MONTREAL, QC — July 2026

 

Award-winning singer-songwriter Brian Gallagher steps into long-buried territory with his most intimate album to date, released under a name he was given at birth and lost at age three: Chris Bristow.

The Curious Life and Death and Life of Christopher Bristow is a folk-rooted, indie-inflected meditation on identity, origin, and the quiet seismic shifts that come with discovering who you are and where you came from. It is, at its core, the story of a name reclaimed — and the life that name carries with it.

Adopted at age three, Gallagher has spent his career making music as Brian Gallagher. But the arrival of new information — a birth mother, and two sisters he never knew existed — cracked open something that demanded a different voice. The album is his answer to that call.

"Chris Bristow was the name I was given before I had any say in the matter," says Gallagher. "Making this record under that name felt like the only honest thing to do."

The songs are intimate, unhurried, and unflinching — folk structures that hold weight without strain, with indie textures that give the record emotional room to breathe. The result is an album that feels less like a confession than a reckoning: with family, with self, with the strange doubled feeling of being someone you always were but never knew.