Collin Clowes is an independent singer-songwriter and producer from Gorham, just outside Thunder Bay, Ontario. He writes indie folk-pop built on plain, unsparing personal storytelling, and he has spent the past several years making records in a small home studio he taught himself to run.
He had been writing songs since grade six, mostly as an outlet for depression, and never felt they were good enough to play for anyone. That changed at seventeen, when he began showing symptoms of an illness his doctors could not identify. It attacked his liver and caused irreversible damage. They settled on an unknown autoimmune disease and told him he would eventually need a transplant. Clowes withdrew from his childhood friends and put everything into music.
For four years he played constantly around Thunder Bay, where audiences responded to a raw acoustic style, while his body deteriorated faster than anyone had predicted. He was rushed to Toronto General Hospital for a liver transplant. His oldest sister was the donor. Both recovered well. Because the underlying illness was never identified, it remains unpredictable — a fact that sits underneath everything he has written since.
After several months recovering in Toronto, he was accepted into the Songwriting and Performance Arts Program at Seneca College and stayed in the city to study. He moved home to Thunder Bay just before the pandemic, built a small studio, and spent two years learning to record, produce, mix and master his own work.
What followed was a run of self-released projects: Sleepy, a seven-song EP dedicated to a friend named June who died while he was finishing it, whose single "Polaroid" earned airplay and an on-air interview at Thunder Bay's 91.5 CKPR; Lily, five tracks on grief and parting ways; Alexithymia, which brought a CION nomination for Outstanding Album in Northern Ontario; and the six-song 27.
Daydreams is the first record Clowes considers finished rather than practice. Ten tracks, written across the last decade, it takes as its subject the years he spent working toward a life he kept postponing — chasing money for a house, making music in whatever hours were left, and losing the people and things that meant more to him than either of those. It also traces the end of a ten-year relationship with someone he describes as a best friend. He sums the album up as "a man who worked himself into a hole and lost a life he adored due to his own disappointment with himself."
"When I was in the hospital the first time at 17, I made a promise with myself to always chase my music as hard as possible," Clowes says. "I turned 30 and felt so far away from being an artist. It made me feel like I had let down my younger self. I feel like I've been trying to make this album my entire life."
He has drawings from elementary and high school of album covers and tracklists for records he had not yet made. Daydreams is the first half of the story; a second album, Sweet Dreams, is recorded and due in 2027.
