SECOND CHANCE MUSIC is the true story of how Canadian acoustic rock singer/songwriter Jordan Holman came to the end of his life decades too soon, and somehow didn't die. Armed with a second chance, he began to compose music once again. Invited to play a year's worth of weekly shows over an out-of-the-blue phone call by an old acquaintance, and encouraged by his now-wife to keep writing the avalanche of music that was beginning to pour out of him, these 11 songs were taken from hundreds to introduce the story of how Holman became Kentucky. Where he is, how he got here, and most importantly where he is going. SECOND CHANCE MUSIC is the improbable first day of the rest of his, and your, life.

SECOND CHANCE MUSIC

You like Kentucky? This is what people who like Kentucky like...so far. Join the journey and change it every day!

Introduction to Kentucky

My story of living in America, The Beautiful. What I saw, what I see. My love letter, as a Canadian, to America.

America, The Beautiful

This story, and its music video, is my life story...so far. I have a reason to live, a reason to be, and I'm living it. If you see yourself in this song or this music video, amazing.

Wonder

This song is the true-life story of a day in the Guadalajara desert in Marfa, Texas where I realized what an awful partner I was to a wonderful young woman. The artwork is a picture taken by me, that day, of my truck and the land that reflected exactly how i felt.

Santa Fe

An upbeat, lively, bouncy pop/rock song by singer/songwriter Kentucky, declaring love eternal for the mother of his child even in the aftermath of a painful breakup.

Same Street (Different Towns)

When you're expecting the worst...and the best thing that's ever happened to you happens. The first day of the rest of your life. When you've been through it all and have resigned yourself to your fate, and in She walks.

The First Day Of The Rest Of Your Life

This song is a declaration. An anthem of where I've been, where I am, and where I'm going. No More Tomorrows is rock and roll for right now!

No More Tomorrows

This is the song that kicks off what you might call Part 2 of the album. It's an epic psychedelic blues trip through decades of trying and abjectly failing to succeed in a relationship. And just when all hope is gone and by all accounts I am labelled "damaged goods", sure enough, she finally comes. And so the blues begins. Because the blues aren't what happens when love ends. The blues are what happens when love begins. When you finally have to deal with yourself. And so I began. I began using all of the hardest lessons that I'd learned in the hardest ways, and applying them to this unrelenting love and certainty about this woman. That's how I learned to know what I'm doing - because I know what I've done. And that's how I (now) know where I'm going - because I know where I'm from. 

I Have Been Waiting

This is the first song on my debut album SECOND CHANCE MUSIC, yet it's one of the last songs I wrote for it. It's an introduction, a summary, and a declaration of defiance all at once. It's my heart, my guts, and my thoughts all stapled on to the front door of my life for all to see. The best way to explain it is through the artwork. One snowy night in Toronto, I lay alone in bed, my heart starting and stopping due to all the drug abuse I was putting it through. When it finally clunked back in and seemed like it would keep beating again for a while, I stood up and walked to the window and looked out on to the deserted snow-covered intersection of the streets and of my life, and had a premonition that I should take the very picture you see. I knew that I was going to die, and die soon. I knew that I had somewhere between a few minutes and a few months left...most likely a week or two. So I put on a song called "Do Not Let Your Spirit Wane" by Gang Of Youths and listened to it on repeat for hours, still unable to stop the drugs, and tried to decide between leaving the city and quietly dying on my own...or to attempt the near-impossible, and try to 'not die'. Now you know what I decided. And you can follow my songs and albums for the rest of my life to find out why, and what's happened since.

A dream brought this song. As a former drug addict who put my nervous system, brain, and body through a lot, the past few years have brought many, many days in which simply existing substance-free and escape-free were impossible. So, instead of turning to the substance or the escape, I taught myself how to do a type of meditation in which I calm my body down so much that I enter a state that is neither sleeping nor full consciousness, but somewhere in between. I later learned that this is an ancient technique called Yoga Nidra, but for me in those first difficult years I just called it "finding a way to not do drugs"! In that semi-conscious dream state, I began to see visions and receive fragments of melody, story, and words. During one of these meditations, I went into it just shy of a panic attack in which my body was a lead weight, and I came out of it to find myself singing out loud, "I left the hardship for this town...and then I couldn't find it anywhere," exactly as you hear it in the song. I got up and wrote and arranged the song immediately, but it was a very frustrating process and even months later I was never satisfied with how I was performing it even though I loved the song. It wasn't until I almost threw the entire song out during the recording process (my wife Jodi stopped me at the last second) that I realized the song's purpose is actually the way that it came to me. It's a message from an unknown realm that even though I stopped the drugs, moved to a new town, started a new life, and "did everything right", that life was still going to be hard, scary, confusing, and at times seemingly unbearable. That one cannot play it safe in life or in love if one wants to be truly alive. And so sonically, I built the song back into its true function and form. A powerful bagpipe-like drone. A supernatural and huge bass synth. An off-time, non-repeating mystical bell and flute-like sound to herald the beginning of the message and to let the listener know that the singer is singing from a place of transcendence in a dream-like state. All set to fade in and then fade out, just as I received it, just as in a dream.

Other Things

Oh boy. It's very hard, in a story of your life or a song about failed love, to tell it like it is and own up to your own bullshit and yet not accidentally or intentionally beg for sympathy, or worse do that evil trick of gathering attention to one's self through dramatizing the pain you caused the other person, at the same time. I feel like I accomplished it with this song though, and so I'm very proud of it. The alternate title of this song is the title of Marcel Proust's aching masterwork, "A la recherche du temps perdu," or, "In Search Of Lost Time". And out of respect for the woman I tried searching for my own lost time in, I'll leave it at that other than the sound of the wedding bells fading away as the song pumps to its beautiful conclusion and gentle set-down.

Second Hand Love

I had played a gig in Ottawa, and afterwards stepped out sweaty into the cool night to go get the truck to load up my gear. The moment my feet exited the downwards steps and hit the pavement, my steps started a song in my head that was in sync with my pace, and the full melody and phrasing and lyrics of the chorus were suddenly with me. It didn't exist, then it existed. The arrival of each song still amazes me. I walked in step with my little baby song, under the streetlights, passing between shadows and light and letting the rest of the lyrics in the verses come to me. Later that night, at home, I sat down with an acoustic guitar and found the chords that already existed out in space somewhere. Another magical example of a song coming fully formed, and accepting my role as the dutiful caretaker, the midwife, to bring it into this world. A songwriter? Sure. But more likely, a translator.

I Walked In The Night All Alone

Same Street, Different Towns. A mother and a father who were once together in every way, now living on the same street in the same town but in two completely different realities. Worlds apart you might say. This divorced, broken-family snapshot is my life and daily reality, but also the life and daily reality of so many other people I know, children and adults alike. Most importantly, children. But since I'm one of the causes of (not a victim of) a broken family, when I write a song about it I can only speak for myself. So what do I have to say? I have to say that I love the mother of my son, the very person I am in this permanent painful predicament with, the person who is equally responsible as I am. I loved her when I first met her, I love her now. And I don't care if I'm wrong or right, because I know I'm right to do so. Show me a person who can argue with love, and I will show you a list of people who have perpetrated the greatest crimes in human history. Love is untouchable, and as a songwriter, a father, and a co-parent I have decided to leave it that way...and to immortalize it and her in a song. Sue me.

This is the single, the best performance, taken from Second Chance Live, the unedited live album taken from the last date of my Album Preview Tour in my adopted hometown of Almonte, Ontario, Canada.

Second Hand Love (Live 2025) (Single Version)

Introduction (Live 2025)

I Walked In The Night All Alone (Live 2025)

Second Hand Love (Live 2025) (Album Version)

Other Things (Live 2025)

Same Street (Different Towns) (Live 2025)

I Have Been Waiting (Live 2025)

Kids Need A Place To Go (Live 2025)

Almost 20 years ago now, I was in Los Angeles filming a music video and my friend wanted to go to church one Sunday morning. I was happy to accompany him, and he brought me to a hip-looking megachurch where a young woman got on stage with an acoustic guitar and played a song she wrote about "being almost awesome" and being ok with that. It left a deep impression on me because, the concept of Christian guilt aside, I thought it was a really truthful way to speak about the human condition. You know, that one can accept their faults and the full breadth of their story while also knowing that they are still pretty cool despite increasingly realizing that they will not achieve perfection or anything close to it. It was a moment that never went into my long-term memory storage. It's stayed in my consciousness ever since, thinking of it often. One morning last year I sat down in the sticky summer heat on the front porch of life, and picked it up where that young woman left it off for the rest of us. In the verses detailing the solitude and dedicated searching that I have always made the central focus of my life. In the choruses laying it bare by saying, "I was in pieces, I am restored, I am closer to amazing than ever before. Someone left a light for me to guide my way back home." And as I finished writing all those parts and thought that this song needed a bridge, I suddenly realized that a short and nameless, seemingly nursery rhyme-like riff and symphonic woodwind section that I had been playing to myself for years in rehearsal warmups and absentmindedly on the couch was intended to be the perfect bridge to Closer To Amazing all along. I admit, I cried. And they were tears of joy that I hung in there long enough in life to finally "know where my story should go.".

Closer To Amazing (Live 2025)

Beyond Justice (Live 2025)

I've described aspects of the stories behind all of the other songs here, and all I'll say about that part of this song is that it's me speaking for myself and no one else about what's taken place since I moved to this new adopted hometown of Almonte, Ontario. What I would like to talk about here is the sound. Every North American suburb, in the 80's and 90's, had a tall, long-haired teenager with a black Led Zeppelin t-shirt walking the sidewalks and wanting to speak of nothing but thee band they worshipped: Led Zeppelin. In Sherwood Park, Alberta, that teenager was me. Producing and arranging the instrumentation for The Story So Far was an absolute delight for me, and it was such a joy to tip my sonic hat towards our four fathers. You'll hear the freedom of expression. The bass riffs that journey far from the root notes and are right on the edge of what the chords will allow, playing in their own free time signature unconcerned with bars and phrases. The drums thundering back and forth between your ears. And most of all, the influence of the beautiful cascading, warm, intricate but relaxed guitar work that makes Jimmy Page by far the most influential combination guitar player/composer/producer of modern music. Take me up on that one, I dare you. I wear this song's sound and instrumentation proudly. And, it really is my story. So far...

The Story So Far (Live 2025)

Never Listen To Adults (Live 2025)

Fearing lightning but needing thunder - expecting doom but instead came wonder. This is where the redemption story of my life was blown wide open to a higher level by a woman who embodies beauty, mystery, and the supernatural...and all the while that I thought I was "helping her" understand the story of her life, she was really showing me how to understand my own. She took all of the hard-earned wisdom that I was so eager to preach to the beautiful woman nearest me, and showed me how to turn it back on myself instead so that I could truly see how far I'd come, and just how far I might be able to go. Oh and another thing about this song: I completely finished it and mixed it AND THEN I THREW IT OUT. Deleted it. Gone. I came downstairs and announced my madness to this same woman, telling her it "wasn't good enough". She promptly made me go back upstairs, rescue it from the trash folder, gave my head a shake, sat with me, and then made me listen to it again. Thank god!


The First Day Of The Rest Of Your Life (Live 2025)

Children's Coda (Live 2025)

Archer was a 9 year old boy who tragically lost his life in front of his elementary school, and I wrote this song for him, the ever-present memory of him, and his parents, so that Archer can live forever. We all live in the same small community in Ontario, Canada, and this song is being released with permission and in partnership with Archer's parents.

The Archer

This song is a warning to all Americans, and people around the world. It hasn't happened yet, but the American government will end birthright citizenship if they can. If a child can removed from the country they were born in, then we will have a world of refugees. If you have ears to hear this song, then hear it!

Born American

Pink Volleyball is the true story of someone very close to our family who tragically succumbed to addiction. However, shortly before they died they sent over a gift of a Pink Volleyball for our daughter's 2nd birthday, an item that held deep personal significance and wonderful memories of the past from before our daughter was born. It showed that even in the midst of the worst and most painful time of their life, their love and goodness could not help but shine through. Pink Volleyball is a Christmas song - a tribute to our friend and a reminder that to give and to help is all there is.

Pink Volleyball

Xmas is for giving
Xmas is forgiving
Don’t forget to give
Forget yourself

I Am Kentucky

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