Let’s be real: this title is a search engine’s nightmare. “My HeyDay is a NewDay”? Google’s algorithms are probably weeping. But guess what? I don’t care. Because it’s not just a blog title—it’s the name of my new album from alter-ego artist TheVerdict, and it drops tomorrow, July 22, 2026, at midnight. Consider this your invitation to the wake… and the rebirth.
If you’ve been here before, you know I don’t make background music. My last album, from another one of my alter-egos Ghost Skizz – Going Through it Legit, wasn’t just a collection of songs—it was an exorcism. Especially “Twelve Years.” That track hurt to write, hurt to produce, and still hurts to hear. And that’s how I knew it was real. Art should leave a mark.
Alright, let’s get into it. I sat down to write something poetic for my new album, My HeyDay is a NewDay. Something clean. My brain said, Nah, fam. We’re going to the Island.
Adult Foster Care is a bit like The Island of Misfit Toys. That’s what I called my parents’ adult foster care home. I wasn’t just a teenager living there; I was a caretaker too. One of them (at least until I went off to college). My brothers pitched in as well. I helped cook their meals, mopped the floors, and learned the intimate geography of aging bodies—bathing men, helping them dress, navigating the quiet shame and profound gratitude that lived in those routines. An adult foster care home is a specific kind of place: for those clinging to shreds of independence, who just need that steadying hand to get through the day. My education was in the raw, unglamorous mechanics of need. I saw the full, fraying spectrum of the human condition up close—every possible way a mind and body can falter while the spirit still whispers for a hand up.
And more than the daily work, I learned the harder truth: places like these become the landing pad for society’s cast-offs. The misfits. Men whose usefulness had expired in the world’s ledger, whose only remaining function was to exist, and to be tended to, in this fragile purgatory before full-time nursing care claimed them. A lot of these men were on the spectrum—minds that once mapped complex worlds now struggling with a TV remote. Others were just… adrift, shipwrecked by bad choices, bad luck, or families who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, weather the storm. Their stories—the harmonica player for a famous band, the veteran who never came home, the father who was loved, the father who was feared—were all compressed into the same small room, the same generic pajamas. Their pasts were reduced to anecdotes they’d repeat, or secrets they’d take to the grave. My job, I realized, wasn’t just to bathe and feed them. It was to witness. To be the one who saw the person, not just the patient, before the final page turned.
A Couple of Patient Stories that I Remember Well
I once had the privilege of taking care of a man named Rip.
Let me tell you about Rip! Oh he was a character! His blue eyes sparkled with laughter when he was happy (often) and then conversely a weepy sort of gratitude when he was overcome with emotion. He remains one of my favorite residents. I could tell that he felt almost ashamed in his vulnerability and that made me want to show him that it’s okay, you know? We all need a hand up.
He was a kind man. One of those men they write sonnets about long after his essence fades. He was hard working, generous, and did well by his family. As a result, his family did well by him. He ended his life on this planet a cherished man.
He was a man whose voice had been softened by a stroke into something childlike and a bit gravelly, but whose grateful blue eyes held the weather of a long, well-loved life. His family’s love was a mixture of loud and quiet, but the most hopeful and heartfelt thing I witnessed was their constant and consistent tide of love. When he left us, they sent gifts in his name—socks, sweaters, dignity—for the other men, the ones without a tide to call their own. His grace had an echo.
And then there was Bob.
Good God, Bob.
He once made music for a living. Harmonica for a famous band. He also made a wilderness of his life, drank the maps, and burned the bridges. By the time he reached our tiny island, he was a storm contained in wrinkled skin. He left this world as he lived in it: alone. The silence after him was dense. A lesson carved out of absence.
He hurt his family. He drank. He abused his wives. He abused his children. As a result, after the money ran out from the music, they sent him to a home. Never to be seen or thought of again. The music lives on and that’s about as close as he gets to a legacy. It’s sad when you think of it.
Two men. Two kinds of legacy. One a lighthouse. The other, the dark water around it.
But it wasn’t all heavy. Memory never is. It’s a prism.
Shit. More dark stuff, I guess. This album also throws me back to 1997. The collective breath the world held when Princess Diana died. Watching two little boys be strong in the face of total wreckage on TV. The fact that the funeral made international television left me asking this about death – have we no fucking shame? Is there no wreckage we can leave in quiet? I get that she was a public figure and the world mourned a princess. Truly, a woman of the people. Her sons deserved their moment of total undoing. I hope they got it in the quiet hours when the world wasn’t watching. So, this right? And then, in the very next breath, one of the guys at the AFC home – Charlie (another of my favorite residents) farting at the dinner table, elbowing Bob, whispering, “Catch that and paint it blue!” The absurdity right up against the tragedy. That’s life. That’s memory. Also, in your face Bob. BLUEEEEE.
It was the same year I’d sit at that big table in the care home, listening to the older men—these living history books with shaky hands and adorable age spots—argue about President Clinton. I believe the phrase “we need one who can keep it in his pants” was passed around more than once, usually followed by a wet, phlegmy chuckle that shook the whole room. The Men nodded at the sentiment in unison. Even Bob. Profound wisdom and pure, unadulterated shit-talking, existing in the same sentence. That’s where I’m from.
I carried all of it. The sacred and the profane. The lighthouse and the dark water. The global grief and the juvenile joke. For years, I thought they were just fragments. Separate from the melody.
I was wrong. They were an important chapter of the overall symphony.
When I started weaving this album—threading together love songs and anthems, letters to the past and prayers for the morning—I felt them all in the loom. The raw, frayed edge in a guitar riff? That was Bob’s rage. The fragile, soaring note? That was Rip’s gratitude. The sudden, sunlit bridge? That was Charlie’s stupid, beautiful joke cutting through the tension. The steady, weary bassline? That was the old men at the table, talking shit about presidents, surviving.
You see, poetry isn’t just pretty words. Truth isn’t just one note. It’s the whole damn chord—the major and the minor, the sacred and the fucking ridiculous, all played at once.
This album, out tomorrow at midnight, is that chord. It’s the love song haunted by the ghost of the unloved. It’s the anthem playing next to the silent room. It’s the sound of me realizing that a “NewDay” doesn’t dawn by forgetting the old night, but by making a kind of music from all of it—the grace, the grief, the grit, and the goddamn fart joke.
So here we are. The poetry found me in the last place I thought to look: in a care home hallway, between a thank you and a curse, between a global tragedy and a painted-blue fart.
My question for you is this: What’s the chord of your 1997? The one made of the big, world-stopping news and the tiny, stupid, perfect thing that happened right beside it?
MY HEYDAY IS A NEWDAY OUT EVERYWHERE 07.22.2026 | 12AM
