Loss doesn’t schedule itself. It shows up when you’re driving somewhere, or in the middle of making coffee, and it stays until it decides to leave.
“Gone, Gone” is the third song from Bodega Dog, the Hudson Valley solo project run entirely by Nico Caro.
It follows “Faces” from December and “Had Enough” from March. The first two songs were about watching time slip and stress piling up. This one comes after both, at the point where looking for closure stops being the question.
The song started on acoustic guitar, late at night, with a chord movement Nico kept coming back to. “I was just strumming around. I wasn’t really trying to write a song at that second, I just kept playing the same chords because they felt cool and moody,” he says. “I remember recording a voice memo late at night because I knew I’d forget it if not. Listening back, it has all the bones of the verse and chorus ideas.”
That voice memo still exists. Just acoustic, barely singing, but the shape of the song is already in it.
Most of “Gone, Gone” came together over a couple of weeks in the winter, in sessions of an hour to three at a time. Nico would work on it, leave it alone, come back the next day. “It wouldn’t really let me think until I felt it was done,” he says. The biggest shift in the writing came from cutting. “Once I started taking ‘unnecessary’ lines away, the song felt more honest, like what it needed to be.”
The state of mind behind the writing was loss in a general sense. “Whether someone close to you, or loss of passion or loss of work, anything. Once it’s gone, that’s it,” Nico says. He isn’t interested in the tidy version of that thought. Most people, in his description, spend a lot of energy trying not to think about their losses, because otherwise you can’t function. “But we all catch ourselves thinking about it randomly, driving or making coffee or whatever, it just hits you.”
Nico lays out the arc across the three singles plainly. “‘Faces’ feels like trying to understand time moving fast and not catching up. ‘Had Enough’ is reacting to stress adding up to the point of giving up. ‘Gone, Gone’ is more internal than I feel. It isn’t really asking for anything anymore.” He describes the state the song locks onto as the point where searching for closure becomes unnecessary, because whatever you were looking for is no longer there.
The track sits piano-first, quieter and more lo-fi than “Had Enough“. Nico originally wrote it as a piano song and layered the rest in from there until it felt right. In the second verse, an organ line comes in underneath, and he says he almost cut it. “But I think all the noise and suspense adds to that part before it cuts out again into the chorus.” Buried under the whole song is a low fuzzy guitar track, not perfectly in time, that Nico left in on purpose. “You don’t really hear it unless you’re trying to listen for it. Sometimes the mistakes end up making the song bigger too.”
The song ends fast, with the last four lines repeating. “It has this longing to it,” Nico says of the ending. “These feelings don’t have a full arc or end, they show up at random moments in my life and it helps to write and get it out of my head.”
The title’s doubling isn’t accidental. Nico tried “Gone” and it didn’t land the way the song did. “‘Gone’ felt too lacking, like hope was still underlying,” he says. “‘Gone, Gone‘ felt like the final say. It’s done, over, in a bigger way? How I felt the lyrics portrayed themselves when I was going after it.”
Everything on the song is done by Nico. Instruments, recording, mixing, mastering, artwork. It’s the same setup he’s used for the whole project so far. Working that way lets him move at his own pace, in his own style, and also lets weird things stay in. “There’s nobody there to tell me something sounds weird, so sometimes I leave the weird thing in. Which is good and bad.” He’ll play mixes for a few people close to him, but he treats it as a reaction check rather than an approval process. “It’s more so seeing if it gets my point across in how they react. It doesn’t dictate completely what happens.” He likes that the songs get to keep their small imperfections when nobody else is in the room to smooth them out.
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Some things got cut and stayed cut. Nico doesn’t remember the exact lines he removed, but he remembers why most of them went. “They over-explained, or just didn’t feel right. I liked them in my head more than I liked hearing it out loud or in the song.” A different bridge never made it into the recording. The part in the bridge where he sings “at all” was originally much longer, until it started dragging.
Nico has lived in the Hudson Valley his whole life, and the pace of the area works its way into the songs whether or not he plans for it. The scene, he says, is up right now, with a lot of artists worth paying attention to. There’s open space in a lot of the towns, and when you drive through them or spend enough time in them, that space starts turning up in the writing. “It’s not so much writing about the Hudson Valley, it’s just being here that can change how you write or the pace and feeling of the art itself.”
“Gone, Gone” is out on all platforms. Nico plans to keep releasing standalone singles through the rest of the year rather than building toward an EP or LP yet, with a longer project in view for next winter. “Each song feels like a call to a specific state of mind,” he says.
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