Matt North returns with “Visiting Hours,” the latest taste of his upcoming third album, Savoy (out September 15, 2026, via Round Badge Records), in a studio performance that transforms one of life’s most disorienting emotional states into something strangely luminous. Written during ICU visiting hours in 2023 while his father was in a coma, the song was born in the suspended space between dread and acceptance—the place where grief often begins before loss has fully arrived.
Some of the song’s most striking lines trace grief in its most non-linear form: “Now I’m a door without a lock / losing private wars,” and later, “I’m so broken. I’m fixed. I’m almost free.” Ordinary routines turn surreal and identity itself feels subtly altered. There’s devastation in the details: eating dinner too early, taking naps, tropical punch, silent conversations with plants. But the song never sinks into self-pity. Instead, it lives in the contradictions of mourning: broken and repaired, trapped and nearly released, bracing for what’s next while already feeling its weight.
North himself points to that balance as what he’s most proud of. Though the chorus lyrics and melody were completed just before his father died, the finished piece resists becoming maudlin. Rather than narrating one specific loss, “Visiting Hours” opens into the emotional weather of waiting, knowing, and surviving what follows.
A major part of the song’s atmosphere comes from Lynn Canfield’s harmony vocals. North, a longtime admirer of her work with Champaign-Urbana’s The Moon Seven Times, describes her voice as the kind that “makes you lean forward in your chair,” and that presence is unmistakable here.
Canfield, who connected personally to the song’s origin, said, “It was just so nice to be invited. Matt’s songs are pretty catchy, so I was all in. When he shared part of the song’s origin story, it felt just like my own dad’s last weeks had. And of course, ‘enough moonlight for the both of us’ is meta for this team.”
North’s instinct for scene-building extends beyond songwriting. In the ’90s and early 2000s, his career moved through comedy clubs, writers’ rooms, and film sets—living in Haight-Ashbury with Patton Oswalt and Mitch Hedberg, starring opposite James Woods in Dirty Pictures, and appearing in Curb Your Enthusiasm as Jason Alexander’s William Morris agent.
In the studio performance, North moves between roles—singing, playing drums, and conducting the horn section—while the piano’s delicately tickled keys punctuate the song’s emotional turns. Brass accents swell around the melody, lifting the arrangement even as the lyrics linger with uncertainty.
Filmed by Amanda Baker of Five Foot Productions at ToneGood Studio and High Cross Sound in Urbana, Illinois, the session features Matt North on vocals, Lynn Canfield on vocals, Paul Chastain on bass, Mitch Marlow and Kent Whitesell on guitar, Jesse Brown on piano, and a horn section with Jeff Helgesen, Scott Frillman, and Jeremiah St. John. The session was mixed by Matt Allison at Atlas Studios, Chicago, and mastered by James Treichler at Wave Upon Wave, Champaign, Illinois.
