Canadian singer/songwriter and social media star Braden Barrie channels the yearning acoustic emo of Dashboard Confessional into his solo project, SayWeCanFly. After beginning to share music under the alias in 2009, he issued three full-lengths and over twice as many EPs over the next eight years, including 2016’s Blessed Are Those, which became a Top 50 independent album. In October of 2018, he released his Braden Barrie debut, Limitless, on the same day as his fourth SayWeCanFly album, Beautiful Mess.
Originally created as the name of his social media channel, SayWeCanFly was home to Barrie’s early demos, which he began uploading as a young teen in 2009. Although he grew up listening to hardcore punk and My Chemical Romance, Barrie’s music is patient and sweeping, more fitting for a coffee shop than an underground basement gig. He released the Sleepy Time EP in mid-2011, following it with the Home EP before the end of the year. Dandelion Necklace EP saw release in 2012. Still putting out his own music and still a teenager, he followed those with the EPs Heaven Is Hell and Anything But Beautiful in 2013.
Two years later, in addition to signing with Epitaph and joining the Warped Tour, he unveiled his first full-length, Between the Roses. Epitaph also released the Darling EP, later in 2015. Tours with the Ready Set, Tonight Alive, and Set It Off followed. His sophomore effort, Blessed Are Those, arrived in 2016 and debuted at number 15 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart as well as landing on the independent albums chart.
Barrie then parted ways with Epitaph and issued the 2017 acoustic EP Storyteller Unplugged as a free download. He returned in 2018 with two full-length releases on his own Purewolf Records label: Limitless, his first album under his own name, and SayWeCanFly’s Beautiful Mess. The latter returned him to the Heatseekers and independent albums charts.