**Unearthing Quiet Gold: A Personal Journey with Christian Lopez’s “Onward” (2019)**
There are some records that find you in your hour of silence—those unassuming albums that sneak up in the peripheral, never making the playlists that crowd radio’s hot rotation or setting fire to Twitter’s excitable masses. Christian Lopez’s *Onward*, released in 2019, is one such artifact: a country album that chartered its course with little fanfare, its sounds echoing more in smoky bars and tender night rides than in the ever-bright gaze of pop culture. It remained largely hidden from the uninitiated, yet its songs found me right when I needed them most.
I first stumbled upon Lopez’s *Onward* in the autumn after a bruising breakup—one of those slow-motion untanglings that leave you doubting both your memory and your motives. The world, I felt then, was something to endure rather than savor. A friend, humming an unplaceable tune, introduced me to Christian Lopez. On a whim, I pressed “play” on the album, and the opening track *Sip of Mine* felt like a careful hand reaching across the dusk to find mine.
“Come and take a sip of mine,
I’ve got a feeling you might find
Peace that doesn’t taste like wine,
But sweeter now that it’s shared tonight.”
These words landed gently but deliberately. Lopez, still in his mid-twenties at the time of recording, brought a generosity of spirit that few bother with anymore—especially in country music, where ego is too often wrapped in bravado. The song, stripped-down and unhurried, rendered both the promise of companionship and the vulnerability of someone who knows what it means to be parched for kindness. For me, it became almost a ritual to return to its chorus in moments when my solitude threatened to tip into isolation.
What gives *Onward* its rare strength is Lopez’s patient, even-handed songwriting. He isn’t interested in easy victories or cheap bitterness. The second track, *Let Go*, wrestles with the sticky, contradictory hope that clings to the end of a relationship.
“I was holding on
To what we used to be
Now I’m watching it drift out to sea.”
I remember—I still remember—how I replayed this line, nearly whispering it to myself during grey mornings. There’s acute heartbreak here, to be sure, but Lopez never wallows. His voice, weary yet warm, suggests that pain can be transformative, even if the process is ugly. In the echoing space between notes, there’s the silent work of healing.
I’ve always struggled with letting go—of people, of ideas, of versions of myself that no longer serve me. When he sings “You taught me how to leave, now I’m learning how to stay with myself,” I felt almost called out. The persistence of memory, and the compulsion to relive old wounds, is a motif I’ve never quite learned to put down. Lopez’s gift is his refusal to glamorize regret: instead, he lets it sit quietly in a corner, making it a companion rather than a monster.
*Onward’s* production is modest, a clear-eyed nod to its roots in Appalachian folk and modern Americana. There’s a banjo that threads through *Still on Its Feet*, a song about home and resilience—a song that handily avoids the trap of nostalgia’s rose-tinted glasses.
“Not all roots go deep,
But this old house is still on its feet,
Through every storm that’s tried to break it down.”
This chorus gave me a kind of emotional permission: to believe that life’s dilapidations are survivable, that whatever I could cobble together from the ruins would be enough. I thought about the old family house I left behind, the way I keep carrying old griefs around, and realized that not every foundation needs to be unbreakable—some need only to hold you just long enough to find your footing again.
There is lightness here, too. In *If I Could Travel Back*, Lopez muses playfully, almost mischievously, about the lure of second chances and the folly of revisionism.
“If I could travel back, would I take that left instead of right?
Or would I find another fork, just as lost, just as right?”
His humor is gentle but incisive, a reminder that hindsight is not always a weapon, sometimes it’s a balm. I laughed, ruefully, to myself over these lines—how many times had I replayed not just my last relationship, but every misstep, thinking a single different word or gesture might have saved me discomfort? The answer, Lopez seems to say, is to stop trying to cheat time and simply walk onward with open eyes.
As I lived through a winter of introspection, *Onward* became both a friend and a mirror—its unhurried melodies and forgiving lyrics tracing the arc of my ache. I shared its tracks selfishly, then cautiously: the album felt too intimate for mass consumption, like the secret wisdom passed between old souls or trusted lovers. In the drifting harmonies of *Nothing Wrong*, Lopez sings:
“Everyone’s got scars they hide,
And everyone’s just trying to survive
With nothing wrong about a heart that cries.”
It’s a message I desperately needed to hear. My own scars, both visible and hidden, no longer felt like defects but markers of survival—echoes of every risk taken, every love attempted.
But it would be unfair to call *Onward* flawless. If the album falters, it’s in its reluctance to break free of its own gentle melancholy. A handful of tracks—particularly toward the middle—risk blending together, with similar tempos and thematic concerns. I longed, sometimes, for a rougher edge, for a riskier departure from its comforting formula—something brash or unexpected, proof that the quiet can also contain moments of sonic rebellion. Perhaps Lopez was too content to whisper when, just once, he might have roared.
Yet, perhaps that’s precisely why this album felt like a lifeline during my season of retreat: its insistence that you can move forward without bravado, that reflection does not equal weakness. Christian Lopez’s *Onward* is not the sound of victory—it’s the sound of endurance, of holding on through the dark in the quiet belief that morning will come.
So if you stumble across this record on a lonely night, as I did, know you have found a companion. And, perhaps, a way forward.
Kroes den Bock