In 2015, COURIER played a concert and invited 9 of his closest friends. They had no idea that all the songs He was about to play . . .

. . . were about them.

It was late summer when they met to make a plan. Friendship had always come easy back in college, but lives were changing now—shattering, in some cases. Some of them were emerging fresh from the university, daunted by the jarring arrival of the real world. Others plummeted headlong into graduate programs. And some had simply gone adrift, clinging to sanity like a life preserver with no one on the other end of the line. Maybe that’s why they were meeting: they were looking for companions. Someone to hold the other end.

So thirteen friends started looking for home in a place that felt very little like it. Summer turned to fall, and fall to winter, and despite the odds, they continued meeting every week for months, and then years. Four years, to be exact—enough time to witness promotions, graduations, celebrations, marriages, divorces, depressions, deaths. Joy. Pain. They walked through it all together.

But after a while, it became clear that something was missing. They knew each others’ present struggles, yes, but if history could inform the present, they realized that they needed to know each others’ histories as well. With this in mind, they decided to take turns telling their stories to each other one by one, week by week.

What they didn’t know was this: someone in the group was taking notes.