Canadian artist Addi John unveils his new EP, Love & Misfortunes, a deeply personal collection about loss, family, change, and learning to move forward. Entirely produced, performed, and mixed by Addi himself, the seven-track project emerged from a period of upheaval and ultimately centres around a simple but hard-earned realization: everything changes, and that’s okay.

The larger record began taking shape after Addi lost his father three years ago. Within six months, his mother and brother had moved out of the country and his former band, Lost in Japan, had broken up. Faced with several major changes at once, he turned to music as a way of processing them, writing songs that explore where different members of his family found themselves following his father’s passing.

“I want people to feel as if they’re not alone and to have a sense of hope for the future,” Addi shares. “The hope I want them to see is that change can be scary but, in order for us to grow, we need to accept that everything changes.”

That sense of hope takes a more energetic form on the title track, “Love & Misfortunes,” an indie-pop outlier inspired by an unlikely combination of a wedding and Two Door Cinema Club’s “What You Know.” After hearing the song at the wedding of two close friends, Addi was reminded how much he loved its energy and challenged himself to capture a similar feeling. The resulting song, somewhat ironically, follows a couple in the aftermath of a fight, uncertain whether their relationship will survive.

The title actually existed before the song itself, initially written down as a possible name for the EP. Addi considered changing it once the track emerged but ultimately found that its balance of love, uncertainty, and hope perfectly suited the larger project’s exploration of change and learning to accept it.

Musically, the title track stands apart from much of Love & Misfortunes. Written before Addi began moving his songwriting more decisively toward folk and singer-songwriter territory, its bright indie-pop/rock production could have been reshaped to better match the rest of the project. Instead, he chose to preserve what made it fun in the first place.

“I’m the only person in this solo project, so I realized I can make style choices, which is kind of fun,” he says. “This will probably be the most indie pop/rock I will ever go with this project.”

That independence extends across the entire EP. Following the end of Lost in Japan, Addi committed to becoming fiercely self-sufficient, producing, performing, and mixing every song himself. The process demanded that he learn not only new technical skills, but also how to trust his instincts without bandmates or another producer in the room to validate each decision.

Ultimately, Love & Misfortunes taught Addi to be patient and kinder to himself. It also changed his relationship with making music. Rather than creating with the goal of pleasing others or pursuing the traditional dream of becoming a famous musician, he has come to view music as a lifestyle rather than a career: something worth creating simply because he needs to create it.