that she was unique.
There Ain’t No Substitute
Grief creates a strange problem with the phrase “moving on.”
People use it as though moving on means replacing what was lost. It doesn’t.
I can continue living. I can build another chapter. I can find another direction. I can meet other people. I can laugh again. I can love again.
None of those things replaces Lisa.
There Ain’t No Substitute is about that distinction.
Human beings aren’t interchangeable parts. Another person does not step into the empty space and suddenly make everything exactly as it was before.
There will never be another Lisa.
That doesn’t mean the rest of life has to stop. It means the life that comes afterward has to be something new.
[EMBED ALBUM — YOU WERE MY ONE]
More More More
If there is one song at the emotional center of this record, it is More More More.
It comes from the last two days I spent with Lisa in the hospital in Tacloban, Philippines.
By then, the cancer had taken an enormous toll. There were moments when Lisa no longer understood that the man beside her was me.
But I would tell her that I loved her.
And she would smile.
“More, more, more.”
Those words belonged to us.
It was something we had always said to one another. I love you. More. More, more, more.
Somehow, when so much else was disappearing, those words remained.
I cannot tell you exactly what was happening inside her mind during those final days. I won’t pretend that I can. What I know is what happened in that hospital room.
I told my dying wife that I loved her.
She smiled.
And she said, “More more more.”
So I put it in a song.
Old Place for Sorrow
Then comes everything afterward.
One of the stranger experiences of grief is discovering how uncomfortable other people can become with somebody else’s sorrow.
At first, everyone understands.
Then time passes.
Eventually someone wonders what is wrong with you.
Why aren’t you better yet?
Why aren’t you acting normally?
Why are you still talking about her?
Why does this still hurt?
Old Place for Sorrow is about living in that place.
There is no universal schedule for grief. There isn’t a morning when a prescribed number of days has elapsed and the surviving spouse wakes up cured.
Something happened to your life.
Someone was there.
Then she wasn’t.
The calendar cannot negotiate that away.
The Funeral
Death has ceremonies.
Grief has an audience.
Until suddenly it doesn’t.
The Funeral deals with something people who have lost someone close often discover: there can be a stark difference between how people treat you around the death and funeral and how they treat you afterward.
There are condolences. There are conversations. There are people asking what you need. There is the funeral itself.
And then everybody goes home.
For most of them, normal life starts again.
For the person who lost a spouse, normal life may no longer exist.
You return to the empty spaces. The routines that no longer make sense. The conversations that cannot happen. The little things you automatically think about telling someone before remembering that you cannot tell them anymore.
The funeral ends.
The loss doesn’t.
Swept Away
And that brings the record to Swept Away.
When Lisa died, I didn’t lose only Lisa.
We lost everything we were going to do.
That’s another part of death that is difficult to explain until you experience it. When somebody dies, the past remains. Nobody can take away the things that already happened.
It is the future that disappears.
Plans disappear.
Expectations disappear.
Ordinary tomorrows disappear.
The life two people thought they were building together can be swept away in a single day.
That is where this album ends.
Not With Goodbye
You Were My One isn’t intended to provide an answer to grief. I don’t have one.
It isn’t an instruction manual for surviving the death of someone you love, either.
It is six songs about one woman, one relationship, one death, and what happened to the person who remained behind.
There is love in these songs. There is anger. There is loneliness. There are memories. There is the bewilderment of discovering that the world continues operating normally after your own world has been torn apart.
But underneath all of it is the reason the record exists in the first place.
Lisa mattered.
Our life mattered.
What happened mattered.
More than a year after September 3, 2025, I am still here. Life has continued, because life has a stubborn habit of doing exactly that.
There can be new chapters.
There can be new people.
There can even be new love.
But there ain’t no substitute.
There was only one Lisa.
She was my one.
