New song with my sister Heather Woods Broderick out today. This song has a story behind it, scroll down below the lyric video if you’d like to read more <3

In 2002 I was 15 years old. My sister Heather, then 19, had a boyfriend who was a few years older than her. Evan B Harris. Heather was absolutely infatuated with this young man in his mid-twenties, and this rubbed off on me. Evan became a huge inspiration to us both. He’d had quite a rocky childhood but had risen above it and become an incredible artist. For me to see this at such a young age, someone so dedicated to their craft, with such a strong vision for what they wanted to do . . . it was a big part of what made me believe I could pursue a creative path in the arts.

Evan also wrote songs on the guitar, and himself, Heather and I all started a band together. It was my first serious music project. We practiced nearly every day, sculpting and refining our songs. When I left the family home at age 17, I moved from a tiny town into the ‘big city’ of Portland where I lived in a house with Heather and Evan. Eventually, after a few years, the band fizzled out, I got busy with other projects and moved to Europe, and Heather and Evan broke up.

Fast forward to early 2024, I got the news from Heather. She had heard Evan was living on the streets of Portland, homeless and drug addicted, nearly unrecognisable. I couldn’t believe it. Evan was pretty much straight-edge when I knew him. He had long sworn off drugs as he believed they would get in the way of his artistic vision and discipline. So to find out he was on the streets, out of his mind . . . it shook me, big time. I started losing sleep over it, fighting the urge to get on a plane and fly back to Portland and look for him, which I very well may have done if it felt in any way possible. But since I couldn’t do that, I did the only other thing I knew how to do . . . I wrote a song.

In the kitchen, through the tears, I wrote and sang a song of prayer for my teenage idol, a man who was very much a part of our family in my formative years. I shared the song with Heather with the suggestion of making it a duet. I went into a recording studio and made a demo. And then, before I could finish the song, I got the miraculous news that Evan had been taken off the streets and was now living in Pennsylvania. An old friend sent me an article in the Guardian detailing Evan’s extraordinary story.

The man who had taken Evan into his home was a filmmaker, and had launched a funding campaign for a documentary about Evan. So I reached out to this filmmaker, Jordan Hayman. I told him about my intimate connection to Evan many years ago, and I offered up all my old recordings and video clips of Evan in case they were of any use for his film.

Fast forward to summer 2025, Jordan and Evan said they were coming to visit me in Ireland! The three of us spent a few days together in County Sligo. It was my first time hanging out with Evan in almost 20 years. I played Evan my half-finished song-prayer written for him in a time of desperation, and to my surprise, he liked it. So it was after that visit I decided it was finally time to finish the song, and since it just so happened my sister was soon coming to visit as well, we got to sit down and work on it together.

May this song serve as a message of hope for anyone who has found themselves or someone they know hopeless.