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 — 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 songs or playing live.

The album's called Whisper in the Wind. It's amazing — I'll tell you why as we go.

Let's put it on.

The record 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. Usually cleverness like this costs you something. You get the joke and lose the feeling. Here you don't. Every line lands hard.

Then there's what's going on underneath. Dark acoustic guitar, and an epic, pounding rhythm on the toms. Heavy. Ominous, honestly. And over the top of that is this 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 cancelling 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 anymore; you can see the whole world around them, and the world is a frightening place where the ones who look like angels turn out to be something else often enough, and the other way round too. That's the ground this song is standing on. And it is a song about faith, entirely — not the churchgoing kind it keeps needling, 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. He does it anyway, with his eyes open, and that's where both the beauty and the drama live.

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 lands 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 of them 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."

"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 deeper than the song lets on, 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 would 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 four 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 so much in it. You get the scene, you get both people, you get a whole film playing in your head — all of it from one line, and then it stays lodged there because of the wordplay. That's real craft.

There are country touches running through this one too, and the melody sticks.

"Forever Plus One" keeps things light, and the vocal on it goes straight through the wall and hits you. No armour on it at all.

"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."

So it 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 that 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, something 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 it: 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" wants more time than forever. "Living in This Moment" wants to hold one moment still. And this one finds the answer to both: the clock doesn't slow down, so what you do is decide that this is the life worth having.

Andrew wrote it for his wife. It was their first dance at their wedding this April 9th, which you can hear — it moves at a wedding dance tempo, and the 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.

And the song is incredible. There's a kind of rapture in it, and it starts working on you in the verses — you can feel it gathering as the chorus approaches, and when the chorus lands the wave goes right over you. Not exaltation exactly. Rapture is the word. The world is beautiful, and all that beauty comes to a focus in one person the way light does through a lens, and it fills the narrator completely — but it doesn't stop there. It spills over onto everyone else. He's kind about the sister. He's kind about the best friend. He's kind about all of the friends she keeps setting him up with. The goodness in him is running over the sides and landing 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 so simple — but the simplicity is the hook here. It feels like the foundation of music, like the essence of a song distilled down and set behind glass in the Paris bureau of weights and measures.

"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 wide 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 it 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 enormous. And that's the joke, sort of, because this is a song about wanting and aiming for exactly that, and it could get there. The band has everything it needs. The stars have to line up a particular way, and I believe they will.

Then the song does the thing it's singing about. It starts gathering. Picks up steam, picks up force, and turns further and further into a banger rather than the relaxed pop-reggae number it came in as.

"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 isn't because the journey is sad. It's because life is big and various, and it doesn't all rhyme. The lyric tidies it into a nice picture — the bartender becomes a story you can tell afterwards, the bad nights become good memories. The music adds depth. Some nights were funny and warm and somebody helped the band out. And some nights were hard, and they drove home afterwards feeling worse than when they arrived, and no amount of retelling turns that into a pretty story. But somehow the hope in the words and the ache in the music add up to warmth. To love, really. You feel it.

"One & Only" is another one 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 their Spotify, and he suggests you compare them.

So I did. The old version is more straightforward and a bit thinner and flatter in terms of mix and production. It's still a hit, mind — the melody's there, the mood's there, there's a real pleasure in it. But the new one has a false bottom.
That's the thing that keeps turning up on this record. It's what "Halo or Wings" and "The Ride" do: words and music pulling in different directions and somehow deepening each other instead of cancelling out. Here the music carries a heavy, aching sort of feeling underneath a lyric that's all forward motion and certainty — not depressive, exactly, but sore, like Keane's hits.

The title track carries an enormous charge of optimism. It fills you up, and it gives you a kind of relief.

Matt's story about writing it: he started singing "There are days…" and Woolf and Andrew came in underneath him with the second and third harmonies 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.'" And that's what listening to it feels like, too. You get the same thing they got. It's like coming home — like knowing it's going to work out, that something good is coming, the way they knew they had a song.

It relaxes you, in the best sense, even though it's bright and moving quickly. The harmonies, the whole arrangement, the banjo working away underneath it — it moves like a river. The Taoists knew and understood this: life flows, the whole of existence flows, and the thing to do is stop fighting it. This song puts you in that frame of mind.

There's something unifying about "Magic", which Andrew described as "a song about puppy love and infatuation." You can picture a whole stadium holding hands and singing the chorus back — it's got universal love in it, and wonder at how beautiful the world is, and warmth, and everything else. fun. and Coldplay have world-conquering hits built on the same sort feeling.

And Uncle Lawrence thought it was a hit, too.

"Will You Marry Me?" is another song that could become a pop standard. And it's completely arresting in the way it doesn't reach for pretty, roundabout language when the plainest, tenderest words are right there.

Andrew wrote it for his wife and played it to her the night they got engaged.

There's no false bottom here. There doesn't need to be — why would you want one, when real love is bottomless anyway?

And then "Life With You" comes back at the end, this time with the whole band on it. The acoustic version sat in the middle of the record — one guy, a guitar, making a promise. Here it lands right after "Will You Marry Me," the song where he asks. So you get the question, then the answer, then everybody playing. The record ends on the promise actually being kept.

And it's the same song that spent its first verse listing things with the one piece missing — the beach with no ocean, the guitar with no strings. Now nothing's missing. Everyone's in the room.

And then "Life With You" comes back, this time with the full band.

It's like a bride changing into a second dress for the back half of the reception — and somehow it's the prettier of the two.

Placed right after "Will You Marry Me," too. The question, then the answer. And 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.

What you're listening to is a band that grew out of love, out of a family that loved 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 much 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 listen 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. Somewhere you flinched, somewhere you stumbled, somewhere you got hurt, somewhere you got sad, somewhere your heart opened up like a flower, somewhere you met love.

I want to live to see The Como Brothers' music get into millions of hearts.