Three Guitarists

Three guitarists. Four years. And then silence — the kind that doesn’t come from choosing to stop. The kind that gets decided for you.

I’m still working out how to talk about this. But I’m going to try.

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Paul went first.

That sentence still doesn’t make sense to me, and it’s been years.

Paul was my guitarist for Black Ribbon Sky. He was also my best friend — more than twenty years of the kind of friendship that doesn’t need explaining, because you can’t explain it anyway. He knew things about me I’ve never said out loud. I knew the same about him. That’s just what real friendship is, if you’re lucky enough to find it.

The thing you have to understand about Paul is that he was the last man you’d expect to lose this way. He took care of himself. Ate right, stayed fit. He rode with us — same roads, same miles — and when he wasn’t on the motorcycle he was on a bicycle, actually putting in the work, because that’s who he was. A man who showed up and put in the effort, in everything. He wasn’t performing health. He just lived it.

And the music. God, the music. Paul wasn’t just a guitarist — he was a musician in the truest sense of it. Metal, jazz, funk, whatever the moment called for. Multiple instruments. Multiple projects. He could walk into a genre most people spend years studying and make it feel like he’d been living there his whole life. Playing with him made you better. Being around him made you better.

Heart attack. No warning. No sense to it. The healthiest one of us, and just — gone.

I won’t pretend I handled it. I didn’t. I went into a spiral I didn’t name for a long time because naming it would have required admitting how bad it actually was. I kept functioning — because that’s what you do, that’s what I’d done my whole life. But functioning isn’t the same as okay. I knew it then and wouldn’t say it.

Losing Paul damn near took me with him. Not in the dramatic way people imagine. In the slow, quiet way — where you stop caring about things you used to love, where the world gets narrower and grayer, and you tell yourself it’s just grief, it’ll pass.

Some of it did. Some of it is still passing.

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Then Anthony.

Anthony was my guitarist in Rise Within. Not just a guy who could play — the kind of player who knew where you were heading before you did. That rarest thing in music: someone whose instincts sync with yours, who makes you better without trying to, who makes the noise feel like it actually means something beyond the sound you’re making.

He died by suicide.

That word still sits wrong in my mouth. Because with suicide, grief doesn’t come clean — it comes with inventory. Every conversation you replay. Every sign you’re not sure you read right. Every time you think what if I’d called that week, what if I’d said the thing instead of letting it go. You never stop doing the math on a debt you weren’t given the chance to pay.

If there’s one thing I want anyone reading this to take: say something before the equation closes. The people who would carry your loss don’t want the math problem. They want you. That’s the whole of it.

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Then Rick.

Rick stepped in to play the tribute show we did for Paul. Let that sit for a second. He came to help us honor a man we’d buried — to fill the spot on stage that Paul used to own — because that’s who Rick was. He showed up when it mattered, no questions asked.

We lost Rick to murder. His wife. Sentenced.

I don’t have words clean enough for what it is to bury a man who was standing in for another man you already buried. Some things are wrong in a way that won’t fit inside a sentence. You just carry it without a container.

Three guitarists. Four years.

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I stopped singing.

Not a decision. More like the voice just wasn’t there anymore. You can’t make music out of that much absence. Or maybe I couldn’t. The instrument was fine. I was the one that broke.

Grief doesn’t announce itself as grief when you’re a certain kind of man. It announces itself as not wanting to do the things you used to love. As going through the motions. As looking at a stage or a setlist and feeling nothing where something used to live.

That lasted a while.

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I’m building a new band.

It sounds simple when I write it. It is not simple. It means deciding that what those three men gave me — the years of music, the stages, the rehearsals, the hours of working something out together — it doesn’t die with them. That it was never theirs to take, even when it felt like they took it with them.

It means picking up something I put down because the weight of it broke me, and deciding to carry it differently.

Paul. Anthony. Rick. I’ll never replace them. I’m not trying to.

But I’m not staying quiet for them either. None of them would have wanted that.

The voice is coming back. Slowly. Honestly. The way real things come back — not all at once, not clean, but back.

That’s enough for right now. That’s where I am.