Photo: @paigesarastudio

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Since he began performing as Boy Golden in 2021, Winnipeg-based musician Liam Duncan has found widespread acclaim from a broad array of sources. His 2023 LP, For Jimmy, won Contemporary Album of the Year at the 20^th Canadian Folk Music Awards. For Eden, his 2024 follow up, was nominated for a JUNO Award. And “Suffer,” the first single from his February 2026 LP, Best of Our Possible Lives, hit No. #1 on the Billboard Canada Modern Rock Airplay chart in December 2025. But Duncan doesn’t think much about these various lines.

“I would generally rather not define my music in terms of genres,” he says. “And the lines between Boy Golden and me are soluble.” He describes his change in moniker as being less about hiding and more about experimenting with the path to creative freedom—the persona allows him to step outside his direct experience, utilizing turns of phrase and themes that might feel out of place under his own name. Duncan’s artistic approach is as philosophical as it is musical. He finds deep inspiration in the work of writer Ursula Le Guin, believing that writing a song with a rigid plan—Le Guin’s “inner preacher” wanting to tell people what to think—usually results in a bad song. “Instead, I strive to be as faithful as possible to whatever the song wants to be and allow a message to reveal itself naturally,” he says.

Underpinning some of his recent musings is the concept of a society as a garden that requires constant tending, lest it become overgrown with weeds. Indeed, staying soft and kind in a hardening world is, for him, a difficult but necessary practice. As he puts it in a new song he’s workshopping, “All the love you’re keeping down/ You’re gonna need it now.”