Names Of Birds is a project born not of novelty, but of timing. For more than two decades, Keppie and Benny circled one another creatively—friends for twenty-two years, collaborators in thought and practice, partners in building a global songwriting education platform—without ever fully stepping into a shared artistic authorship.

Both came to music by way of deliberate refusal. Keppie left a law degree behind; Benny stepped away from a future in elite sports performance analytics. Each abandoned a path that was reasonable, legible, and quietly encouraged, in favour of something far less certain but impossible to ignore. Songwriting was not a detour—it was the throughline. That shared history of walking away from the straight-edged and the sanctioned would come to define not only how they made music, but why.

What changed, when they returned to writing together years later, was not skill but arrival. Shaped by long creative lives, sharpened by teaching craft to thousands of others, steadied by confidence in their own artistic instincts, they found themselves finally aligned. The struggle was still there—long days of deliberate work, precision, patience—but something had shifted.

In 2024, after hours of hard writing at a house perched above the Central Coast of New South Wales, Benny disappeared into his basement studio. What emerged was a single line, sung over and over like an invocation: Catalina, I never did see you smile.

The song that followed arrived quickly, almost shockingly so. It unfolded in twenty minutes, but it was earned by years. Built from story, melody, and voice moving together instinctively, it carried the sound they had been circling without naming: folk and Americana filtered through restraint, lived-in storytelling, and vocal harmonies composed as architecture rather than ornament.

That song became the proof that Names Of Birds could exist.

At the heart of the project is a refusal to settle. Lyrics are worked until every word earns its place. Harmonies are not chosen for ease, but designed as part of the emotional grammar of the song. Nothing is incidental. Craft is not hidden, but neither is it flaunted.

Thematically, Names Of Birds dwells in a profound middle space. These are songs written from the nexus of raising young children while caring for aging parents; of standing inside family not as memory, but responsibility. They reflect a life stage defined as much by doors closed as doors opened—not with regret, but with clarity. The music attends to choice, inheritance, and the quiet gravity of staying.

The name itself gestures toward this attentiveness. Naming is an act of care and an act of failure; a way of holding something still while knowing it will never be fully contained. Birds appear and disappear. They are known, misnamed, remembered incorrectly. The project lives in that tension:

The desire to catalogue meaning, and the humility of knowing it will always escape.

Names Of Birds does not chase reinvention. It does not perform urgency. Instead, it offers something increasingly rare: songs shaped by patience, intimacy, and lived understanding. Music made not to impress, but to tell the truth carefully—and to trust that, in the end, careful truth carries further than noise.