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Brian Vander Ark has a voice that I grew up around for the most part. When I saw the music video for The Verve Pipe’s Villains when I was twelve years old that I’d still be listening to Brian Vander Ark’s raspy… croon? ’s sweetly soaring warmness? twelve years later. I’m glad I am. The guy writes songs like I want to live life, full of detail, emotion, and shit that just makes you wanna sing. Maybe I’m being kind of gay about Brian Vander Ark but this shit is genius.

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I can sing all of A Million Things, or at least I like to think I can. I don’t know if it’s because it’s an easy song to sing (as I don’t know a thing about singing except that there’s a point where your voice gets away from you and locks in and it feels awesome and real and loud), or because I’ve been listening to it for five years, or that the lyrics (much like 1229 Sheffield above) feel so immediate that it’s almost like they were somewhere in my head to begin with and Brian Vander Ark just unlocked them by making me aware of their proper sequence.

Due to the weird fact that he feels like a guilty pleasure, I’ve never sought out any of his latest solo work. I hear The Verve Pipe are going to release a new album (or have and I haven’t noticed yet) this year, which may or may not be awesome (I’ll give it a 65% chance at awesome, a 25% chance at being a cool attempt at revival-mid-90’s-commercial-rock). I’ll probably write down in my Tasks list his name so I go on a crazy Vander Ark spree and grab all his other stuff at once.