“The Bullet and the Blank,” a brand new single by The Never and the North—a collaboration with my brilliant singer songwriter daughter Vivi Rogers—was written by the two of us before we played our first live show at SPACE in Evanston in the Summer of 2024. (Were you there??)

In the wee cold hours of early 2025, we went to Crystall Recorders in Lombard and recorded with Bryan Clavey (who also mixed the track). Vivi played piano, I played acoustic guitar, and Dave Rothkopf (The Good) played bass guitar. We sang our vocals live together after basic tracking; the final was mastered by Johnny Nevin.

You can hear the track on Bandcamp (where you can also see the lyrics), and also listen to it on all the modern streaming platforms, some cheerfully engaged in destroying the integrity of human music with AI: Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube. 🙂

The cover image is Vivi, photographed in Nashville by Brenna Baughman.