Matthew McLean on losing his brother, the grief that stays, and the songs that bring him back
The last picture I have of my wee brother was taken exactly four years ago. He was grinning broadly as he held my daughter at her first birthday party.
We would never see him again.
I had commented to a friend that day in 2022 that it was great to see him so happy. He’d been through hell a few years prior and had made several attempts on his life. We had no idea that he was still suffering.
Two weeks later, we were out picking our way through every wooded area in Glenrothes. That was his final clue for us. He always did have quite a dark sense of humour.
The nature of the note he left us, combined with a few other factors, put us in no doubt as to what had happened. This wasn’t a case of “he might turn up”; it was an immediate fear that we might never find him.
It’s hard to explain how you feel when you’re looking for the body of someone you love. When every clearing you enter, every branch you lift, every ditch you look down into, might contain the thing you’re both searching for, and terrified to find.
It took five days. It was Friday afternoon, and I must’ve been 100 yards away when a friend called out that he’d found Ross. He was lying by a riverbank. He could have been sleeping.
I was soon driving to break the news to our parents and his partner. Obligations have a funny way of protecting you from the bigger picture in the moment, but I remember thinking to myself, “Has this really all just happened?”
It wasn’t until later that evening, once there was nothing left to do and nobody left to tell, that it hit me. I would never see my brother again.
On top of being a loving dad, a talented artist, and a witty poet, Ross was also a gifted musician. Most of our text exchanges over the past couple of years were based around links to songs he’d send me.
Remastered cover of Heart of Gold
Whether it was covers (he did a brilliant version of Soul Rebel by Bob Marley, as well as The Needle and the Damage Done by Neil Young), or his own original works, he was never content with them, always qualifying that they were a work in progress.
In the days that followed, I made sure to save all those tracks. I listened back to everything, and I regretted not emphasising to him just how impressed I was at his talent.
But it’s a comfort to have his music. I always revisit it on those two dates anyone who’s ever lost anyone will be all too familiar with - his birthday, and the day he died. On those days, I'll head up to that spot by the river on the outskirts of Glenrothes and listen to his songs on the route he would have taken.
Many of his songs were recorded in his kitchen, into the video or voice memos app on his phone. Though they are rich in character and delivery, the technical quality is extremely limited. Some are essentially voicemails.
But as we approach that fateful date on the calendar once again, I started to experiment by running some songs through AI mastering software. I was pretty impressed at the outcome, given it was simply an ‘upload and automatically enhance’ style process.
Epiphany's Way, remastered
In the short term, this definitely improves the sound quality of his catalogue. It adds richness and depth to the audio that undoubtedly matches the power of the source material as it would’ve sounded in the room with him.
This is something I think I could do more with. Some mastering software now has options to separate the voice and music and optimise each individually before joining them back together. I'd love to try working on that ahead of his birthday early next year.
I imagine Ross would be quite annoyed with me attempting to polish these up for him, but I hope he’ll forgive me.
Four years on, I still think about him every day. I still think about what more I could have done to help him.
I hope that, wherever he is now, he’s still making music.
And I hope that one day, I might get to hear it.
