Yours for Mine - Call Me Distant

Some artists and songs have more memories attached to them than others. One of those bands for me is Yours for Mine, an indie rock/post-hardcore outfit that released their debut full-length, Dear Children, on Blood and Ink Records in 2008.

My first memory of Yours for Mine is seeing their CD at a local Christian bookstore, Scott's Parable (which has since relocated and been rebranded as Kennedy's Parable) around the time their album was released. I would have probably been in grade nine.

I did not begin listening to Yours for Mine until I graduated high school, however. What motivated this was that Blood and Ink Records had everything available for free on Bandcamp around Christmastime in 2012. Not only was that the year I graduated high school, as 2012 also marked my first year away from home, in which I packed my bags for Thetis Island, BC to attend a programme at Capernwray Harbour Bible School that lasted from September 2012 to April 2013.

Christmas of 2012 was pretty awesome. In addition to being reunited with family and friends after a few months of separation, my parents spoiled me with a 160 GB silver iPod Classic. (In fact, I have the replacement sitting beside me as I type this. One of my roommates from bible school tinkered with the original and unintentionally caused it to malfunction, due to my leaving it behind in our cabin on spring break, when I left for Seattle, hence the replacement.) I loved music back then, perhaps more than I even do now, as I did not take a liking to books at that time in my life.

Returning to the topic of this post, Yours for Mine, I remember including "Absence in Elegance" in a playlist I made for a yearbook committee meeting at Capernwray. That jazzy outro! Dear Children is also the album I listened to when I hopped aboard the wrong bus after a psychology lecture as a first-year student at the University of Saskatchewan in 2014. I probably spent an hour and a half on the bus, instead of the usual half an hour. In 2019, Yours for Mine also made it onto a couple of monthly playlists I created in Windows Media Player with their tracks "The Angry End" and "My Tomorrow."

And here I am, in 2024, still getting this band's music stuck in my head. The singing on Dear Children can be rather pitchy, but there is something captivating about Yours for Mine that encourages me to look beyond that part of their music. "Call Me Distant," the song I have decided to share here, takes inspiration from 1 John 2:12.