Donovan Woods - Squander Your Gifts EP (2026) [Hi-Res]

Tenderness has always been the hallmark of Donovan Woods’ songwriting—both in the poignant and painful senses of the word—and this five-track EP sees the Ontario indie-folk troubadour tending to a particularly deep bruise. Squander Your Gifts is Woods’ rueful response to the 2023 death of Abe Stoklasa, with whom he frequently collaborated in Nashville’s song factories, and on the opening “I Talk About You,” Woods is caught between warm memories of the past and the bitter realities of the present. (“I talk about you to anybody who’s gonna listen,” he sings, “Your life may be through, but I’m gonna go on livin’.”)

Though the following tracks may not address the tragedy in equally explicit terms, they’re likewise steeped in feelings of survivor’s guilt and the struggle to carry on: “Sometimes, they don’t have your name on the guest list at the door/Sometimes, you don’t pick up a phone call, and they don’t call anymore,” Woods observes over the fiddle-smoothed country-rock groove of “These Things Happen,” as if he were trying to rationalize life’s cruel twists of fate, yet still sounding too wounded to fully embrace his own song’s let-it-be sentiment. But the duet with Anaïs Mitchell on the comforting closer “Losing Everything” is a reminder that, when working through grief, it always helps to have a shoulder to cry on.