Everyone knows they need to change. It takes loving someone to make that knowledge unbearable. "The Fixer", the first single from Canadian singer-songwriter Cameron Reed's debut album as Father Of The Year, is the opening salvo of a record about marriage, masculinity, and the limits of love.

For themes this personal, Reed arrives with unlikely background credentials. Previously known as Babe Rainbow, a Warp Records-signed electronic instrumental project whose work Pitchfork described as "overcast, suffocating sonic landscapes," Reed pivots with Father Of The Year into altogether more intimate territory, kitchen sink storytelling in the tradition of John Prine, Loudon Wainwright III, and Bill Callahan. The tradition has always made room for men who fall short. It hasn't often had to accommodate a generation of men who have the language to understand themselves completely and nothing to show for it.

“The Fixer” opens with just guitar and hushed vocals, a man alone in a room acknowledging his limitations before the band has even arrived. It's a quiet, disarming entrance for a character who is anything but. When producer and multi-instrumentalist Christopher Vincent's arrangement fills in, organ, brass and strings built around a loose blues-inflected riff and a cool mid-tempo groove, it carries the warmth of 70s soul, a tradition that has also known what to do with a man who loves someone and fails.

The character is immediately recognizable. He arrives defensive before anyone has said a word ("Don't accuse me of nothing"), fluent in his own dysfunction and entirely unable to apply it ("All I've got are my tools / But I can't build a thing / I'm a half-ignorant man"), and absolutely certain of his own authority. The tension at the heart of the song, the desire to help someone you love, is real and tender, but so is the arrogance that makes you ignore what the moment actually requires.

The grandeur peaks mid-song with a kind of magnificent self-delusion: "You'll address me 'Your Highness' / I'm the smartest man in the room / When you hear what I have to say / Then you'll believe it too / I'm a cold-hearted fool / Traits befitting a king." He knows he's the punchline. He delivers it anyway. “That’s what makes me a man,” Between each chorus, a weary sigh, "I'm the fixer," followed by the offer he can't stop making: "I can give you a hand."

“The Fixer” introduces a man at his most fortified, a man who can't stop offering solutions to problems nobody asked him to solve, and who has not yet learned to simply listen.

Where “The Fixer” introduced the central character at his most fortified, "When You Hold Your Breath" finds him at his most open. The arrangement, conceived by producer and multi-instrumentalist Christopher Vincent, carries the same warmth of organ, brass and strings, the same loose mid-tempo groove, but the emotional register has shifted. This is not a man fixing problems nobody asked him to solve. This is a man learning to listen.

The song turns on a private language two people build in the silence between words. ‘When you hold your breath, I hear every word unspoken / When you're lost in thought, I'll never know where you go.’ He can feel everything she isn't saying. He will never fully reach her. In a crisis just one look will hold us together / When I see you exhale then I know you found your way home.’

While “The FIxer” highlighted a man who couldn't stop talking, he learned that the things left unsaid are the ones still in our command. It is not a comfortable admission for someone like him. "I'm not a humble man" he concedes, before the song opens into something larger, love not as a problem to be solved but as a defiance of everything that would diminish it. ‘In defiance, we'll sing as Death comes to take us / 'Cause our love assures we'll be heard through the Great Unknown.’