Their dad writes down the setlists. He's been doing it for years — comes to the shows, helps carry the amps, writes down every song his sons play into a notebook.

The dad's name is James Como, and he used to be a drummer in a band called The Words, around New York in the late seventies. They had a following and even opened for Blondie at CBGB once. James's brother Lawrence wrote most of the songs.

Matt and Andrew grew up on those songs. Not only on records of them — on their father and uncles playing them in the living room, every time the family got together, which was often. They thought The Words were famous. They also thought The Beatles were on the radio right now, because that's what was in the car.

When the brothers hit fourteen and fifteen, James started a family Beatles tribute band. Him on drums, Lawrence on bass and Paul's vocal parts, Andrew as George, Matt as John. They played for six years, two or three nights a week, bars and restaurants and town festivals. That's how Matt and Andrew learned what a song is — from the inside, by playing the best ones over and over until the shape of them got into their hands and under their skin.

Lawrence stayed with the nephews after the tribute band ended. He'd come to shows and tell them honestly how it went. Which songs were working. Which ones he thought were hits. He said "I Don't Like You" was a hit (we'll get to that song later).

Lawrence was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2022 and kept coming anyway, sometimes driving ninety minutes each way, despite the treatments that would take everything out of him. He died in July 2023. He was sixty-two.

There's a song of his on the band's new record "Whisper in the Wind" (we'll get to that one later too). But not just one song — uncle Lawrence is present on every track, in a way. The brothers say they still ask “what would Uncle Lawrence think or do” when they’re writing or playing live.

Keep the backstory in mind as you press play. Let's listen to the new record together.

"Whisper in the Wind" opens with "Halo or Wings," and the hours that the band spent studying and playing The Beatles songs and learning from the best, show here — the songwriting reminded me of pure chart pop, or of hip-hop, where this kind of dexterity is the point of the exercise. The clever wordplay here is never at the cost of real emotion — every line lands hard.

What's going on underneath is no less interesting. Dark acoustic guitar, and an epic, pounding rhythm on the toms. Heavy. I'd even say ominous. And over the top of that is a beaming, lit-up, head-over-heels lyric about a girl being an angel. I genuinely don't know what the mechanism is there — why the one lifts the other instead of clashing with it. Robin Gibb said in an interview once that the best songs aren't sweet or bitter, they're bittersweet. This one is.

I wouldn't call the darkness foreshadowing — it isn't telling you this is gonna end badly. What the arrangement does is it pulls the camera back. You're not just watching the narrator and the girl; you feel as if you can see the whole world around them, and the world is a frightening place where the ones who look like angels often turn out to be something else, and the other way round too.

And, to broaden the scope even more, it is really a song about faith — not the churchgoing kind it keeps mentioning, but the ordinary kind — deciding a person is who you hope they are without any evidence you could show anyone. That's a leap off a cliff. The narrator knows it's a leap. But he leaps anyway, with his eyes open, and that's the source of both the beauty and the drama.

Track two, "You Remind Me," comes at you like a freight train. Muscular, all forward motion — power-pop muscle, or the poppier end of country, which the brothers flagged themselves. But, to my ear, mostly it reads as radio pop-rock, and the thing it kept reminding me of, oddly specifically, was Bryan Adams' "Cloud Number Nine."

The song started, Matt says, with the two Como brothers sitting down with nothing. "Andrew and I had both been coming off a few writing sessions where we were really inspired by that Nashville style of storytelling, and we wanted to bring some of that into this song. ... Trying to create lyrics and parts to songs is always fun together. We imagine what it must have felt like sitting down as John and Paul writing a Beatles tune in their early days." What came out was a coming-of-age song rooted in a real place — Port Jefferson, the harbour town they're from, where Matt also happened to take his wife on their first date. "It's really about looking at the person you love and having them bring you right back to all those memories of when you first fell in love."

If that song looks back with warmth, the next one bares its teeth. "I Don't Like You" is an incredibly strong song, and what makes it strong is how it pulls together what the first two tracks were doing separately. It's got the muscle, the robustness of "You Remind Me," and the depth, darkness and ache of "Halo or Wings," and when those two things land in the same song you get a genuine hit.

The song is old. Matt wrote it around 2010 or 2011, about a girl he'd thought he wanted to date until he found out what she was like. "At the time, I was sitting in my dorm room and really falling in love with the idea of writing my own songs. I'd take out my acoustic guitar and sometimes stay in on a Friday night just trying to come up with the perfect lyrics, chords, and melody. I was still figuring out who I was as a songwriter, and this was one of the first songs I wrote that I remember being really proud of."

It's also the song Uncle Lawrence always believed in. He thought it was a hit from the very beginning, and so did their dad, and that belief is the reason it's here at all: "If Uncle Lawrence believed in it that much, then maybe we should too." The brothers re-recorded it for this record and gave it a new sound, but Matt says the heart of it hasn't moved. "In a way, the song has grown up right alongside us. It's gotten better over the years, and hopefully we have too!"

But the thing I keep coming back to is the sadness, which runs deep through the song, and which is sung so plainly it catches you off guard. Worth saying something about who gets to sing it, too. Today a woman singing something like this about a man is encouraged; a man singing it the other way round could get pelted with rotten tomatoes. And yet there's no misanthropy here. Just truth, and a deep interior sadness underneath it — a sadness about the whole world, I think. The Buddhist kind, where before you can start down the path toward enlightenment you first have to feel an enormous, bottomless grief about the way the world is put together. Everything grows from that root.

After two songs that heavy, dropping something lighter and brighter in the fourth spot is a smart move — and the moment of relief is "Somewhere in This Cup". Andrew's description of it is one sentence long: "This is a song about liquid courage."

The million-dollar line here is I can see them looking at you looking at me. There's a lot in a few words: you get the scene, two people, a crowd around them, and then a whole film unfolding in your head — all of it from one line, that keeps playing on repeat in your memory because of the wordplay. The whole melody of the song with its light country twist works on you the same way.

"Forever Plus One" keeps things light, and the vocal on it goes straight through the wall and hits you. "This song idea came about when I was sending out wedding invitations (when I say I... I really mean my wife)," Andrew says. "There's a box you can check when accepting a wedding invitation that says 'plus one'. I was thinking that when I get future wedding invite, I'm never going to have a plus one again because I'm always going to have my wife."

The song was born at a wedding, and it's ready to go straight back to one. It sounds both modern and timeless enough that you can hear it joining the handful of recent songs that have already made it into wedding repertoire — Ed Sheeran's "Perfect," "Thinking Out Loud," that sort of thing. Half ballad, half pop song, built for two people becoming one, dancing in a place full of everyone they know.

"Living in This Moment" has a lot of forward motion in it, but there's a lightness to it too, a hidden force that lifts it off the ground.

Matt wrote it after watching the Get Back documentary. "Like so many times before, watching The Beatles create together inspired me to pick up the guitar and write more songs." There's something McCartneyesque in "Living in This Moment": wisdom and lightness arriving in the same melody. And there's something of the Eagles too, in the way the harmonies sit back off the lead and the whole thing rides rather than pushes.

"You start to realize that these moments pass by, and once they're gone, you don't get them back," Matt says about the song's lyrics. "It's easy to spend so much time thinking about what's next, worrying about the future, or going through the list of things you have to do that you miss what's happening right in front of you."

Being in the moment isn't something you achieve by telling yourself to do it. It's the opposite — you stop instructing yourself and you start watching, and you let things happen to you. And when you manage that, everything starts arriving. Songs as magical as this one included.

"Life With You" closes what feels like a trilogy. Three songs in a row with the same lightness to them, the same love of being alive — and they're circling the same thought from different angles. "Forever Plus One" asks for more time, and "Living in This Moment" tries to stop it. This one accepts that neither is possible — time keeps moving, so the game is to love the life you've got while it's happening.

Andrew wrote it for his wife, and it was their first dance at their wedding on April 9. The song was built for that moment: it sways at a slow-dance tempo, and the sparse acoustic setting leaves the vocal nowhere to hide.

"Make My Heart Move" is full of sunlight. Listening to it I feel summer — sun kissing my skin, a soft wind coming in off the sea and moving over me. And the touch of someone who loves you is just like that: as warm as summer, as endless, as total.

The song has been around a long time, and it's also one of the songs they've played live more than almost anything else. Matt and Andrew first cut it in 2013 or 2014 at the Hit Factory in New York, with Steve Jordan on drums — yes, the Rolling Stones and John Mayer Trio Steve Jordan — for their Imagination EP. Ten or twelve years later they came back to it. "We ended up reworking some of the storyline, finding a new groove, and giving the song a fresh perspective while still keeping the spirit of what we originally loved about it."

"All I Want Is You" is Uncle Lawrence's song. He wrote it for The Words, and it's the brothers' favourite thing of his — they've re-recorded it with a full band and Grammy-winning saxophonist Bob Reynolds, of John Mayer and Snarky Puppy, on the solo.

There's a kind of rapture in this song that starts working on you in the verses. You feel it gathering as the chorus approaches, and when the chorus lands, the wave goes right over you. "All I Want Is You" says the world is beautiful, and all that beauty converges on one person the way a lens gathers light to a single point. That feeling fills the narrator completely, but it doesn't stop with him. It spills over onto everyone else. He's kind about the sister. He's kind about the best friend. He's kind about all the friends she keeps setting him up with. The goodness in him simply overflows and lands on everybody.

It also sounds like a classic. In a slightly different arrangement this could be a Motown record, and it's easy to imagine the Beatles covering it the way they covered Motown and everything else they loved. It's genuinely timeless. And the lyric is simple — but the simplicity is the hook here. It feels like the reference standard for what a song should be — the kind of thing you'd keep under glass in Sèvres, next to the original kilogram.

"Your Baby I'll Be" is another one of those warm, cosy, sunlit summer songs. You can practically feel the light coming off it.

And listening to it, you start to understand where a person that full of love comes from — the one singing "All I Want Is You," pouring goodness over everybody within reach. He comes from a loving family. From people who noticed what he could do when he was small and then backed it, tended it, kept it alive. And who stayed with him through the bad stretches too — the empty rooms, the gig nights nobody shows up for.

The song's written for Matt and Andrew's mother. "No matter how old we get, we'll always be our mom's baby," Andrew says. Matt adds: "There's nothing like our Mother's love. She is one of a kind, saintly and has done everything possible to give us the best life possible."
The lyrics are written from the perspective of both mother and son, but nothing in the song says "mother." Which leaves it open: someone else could hear it as a love song, or about a brother, or a friend who's always been there. We happen to know what it is, and knowing makes it softer and warmer. But the song doesn't lose a single one of the other things it can be.

"Wanna Be" opens on a reggae skeleton, which is a shape we know from a lot of pop hits — the closest comparison here is probably Bruno Mars and "The Lazy Song," which went huge. Fittingly, it's a song about chasing that level of success, and it sounds like it could actually reach it. Everything the band controls is already in place. What's left is luck, and I think it'll come.

Then the song starts acting out its own ambition. It gathers momentum, builds and builds, and by the end the relaxed pop-reggae number turns into a full-on banger.

"Wanna Be" was about wanting your name up in lights. "The Ride" is about how the name in lights isn't the point. And you'd expect the first one to be the heavy song and the second one to be the happy one — wanting eats you alive, and letting go of it is supposed to be the relief. Here it's the other way around. The song about wanting is bright and cheerful. The song about being content where you are, which takes real wisdom to arrive at, is the sombre one, with a quiet sadness lighting it from inside, like a match.

It's about the brothers' twenty years. "Especially during those first 10 or 15 years, we played plenty of the gigs to basically no one," Matt says. "There were nights when, as the song says, the bartender was pretty much the only fan in the room." And through all of it, their father was with them: "I can remember countless nights when Andrew and I would be playing some dive bar with only a couple of people there — or nobody there at all — and our dad would still be there cheering us on and sometimes even singing along with us."

And this is where he arrives: "After all those years of chasing some idea of success or imagining what it would feel like to finally 'make it,' you realize there really isn't one magical endpoint."

But the sadness in the music doesn't mean the journey was sad. It's there because life on the road is mixed, and not all of it fits a neat narrative. The lyric tidies things up: the bartender becomes a story to tell later, the bad nights turn into good memories. The music remembers the rest. Some nights were funny and warm, and somebody helped the band out. Other nights were hard, and they drove home feeling worse than when they arrived, and no amount of retelling makes that pretty. Somehow the hope in the words and the ache in the music end up producing something warm and full of affection for all of it.

"One & Only" is another song the band went back to — they wrote it more than ten years ago and never felt they'd caught it. "We changed the musical approach, added some new lyrics, played around with the structure, and basically gave the song the update we always felt it deserved while keeping the heart of the original intact," Matt says. The old recording is still up on the band's Spotify, and he suggests you compare them.

So I did. The old version is more straightforward, with a somewhat thinner mix. It's still a hit — the melody and the mood are there, and it's a real pleasure to listen to. But the new one has a false bottom: there's more going on beneath the surface.

That's something that keeps turning up on this record. "Halo or Wings" and "The Ride" do it too: the words and the music pull in different directions, and instead of cancelling each other out, they deepen each other. Here the music carries a heavy, aching undercurrent beneath a lyric that's full of forward motion and certainty. There's a tender ache to it rather than sadness, a bit like Keane at their best.

The title track, by contrast, carries an enormous charge of optimism. It fills you up and brings a kind of relief.
Matt remembers starting to sing "There are days…" and Woolf and Andrew coming in underneath him with the second and third harmony parts almost instantly. "As soon as we heard the three voices together, we all kind of looked at each other like, 'Okay, there's something here.'" Listening to it, you get that same feeling: the certainty that something good is on its way, just as they were certain they had a song.

Bright and brisk as it is, the song relaxes you in the best sense. The harmonies, the arrangement and the banjo are working away underneath: it all moves like a river. The Taoists understood this long ago: life flows, and the wise thing is to stop fighting the current. This song gently puts you in that frame of mind.

That feeling of flow carries straight into "Magic," only now it's shared. Andrew described it as "a song about puppy love and infatuation," but it reaches further than one crush. You can picture a whole stadium holding hands and singing the chorus back: it's full of wonder at how beautiful the world is, and full of warmth toward everyone in it. It's the same feeling behind the world-conquering hits of Coldplay and fun.

And Uncle Lawrence thought it was a hit, too.

"Will You Marry Me?" is built to last. What stands out is how plainly it speaks: Andrew doesn't dress anything up, he just says what he means in the simplest words there are. He wrote it for his wife and played it to her the night they got engaged.

Unlike "One & Only," there's no false bottom here. There doesn't need to be — real love is bottomless anyway.

Then, right after "Will You Marry Me?", "Life With You" returns, this time with the full band. It's like a bride changing into a second dress once the dancing starts, and this one might be the more stunning of the two. The question, then the answer: that's where the record ends.

Listening to this album has been a rest for the soul. Like a long drink of cold water when you hadn't noticed how thirsty you were.

The Como Brothers is a band that grew out of love, out of a family that cherished them, and that's carrying forward something their parents and uncle started. James and Lawrence made music because making music is a good way to spend a life — at family parties, in bars around Queens, clubs or stadiums, or for whoever cares to listen. Matt and Andrew are doing the same thing, on the same terms, and the pleasure of it is in the doing, as "The Ride" tells us.

And at the same time Matt and Andrew look at everything with disarming honesty. "I Don't Like You" is the clearest case — a song that had every excuse to be simply nasty, and instead goes somewhere more sincere and sadder. You have to be a genuinely truthful, whole person to find your own words for the uncomfortable feelings and the courage to sing them.

There's the melodicism too, learned from the classics and from their parents. And the vocal harmonies, which music is genuinely short of right now — voices locking together the way they do on the title track, and you could come back to this record for that alone. Arrangements that never overreach and always find the strongest thing in a song and put a light on it. And the particular pleasure, the songs that make you want to come back into the world this band has built, are the ones where words and music pull against each other — "Halo or Wings," "One & Only," "The Ride." That contrast tells you about all the colours in our universe, not only the ones you'd want to photograph.

By the end, you've walked the whole road with the band. Along the way you flinched, stumbled, got hurt, felt sad — and fell in love more than once.

I can't wait to see this music reach millions of people. It deserves to.

Listen to the album below. You can also find all of the band's music at this smart-link. Moreover, you can vote for The Como Brothers on American Songwriters' talent contest here. Just three artists made it through thousands of submissions and a jury's review. And the band is one of those three deserving. Please support them — and make sure you do it before October 20.