Canadian singer-songwriter Boy Golden (Liam Duncan) carries himself with the easy charisma of a man who knows a secret you don’t. He possesses a dapper mustache, a wicked wit, and a perennially mischievous gleam in his eye—but you don’t need to see him to feel the pull of his orbit. That allure is baked into the very grain of his voice. On his latest release, Best of Our Possible Lives, Boy Golden distills that charm into 12 tracks that serve as both a high-minded philosophical inquiry and a low-slung backyard groove.
The record title is a clever pivot on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s assertion that we live in the “best of all possible worlds”. It’s a nod to Voltaire’s Candide, where the bumbling Dr. Pangloss clings to optimism while the world falls apart around him. Boy Golden, however, isn’t interested in choosing sides. He compellingly plays it both ways, suggesting that the paradox is the point: the world is a shimmering meadow of sandy beaches and soulful glances, yet it is simultaneously a theater of tragedy. “We all suffer,” he proclaims on the opening track, laying the groundwork for an album that finds beauty in the breakdown.
Boy Golden is a musician, not a logician, and the album is better for it. He bounces between topics with a psychedelic buoyancy, using puns and offbeat vignettes to poke at the meaning of life. He is serious enough to ponder the infinite, but chill enough to take a metaphorical puff and laugh at the absurdity of the quest.
Musically, the record is a chameleonic delight, gliding from dusty folk and gut-bucket blues to shimmering indie rock without ever losing its centered, “Founder of the Church of Boy Golden” identity. While producer Robbie Lackritz (Feist, Bahamas) and bassist Pino Palladino (D’Angelo, The Who) provide a world-class foundational groove, it is Golden’s magnetic presence that commands the pulpit.
The narrators here serve as foils to Boy Golden’s self-discovery. He occupies various skins—the child, the lover, the pumpkin pie, the Cool Whip—searching for the “Mozart in a tambourine.” In the standout track “Eyes”, he croons, “Don’t it all feel like a dream,” capturing the hazy irrationality of modern existence. Whether he’s finding profundity in the song of a “Chickadee” or admitting, “Oh Lord, I’m all fucked up,” he clarifies that it’s love, not vice, that has him spinning.
The journey concludes with the title track, which deftly swaps the “All” of Leibniz’s theory for “Our.” It’s a subtle, moving shift: meaning isn’t found in the universe at large, but in the specific, messy act of sharing life with one another. It’s a classic sentiment, but Boy Golden’s charisma makes the cliché feel like a brand-new revelation. He has given us a soundtrack for good times, which is an achievement that, in our current world, feels nothing short of miraculous.