Forever & For Now

The story behind
the songs

“Music isn't something you own. It's something you pass on.”

On the outskirts of Houston, a five-year-old boy kept his father company at a used car lot. There, he befriended an elderly blues man they called Homeless James—a sidewalk philosopher with a Yamaha SG75 and stories older than the Texas sun. On their last day together, James pressed the guitar into the boy's small hands. “If I'm not going to see you again,” he said, “you'll need this.”

Decades later, Shawn still writes on that same guitar. Every chord carries the weight of that moment—the understanding that songs aren't crafted, they're inherited. Passed down through calloused hands, dusty sidewalks, and the honest ache of living. That belief runs through everything Pander creates: roots-pop acoustic narratives that blend blues, jazz, and folk into something unmistakably his own. Songs that strike with the precision of a storyteller who learned at the feet of the real thing.

It's a path that led from that Houston car lot to the Cavern Club in Liverpool, from Dr. Phil's stage to the Lincoln Center, from a John Lennon Grand Prize to an ASCAP Lyric Award. But none of that was the point. The music was always the point.

His new album Forever and For Now, written and produced with Gabriel Rhodes, is the purest expression of that belief—eleven songs about love, loss, memory, and the stubborn hope that keeps us moving forward. Vintage warmth meets raw honesty. A lifetime of stories, told on an old man's guitar.

Written & Produced by Shawn Pander & Gabriel Rhodes