Winnipeg singer/songwriter Jacob Brodovsky confronts fatherhood, climate dread, and inherited consequence on “Kids,” a driving, deeply human indie folk-rock confession from his upcoming sophomore album ‘Tell The Kids We Tried’ that carries fear, love, and fragile hope toward one urgent question: What will we be able to say when the next generation asks what we did for them?

Stream: “Kids” – Jacob Brodovsky

Will you tell the truth to youth or cling to alibis?

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Parenthood can make the future feel unbearably close: Every headline sharper, every choice heavier, every small act of care threaded with fear and faith.

Jacob Brodovsky’s “Kids” lives inside that collision, channeling the dread of raising children in a burning world into a driving indie folk / rock confession that still finds room for warmth, wit, and wonder. Its instruments move with aching intent, while Brodovsky’s soft, searching vocal keeps returning to the question no parent can fully answer: What will we owe the next generation when they ask what we did with the home we gave them?

Charming and heartsore, propulsive and deeply human, “Kids” is a tender reckoning with optimism, responsibility, and the fragile comfort of trying.

Once the crooked clowns
have hedged their bets
And pain enshrouds the lives
we tell ourselves between regrets

Once the night has come
Once we hide away
Once we live too long
Cause we tried to stay

Can you settle down beneath
the weight we left behind?

Atwood Magazine is proud to be premiering “Kids,” the stirring title track from Winnipeg singer/songwriter Jacob Brodovsky’s forthcoming sophomore album, Tell The Kids We Tried (out July 10, 2026). An award-winning indie folk artist with a gift for folding plainspoken humor into emotionally candid storytelling, Brodovsky makes music that feels conversational without ever losing its charge: Thoughtful, wry, big-hearted, and grounded in the kind of observations that linger long after the hook. Often compared to John K. Samson and Ben Gibbard – two touchstones he readily embraces – he brings a distinctly Winnipeg spirit to songs that balance self-scrutiny with communal warmth, turning lived-in details into openhearted reflections on family, aging, belonging, and the work of staying present.

Created with producers Gavin Gardiner and Champagne James Robertson of MOONRIIVR, Tell The Kids We Tried arrives four long years after 2022’s debut album I Love You and I’m Sorry, and captures Brodovsky surrounded by friends, collaborators, and musicians he’s long admired – leaning into instinct, immediacy, and the electricity of making choices in the room. The record’s title track carries that spirit in its bones. Written from the tension between hope and helplessness, “Kids” finds Brodovsky wrestling with what it means to love the next generation honestly: To protect them where he can, to admit the limits of that protection, and to keep choosing care even when the world feels determined to test it.

Following previously shared singles “Past Mistakes” and “Colorado Low,” “Kids” brings the album’s central question into full view, transforming a phrase Brodovsky had carried for years – tell the kids we tried – into a plainspoken reckoning with parenthood, climate anxiety, and the strange, stubborn hope of raising children in a world that so often feels past the point of repair.

“This song started as a writing exercise to try and write a song with the title ‘tell the kids we tried,’” Brodovsky tells Atwood Magazine. “At the time, my son was 2 and we had just found out that we were having another kid. I was (still am) really struggling with the idea of bringing kids into the world while knowing how hellbent we are as a collective civilization on destroying it. For me, having children has been a massive source of both optimism and dread. Being around children and watching them discover themselves is such an incredible gift to behold, while also terrifying to realize all the ways they could hurt themselves and the limits of my own abilities to protect them.”

He continues, “We recorded the bulk of this song during a preproduction session. I had just finished writing it, and James Robinson and Gavin Gardiner pulled up a simple drum machine for me to play along to. We tracked everything just thinking it was a demo, but ended up keeping the original vocal and guitar parts and just added a few flourishes in the studio.”

The song opens with the weight of a world already buckling: “Once the crooked clowns have hedged their bets / And pain enshrouds the lives we tell ourselves between regrets.” Brodovsky writes with a father’s tenderness and a cynic’s clarity, staring down ecological collapse, moral failure, and inherited consequence without letting the song curdle into despair. “Kids” doesn’t pretend trying is enough to fix what’s broken, but it does ask whether effort – honest, flawed, persistent effort – might still count for love when the future comes looking for answers.

Musically, “Kids” moves with a stirring push and pull. Its chugging chords and glinting guitar lines give the song a bright, ‘00s pop-rock charge, while restless drums keep it leaning forward as if Brodovsky can’t afford to stand still inside the thought for too long. That momentum matters: The song isn’t frozen in dread, but running through it, gathering breath and feeling as it climbs toward its refrain. By the time Brodovsky sings, “Will you tell the truth to youth or cling to alibis? / Will you tell the kids we tried?” the question has become both accusation and prayer.

When all at once,
we breath defeat
All our naked greed’s belief
returns us incomplete
Once the flowers wilt
And the lakes run dry
Once it’s hard to breathe
beneath the blanket of smokey sky

Will you tell the truth to youth
or cling to alibis
Will you tell the kids we tried

That refrain cuts deep because it refuses easy comfort. “Tell the kids we tried” can sound like a defense, an apology, a confession, or a last small offering, depending on how much hope the listener brings to it. In the context of the song, it rings as the ache of a parent who knows love alone can’t shield a child from harm, but who keeps choosing love anyway – not as denial, but as a daily act of responsibility. Brodovsky holds the phrase open just wide enough for dread and optimism to coexist, and that tension gives “Kids” its lasting power: It’s a song about fear for the world our children will inherit, and faith in the meaning of showing up for them while we’re still here.

“I think when I wrote the song my first kid was quite young, my second wasn’t born yet, and I was still feeling pretty cynical about the idea of fatherhood,” Brodovsky reflects. “In its inception, this line was meant to be almost sarcastic. ‘Tell them we tried’ said with a shrug and an eye roll. I’ve been a dad for a little over 3 years now, and my relationship to this song has changed. Watching my kids discover the world with such wonder and joy and unbridled optimist has sort of caused me to rethink how I feel about the refrain. Maybe we are actually trying. Maybe that’s all we can do? And maybe that’s okay.”

His answer reframes the song’s title as a living thing: A phrase that began in cynicism and slowly softened into a kind of grace. “Kids” doesn’t let anyone off the hook, but it also doesn’t flatten parenthood into fear. Its power lies in the space between those feelings – the place where Brodovsky can look at a damaged world, look at his children, and still find meaning in the imperfect, ongoing act of trying.

That tension sits at the heart of Tell The Kids We Tried, an album shaped by community, consequence, and the strange ways our lives can catch up to our songs.

Across his second record, Brodovsky writes with the clarity of someone taking stock in real time: of family, friendship, growing older, losing certainty, and learning how to keep faith with people even after the ground beneath a once-familiar world has shifted. Where “Past Mistakes” opens the door with hazy self-reckoning and “Colorado Low” roots itself in memory, weather, and the complicated pull of home, “Kids” feels like the album’s emotional center – the place where private anxiety and collective responsibility meet.

It’s also a fitting entry point into a record that Brodovsky describes as born from collaboration rather than solitude. You can hear that communal charge in the way “Kids” breathes and builds, its loose edges left intact, its blemishes treated less like flaws than evidence of life. The song’s urgency doesn’t come from polish; it comes from presence. Every instrument seems to move in service of the same question, pushing Brodovsky’s words forward as if the band itself is helping carry the burden.

In that sense, “Kids” doesn’t just introduce Tell The Kids We Tried – it opens the album’s wound and lets the light in. It’s a song about dread, yes, but also about accountability, about the families we raise and the communities we build, about what survives after certainty gives way. Brodovsky may not offer an answer, but he gives the question shape, pulse, and heart. And sometimes, in a world that keeps asking more of us than we know how to give, that’s where the trying begins.

Everyone’s in crisis
Everyone’s in love
Everyone’s been diagnosed
with all of the above
If I was an optimist I would’ve lied
Instead I tell the kids we tried

Once we’re buried deep
Once the haze abates
Once intention and resolve
collide to pacify our fate
Once we’ve given up
Once we’ve said our piece
Once we’ve realized
where we went wrong
and days descend to weeks

The “Kids” music video widens that emotional frame, turning Brodovsky’s private reckoning into a family archive. Built around old home video footage of him performing as a child – and interspersed with new footage shot in a similarly grainy, lived-in style – the visual feels both past and present at once: a living room full of toy instruments, tiny keyboards, children’s drums, scattered playthings, and the familiar clutter of a home where creativity and care are always unfolding in real time. It’s bright and funny, sweet without becoming precious, nostalgia-inducing without losing sight of the song’s present-day ache.

That contrast gives the video its heart. The childhood clips frame Brodovsky as the kid he used to be, shamelessly performing for anyone who’d watch; the newer footage places him inside the life he’s built now, surrounded by the artifacts of his own children’s wonder. In a song about what one generation owes the next, that visual bridge lands beautifully: The past isn’t just remembered, but repeated, refracted, and reimagined in the rooms where his children are now beginning to discover themselves.

“I’ve always been addicted to attention from a very young age,” Brodovsky says. “I’ve definitely passed that trait onto my kids. I asked my folks if they had any footage of me from childhood putting on shows in our living room and my dad dropped off a hard drive with a literal terabyte of footage of me lip synching in my living room. The idea for video is to kind of poke fun at myself and the fact that very little has changed. I’m still addicted to attention, I’m still putting on shows, and I’m still pretty shameless about it all.”

There’s tenderness in that self-awareness, and a sly sense of continuity too.

“Kids” may be haunted by the future, but its video finds warmth in inheritance – not only the heavy kind, the world’s crises and compromises, but the playful kind as well: A love of performance, a need to be seen, a living room transformed into a stage. Brodovsky lets the song carry the fear, while the video reminds us what’s worth fearing for.

Stream “Kids” exclusively on Atwood Magazine, and dive into our full conversation below as Jacob Brodovsky opens up about fatherhood, fear, optimism, creative community, the making of Tell The Kids We Tried, and finding the grace to keep showing up for the people and places we love.

By the end, that’s what “Kids” leaves behind: Not certainty, not absolution, but a hand held out across the years. Jacob Brodovsky knows the future can feel unbearably close, and he knows the weight of what we’re leaving behind. Still, he sings like trying matters. Still, he lets warmth in. Still, he finds a way to make care sound like courage.

Will you repent for all the harm you’ve justified?
Settle down beneath the weight we left behind?
Will you tell the truth to youth or cling to alibis?
Will you tell the kids we tried?
Will you tell the kids we tried?

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:: stream/purchase Kids here ::

:: connect with Jacob Brodovsky here ::

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Stream: “Kids” – Jacob Brodovsky

A CONVERSATION WITH JACOB BRODOVSKY

Jacob Brodovsky: I’m a singer/songwriter from Winnipeg, Canada. I try to write songs that make you chuckle and also make you feel something. I often get compared to John K Samson or Ben Gibbard which makes sense as I love Death Cab and the Weakerthans. I’m also a Dad – I have 2 kids, 2 dogs, and a pretty unreliable sleep schedule!

Jacob Brodovsky: “Night Baker” seems to be the one people gravitate to for whatever reason, I wrote that song during a particularly sad summer and sort of embellished my own misery onto the night baker I was watching work at the Bakery down the street. Another one could be Likewise. That’s probably my favourite song off that record. I wrote it after eavesdropping on conversations of customers at the diner I used to work at.

Jacob Brodovsky: Good question! I continue to not absolutely hate it which is new for me. Certainly the first piece of work I’ve put out in my life that I can still stand to listen to. I try really hard to think of records as simply artifacts of a moment in time. I don’t connect to many of those songs like I used to, but other people still seem to, and so I guess I’m still happy with the work.

Jacob Brodovsky: As I said before, the weakerthans / John K Samson Fellows is certainly my #1. If I can write a song half as well as he can I’m a happy person. I think there’s something about the bands you discover in your teens when you’re carving out your own music taste for the first time, they just kind of embed themselves in your DNA. Lately, I really gravitate to artists who write candidly about vulnerable subject matter. Artists like Charlotte Cornfield, Leith Ross, Bonnie Light Horseman, Hiss Golden Messenger, the list goes on.

I’m really, really excited and feel so grateful to be a part of the Winnipeg Music Community. There are so many amazing songs being written and put out by so many friends of mine, and to just be mentioned in the same breath as them as being a part of the scene here is very special and dear to me. I love collaboration and making music with other people, and I think I’m most excited about this record because it really feels like a band record.

Jacob Brodovsky: It feels like a continuation of the last record in some ways. Certainly some songs are very much a second part of a previous song. I see parallels between restaurant and night baker, and lack thereof in some ways picks up where me and my mental health leaves off. This record feels like a record born out of a community vs I Love You and I’m Sorry was more born out of solitude. This new record was captured live to a Tascam 388 over 6 days with everyone in the same room. No partitions, no vocal booths just all of. Us in a circle arranging the songs in real time, hitting record, and moving on. I feel like that limitation really lent itself to taking more risks with this album, and leaning harder into allowing the band to make creative decisions.

Jacob Brodovsky: This song is about trying to contend with the idea of bringing children into the world without necessarily believing that the world is a good place. I had the title/refrain “Tell The Kids We Tried” written in my notebook for a long time and when I finally sat down to write it, this is what came out. I spent/spend a lot of time debating with myself the ethics of bringing more human beings into the world and this song sort of try’s to tackle that subject. This idea that it feels like every year things get worse, things feel more bleak, it feels like as a collective species, we continue to learn more about all the ways we are contributing to our own extinction, and yet we’re having babies? So I guess that’s the story behind the song. Nice and light et?

Jacob Brodovsky: I think when I wrote the song my first kid was quite young, my second wasn’t born yet, and I was still feeling pretty cynical about the idea of fatherhood. In its inception, this line was meant to be almost sarcastic. “Tell them we tried” said with a shrug and an eye roll. I’ve been a dad for a little over 3 years now and my relationship to this song has changed. Watching my kids discover the world with such wonder and joy and unbridled optimist has sort of caused me to rethink how I feel about the refrain. Maybe we are actually trying. Maybe that’s all we can do? And maybe that’s okay.

Jacob Brodovsky: I’ve always been addicted to attention from a very young age. I’ve definitely passed that trait onto my kids. I asked my folks if they had any footage of me from childhood putting on shows in our living room and my dad dropped off a hard drive with a literal terabyte of footage of me lip synching in my living room. The idea for video is to kind of poke fun at myself and the fact that very little has changed. I’m still addicted to attention, I’m still putting on shows, and I’m still pretty shameless about it all.

Jacob Brodovsky: “Colorado Low” is a song I’ve had for a really long time and never found a home for, “Past Mistakes” was a newer song I had written during the so-called “end” of the pandemic. I think both songs kind of cover the boundaries of the record. “Past Mistakes” is as ethereal and abstract as the record gets, whereas “Colorado Low” is certainly the most “rocky” I feel like the songs provide nice goal posts for where the rest of the album goes.

Jacob Brodovsky: Still getting used to it, “Kids” is definitely one of my favourite songs I’ve written from a lyrical standpoint, and I’m quite happy with the production choices we made. It’s essentially the original demo and we kept all the vocal distortion and blemishes which I quite like. There’s a song on side B called “Beneath It All” which is a very personal song for me and features my good pal Charlotte Cornfield on harmonies. I recorded the song to a 4-track in my attic and sent it to her to add vocals to. It’s very meaningful for me to have her on the record, not only is she one of my favourite songwriters in the world, but she was actually one of the first people to know we were expecting a baby, and her and I sort of bonded over having these very serious conversations about our respective reservations around having kids in this time.

Jacob Brodovsky: I think with any of my songs, I mostly just hope listeners take something or anything from it. Music is so subjective and connects with some people so much better than others, I just hope I’ve written the song and recorded it in such a way that for those folks out there who need to hear it, can access it in a way that is meaningful to them. Is that a bit of a cop out answer?

I think for me, creating it was an exercise in trusting the process and trusting the musicians and artists I chose to make it with me. I’m a bit of a control freak and working with Gavin and James from MOONRIIVR as producers really forced me to let go of control. I think that was a really healthy exercise for me, and I look forward to making more music with friends and having less control.

Jacob Brodovsky: Gonna plug a bunch of pals! Living Hour put out one of my favourite records last year, Charlotte Cornfields new record is genius, other Winnipeg buddies like Boy Golden, Leith Ross, Tired Cossack, Field Guide, Slow Leaves, Dominique Adams, Slow Spirit, and Tofusmell have all put out incredible records this past year, I’m sure I’m forgetting lots but everyone named above warrants a close headphone listen!

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:: stream/purchase Kids here ::

:: connect with Jacob Brodovsky here ::

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Stream: “Kids” – Jacob Brodovsky

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