There are songs about loss that feel like open wounds and there are songs that feel like the scar left behind, still tender, still capable of hurting if you touch it, but not defined solely by pain. This is the case with Garrett Anthony Rice’s ‘Going Up (to see him)’. It’s a gentle, dream-soaked pop-rock meditation on friendship, memory, absence and the strange way people can be part of our lives long after their physical presence has gone. Rice approaches the topic with an emotional honesty that immediately distinguishes the song from the many sentimental songs that try to wrap up grief in a neat package. This is not an order. It’s thoughtful, bittersweet, and deeply human. Fundamentally, it is the memory of a best friend whose death left Rice with decades of unresolved grief, feelings he says he couldn’t properly express until the EQUINOX sessions in 2024. It matters that the distance between the loss and the eventual song is a vast one. “Going Up (to see him)” is a title that suggests something that needed time to happen. There is no emotional performance here, no trying to wring tears for effect. Instead, Rice seems to be looking back, with the perspective that only years can give, and seeing that grief changes shape even if it never quite goes away. The result is a loving musical epitaph, one that celebrates the life and influence of the person being honored, rather than allowing death to have the last word.
“Going Up (to see him)” evokes an atmosphere from the first passages that is almost weightless. Unobtrusive beats pulse softly, soulful guitar lines drift gently through the arrangement, and heavenly harmonies provide a spacious backdrop for Rice’s reflections. The music does not hurry to dramatize the subject, and that restraint is one of its greatest virtues. Here there is space for memories to bloom out on their own. The pop-rock foundation makes the song accessible, but the production has enough warmth and air to lend it a cinematic feel, as if the song is unfolding somewhere between waking life and remembrance. This dreamlike quality is particularly apt for a song about the persistence of someone who is not physically present. Memories are like that, you know: fragments, vivid, strangely immediate. Suddenly years later when the person is gone the voice, the face, the moment can feel tangible. Rice captures that feeling without overdoing the arrangement. Each of the instrumental parts seems to get the emotional assignment. Tim Will’s piano lends a reflective warmth, and Chris Webb’s bass quietly anchors the song. There’s no overpowering percussion from Geoff Dugmore’s drums, but a subtle momentum that lets the track breathe. The musicians are not competing to make the song bigger; they are helping Rice make its emotional world feel more real.
The vocal arrangement adds another whole layer to that world, not least with the input from the Dublin African Gospel Choir. Their soaring presence brings about a spiritual elevation, but it never feels alienated from the song’s earthly sadness. Rather, the choir establishes a beautiful tension between absence and continuation. Rice sings of a lost love. But the music feels more and more crowded with voices, memories, echoes. That contrast is important, because “Going Up (to see him)” isn’t a song that ultimately wants to leave its listener in darkness. There is thankfulness, too, but there is sadness here. The song acknowledges that the people we lose continue to live through the people they touched, the memories they made and the versions of us that were formed by knowing them. It is an insidiously powerful idea. Physical presence is only one element of a relationship, and Rice knows that memory can become a kind of companionship in itself. The gospel harmonies support this view without making the song a sermon. Instead they seem to extend the emotional horizon, to hint at something beyond the immediate sadness. Producer Chris Potter should be congratulated for keeping that fine line. Recorded at Kore Studios in London, Potter’s own studio in Bournemouth, and Darklands Studio in Dublin, the production manages to feel intimate in scale without sacrificing breadth. The track can feel close enough to whisper in your ear, yet expansive enough to fill a much larger emotional landscape.
Perhaps the most affecting aspect of “Going Up (to see him)” is Rice’s refusal to treat grief as a problem to be solved. The song knows something that people who’ve lost something eventually learn: healing doesn’t mean forgetting, moving on doesn’t mean leaving someone behind. Rice’s decades of unresolved grief haven’t disappeared but have transformed into something he can finally look at, put into words and share. It makes the song less of a goodbye and more of a reconciliation. The discovery that sadness is not the only legacy of loss is a particularly poignant maturity. With time, pain gives way to appreciation. The no is there but so is everything the relationship gave you. Friendships continue to shape your view of loyalty, love, humor, courage or just what it means to have known another. “Going Up (to see him)” occupies that complex emotional space. It remembers the pain but doesn’t get lost in it. The soft guitar and easy piano lend a gentleness to the track that allows one to digest its weightier ideas, and the vocal harmonies keep opening the song up to something more hopeful. Rice isn’t pretending loss is beautiful. He’s saying that you can grow something beautiful around it eventually.
There’s also a universal aspect to the song that allows its very personal origin to become something bigger. Rice might have written “Going Up (to see him)” in response to the death of one particular best friend, but the emotional terrain is one familiar to anyone who has had to confront an empty chair, a phone that rings unanswered, an old photograph, or a memory that ambushes you unannounced. The track gets that everybody has a version of absence. What’s especially effective about Rice’s approach is his decision to focus not only on what was taken away, but what remains. That view lends the song a gently restorative quality. He ponders that people live on in the impressions they make on others, rather than the total oblivion of death. It’s an idea that in less careful hands can seem sentimental, but here it feels earned, because Rice has lived with the question so long. The years count. The silence is important. In the end it is the writing itself that counts. “Going Up (to see him)” is like a message back in time, not to change what happened, because nothing can do that, but to acknowledge the ongoing importance of a friendship that still has emotional weight decades later. That makes the song intimate and strangely communal.
The very title of the track adds another level of intrigue. “Going Up (to see him),” conversationally simple, stands in stark contrast to the enormity of what Rice is contemplating. It feels like a conversation between friends, which keeps the song grounded even as its ideas lean toward spirituality and whatever there might be out there after this physical life. The central emotion does not need elaborate philosophical language: I miss someone, I remember, and I think that they are not entirely absent from my life. That simplicity allows the melody to do much of the emotional heavy lifting. Rice doesn’t need to push for a big climax because the song’s importance builds up slowly. The guitar, piano, bass, drums and choir create an environment where the listener can sit with the thought rather than being told exactly what to feel. This is music for silent driving, for the depths of nite, for strange moments when an old memory is suddenly reborn. The arrangement is polished enough to feel cinematic but restrained enough to maintain the intimacy of the songwriting. Most importantly, it never feels like the production is trying to detract from the vulnerability at the heart of the piece. Everything leads back to remembrance.
In the end, “Going Up (to see him)” is a song about the possibility of finding light without denying the darkness that preceded it. Garrett Anthony Rice has taken an experience from decades ago that is not resolved and transmuted it into something generous: a song that remembers one person but offers solace to countless others who have suffered their own losses. Its greatest strength is that it doesn’t pretend grief has a finish line. Rather, it shows how grief can turn to gratitude, how memory can be a well of strength, how the effect of someone lost can go on to influence the lives of those left behind. Gentle pop-rock melodies, soulful guitars, warm piano, restrained rhythm section and soaring Dublin African Gospel Choir create an appropriately expansive setting but the emotional center remains remarkably simple. Somebody was important. Someone was loved. Someone is missing. And because of that love they are still there in ways that cannot be measured in physicality alone. Hence ‘Going Up (to see him)’ is more than a song of remembrance. It’s a quiet celebration of connection surviving absence, an affirmation that healing can coexist with remembrance, and a beautiful reminder that sometimes the people who leave our world never truly leave the story of our lives.
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