Listen to Billy Raffoul’s Debut Single, ‘Driver’

In our quest to present new music on full in bloom, we came across Billy Raffoul and his debut single, ‘Driver’. The dynamic track is a potent calling card for the 22-year-old son of Canadian singer/songwriter Jody Raffoul. Naming Jeff Buckley, Neil Young, and Joe Cocker as influences, Raffoul also credits experience as the inspiration behind his songwriting. “That’s one thing for me — a song needs to be about something I’ve experienced or something someone close to me is going through,” Raffoul says. “I find myself going back to moments of time from the past, picking apart these little experiences and building them into bigger things. I want people to know that the songs are genuine, that they’ve been lived in.”

“Driver” was inspired by his family picking up a hitchhiker one night after Raffoul and his father played a gig on Pelee Island in the middle of Lake Erie. “This guy was really out of it, so he ended up staying with us for a few hours,” Raffoul says. The following weekend Raffoul told his story of the hitchhiker to songwriter Simon Wilcox and songwriter-producer Nolan Lambroza during a writing session in Los Angeles. “We turned it into something a little more sentimental, in that maybe I’m not singing about someone being lost on the side of the road, but maybe someone lost in life who doesn’t know where they’re going or what they’re supposed to be doing,” he explains.

While listening to the track, I could not pinpoint the artist, but when Raffoul sings the line, ‘Sometimes I wish I was the driver’, I thought it captured a vibe of somebody from the 80s era of music – see what you think. You can now listen to “Driver” via the embedded clip above.