TWO YEARS, ONE SOLAR ECLIPSE: HOW ISAAC WINEMILLER FINISHED ‘IN THIS LIGHT’ - THE PARTNER TO ‘YOUR SHOW’

The Bozeman bedroom-pop artist’s new double single Solar Eclipse documents a relationship in real time — and could only be completed once it was truly over

Some songs arrive quickly. A mood, a melody, a set of words that arrive more or less fully formed and ask only to be captured. And then there are songs like ‘In this Light’ — the kind that resist completion not because the writer lacks anything, but because the story they are trying to tell keeps changing underneath them.

Isaac Winemiller began work on the track in 2024. He would not finish it for the better part of two years.

The reason is not complicated, though it is revealing. ‘In this Light’, the focus track from his new double single Solar Eclipse, documents a long-term relationship that spent those same two years cycling repeatedly through the same patterns: breaking apart, reconnecting, falling apart again. Every time Winemiller returned to the song, the emotional landscape had shifted. Every time he thought he was close to finishing it, something changed.

“In many ways,” he has said, “it felt impossible to truly finish the song until I had finally moved on emotionally.”

That kind of biographical entanglement with a piece of music is not unusual in songwriting. What is less common is an artist willing to sit with that discomfort for as long as it takes rather than forcing a resolution the material isn’t ready for. For Winemiller, completing the track ultimately became something beyond a creative act. “Completing it became more than just finishing a track,” he explains. “It became part of the healing process itself.”

The finished song bears little obvious trace of that protracted gestation. Produced entirely from his home studio in Bozeman, Montana, where Winemiller handled every element himself save for lead guitar, ‘In this Light’ is warm, shimmering, and physically immediate. A Juno 60 and Waldorf synthesiser carry the harmonic weight; Rhodes and Wurlitzer electric pianos lend a softness to the low end; the rhythmic architecture is dance-forward and precise. It is, sonically, the kind of music that invites movement. The subject matter is something else entirely.

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That tension between form and content is arguably what gives the track its particular quality. Winemiller has spoken previously about wanting his music to occupy a specific emotional register — songs that can, in his words, “make you want to cry, smile, fall in love, and dance all at once.” ‘In this Light’ does not so much split the difference between those states as hold them simultaneously, which is a harder thing to pull off than it sounds.

Isaac grew up surrounded by music in every practical sense. His mother directed choirs and taught voice lessons from the family home; his father sang and arranged; his siblings are similarly embedded in the craft. He came to singing and to his own solo voice relatively late, by his own account, and the Isaac Winemiller project has always functioned as something distinct from his other work: a space for writing that doesn’t fit elsewhere, music made primarily for the act of making it.

That other work covers considerable ground. Winemiller is a full-time touring musician across the Rocky Mountain region and has performed internationally as bassist for Vansire, which has taken him across North America, through Japan, Singapore, and China. A full North American Vansire tour is scheduled for autumn 2026 and into early 2027. Beyond that, he produces and performs with a growing roster of independent artists, including emerging indie-Americana songwriter Abby Webster, and describes himself, with characteristic understatement, as the local “bass dude” around Bozeman.

His solo catalogue has grown steadily and without fanfare. His 2021 debut Levels of Removal drew tens of millions of cumulative Spotify streams, an editorial Fresh Finds placement, and write-ups from Indie-Shuffle, Obscure Sound, and Kidwithavinyl. His 2025 follow-up Rolling Hills Road extended the blend of romantic lyricism and groove-driven production that runs through his work. Solar Eclipse is the first release since that album.

Whether it is also his most personal is a matter of degree; Winemiller has consistently described his songs as diary entries, fixed points of honesty tied to specific moments. But there is something different about a song that took two years to write not because the writing was difficult, but because the subject matter demanded that kind of patience.

“The song stands as a testament to resilience, self-reflection, and the confidence it takes to let go and move forward,” he says.

For an artist whose three guiding principles are honesty, vulnerability, and compassion, ‘In this Light’ feels like a precise and unhurried expression of all three.