Songs Never Heard
A craft podcast that spotlights some of the best songs you've never heard.
Songs Never Heard
S1E11: Love Is My Superpower (Knumb The Geek)
A Marvel t-shirt question leads to a song about energy that refuses to fade.
Love is My Superpower on Bandcamp: https://knumbthegeek.bandcamp.com/track/love-is-my-superpower
More Knumb The Geek music:
Robert Howell:
My name is Robert Howell, and in this series I'll be sharing, and digging into, some of my favorite songs that I've come across while in and exploring the underground songwriting scene. Songs written by talented people who are creating music that deserves wider recognition. Songs that, unfortunately, most of the world may never hear.
Welcome to Songs Never Heard.
This episode's song was written to be sung by rooms full of people spreading a message that one remarkable kid intuitively understood. Here's "Love Is My Superpower" by Knumb the Geek.
Kevin McAndrews:
You were birefringent
Shining under polarized light
Lit up like Rockafeller center on Christmas night
You were incandescent
Glowing with a light from with in
Sparkle like the facets of a diamond on Saturn's rings
You can say everything is meant to be
You can say anything and I'll agree
You can say
Love, love, love, love, love, love, love is my superpower
You can say
Love, love, love, love, love, love, love is all we need
You were missing persons
With a hole in your Metallica shirt
I swear I never wanted you to be hurt
You were roof top parties
Soaking in the city scene
Fucking up the lyrics to Holocene
But you can sing anything to me
You can sing anything and I'd be happy
Yeah you can sing anything to me
You can sing anything and I'd be happy
You can sing
Love, love, love, love, love, love, love is my superpower
You can sing
Love, love, love, love, love, love, love is all we need
You can sing
Love, love, love, love, love, love, in the midnight hour
Won't you come back to me
You can sing
Love, love, love, love, love, love, love is my superpower
You can sing
Love, love, love, love, love, love, love is all we need
You can sing
Love, love, love, love, love, love, in the midnight hour
Won't you come back to me
Won't you come back to me
Won't you come back to me
Won't you come back to me
Won't you come back
Robert Howell:
That was "Love Is My Superpower" by Kevin McAndrews, who releases his music under the name Knumb The Geek. The song's title comes directly from Kevin's son, Cormack. " I can't really get into the song at all without talking about my son," Kevin explains.
By all accounts, Cormack was a remarkable kid. Very smart and very kind. And Kevin says he had a Marvel shirt that asked, "What is your superpower?" When people asked him that question, as they inevitably did, Cormack always had the same answer: his superpower was love.
In late 2018, Cormack was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Six months later, at six years of age, he passed away.
Kevin wrote this song in the middle of 2022, about three years after losing his son. "It's me trying to deal with some of those feelings," he says. But Kevin is careful to clarify what the song is and isn't about. "It's not just about him, it's also about that idea. Of love being a superpower."
The song honors Cormack, but it reaches beyond him. It's Kevin's attempt to amplify something his remarkable kid understood intuitively. That love, as implausible as it might sound to adults like us, tromping through our day-to-day lives, really could be a superpower.
When Kevin thinks about this song in relation to his son, he thinks in terms of energy and ripples. " I think of him being a superhero like that, even to me," he says, "and that energy doesn't just go away 'cause he's gone. It can form ripples out from where he is."
This is where Kevin's purpose becomes clear. The song isn't just about processing grief or memorializing his son. He says, " In some ways the song is my attempt to amplify his qualities and make that ripple a little bit bigger."
It is an important distinction about what "Love Is My Superpower" actually is. Yes, the song contains pieces of Cormack, but it also contains pieces of Kevin himself. His friends. "It is even part of you," he told me. It's everybody.
The song reaches beyond one remarkable kid to explore the idea itself. That love, treated seriously and intentionally, carries a kind of power that doesn't dissipate when someone is gone. The ripples keep moving outward. And with this song, Kevin is trying to make those ripples bigger and bigger. Sending them further than they might have traveled on their own.
Kevin's typical approach to songwriting is to have a central concept. My one goal is to always have an idea. He explains, " I wanna know what I'm writing about when I'm sitting down to write." With this song, he definitely knew what he wanted to say. The challenge was, figuring out how.
"I knew I had to have a song about ‘love is my superpower,’" Kevin said. The repeated 'love, love, love' structure came first, even though he worried it might come across like a cliche. But the concept was something he wanted to hammer home. So he committed to it and wrote the rest of the song around that central hook.
And although it followed Kevin's usual writing process for the most part, this one had an urgency to it. "It was a song I felt I had to write, he said. For a topic like this, however, having a sense of urgency and a need to write definitely does not mean it was easy. "These are hard things to express," Kevin told me, "So how do you say them?"
The question guided everything that followed. How do you capture love as a superpower? How do you honor someone remarkable, without reducing the attempt to a cliched sentiment. How do you make a song that spreads positive energy outward, rather than just looking backward?
The opening verse of "Love Is My Superpower" doesn't describe Cormack in straightforward terms. Instead, Kevin reaches for scientific imagery that feels almost clinical at first: "You were birefringent, shining under polarized light."
Kevin explains where that unusual choice came from. A friend of his was doing visual experiments with crystals that had birefringent properties. Using these crystals, his friend would create kaleidoscopes. "They were really beautiful things," Kevin says, "and it just captured the colors that I was trying to find. The same idea as the Rockefeller Center reference. Just these overwhelming floods of amazing, unforgettable colors."
That's how Kevin built the imagery throughout the song. He was trying to express what he wanted to say through thoughtfully selected visual references and settings. The Missing Persons and Metallica mentions. The rooftop parties soaking in the city scene. When I asked Kevin about that specific line, he admitted rooftop party coolness really wasn't him at all. "I was just trying to find that place," he said. He was reaching for imagery that could express what he was after. Even if it wasn't literal.
Kevin's vision for "Love Is My Superpower" was clear from the start. He wanted something big. Something that would build and grow. A song that started small and expanded outward, mirroring the ripple concept at the heart of the song itself.
To bring that vision to life, Kevin worked with his friend Alanna Matty. Kevin has deep respect for her abilities. " She's an incredible producer, a phenomenal musician, and a lovely human being," he says. Kevin traveled to Halifax, Canada where Alanna is based, and despite his tendency to get too attached to the early versions of his songs, he was determined to trust her completely with the production process. He knew what he wanted the song to become and he also knew Alanna had the skills to get it there. So he stepped back and let her work.
The trust paid off when she sent him a rough mockup around one in the morning. Just a handful of hours after he'd left her studio where he'd recorded an acoustic demo of the song to start the process. When he listened to it, he was floored. She'd taken his acoustic straw man and turned it into exactly what he was looking for. A song that just grows and grows towards the massive ending he had in mind.
Those voices you hear joining in at the end of "Love Is My Superpower " aren't paid talent. They're Kevin's community, literally amplifying his message.
"I knew that I didn't just want it to be me singing it. I wanted it to have other people as well, amplifying that ripple."
Kevin live streams his music on Twitch, and when he knew he'd be recording this song, he asked people who hang out there to send him recordings of themselves saying the word love. And a whole bunch of them did. He also asked for and received recordings from his family and friends, including his mom and his wife.
But then Kevin shares the most powerful detail. "I found a recording of my son saying the word 'love,' and I got him on there too. Sometimes if I have the right headphones on, I can pick 'em out, and that always makes me really happy."
Alanna took all of those individual recordings, and as Kevin puts it, did a whole bunch of wizardry to make them sound like a coordinated choir. "That's one of the things that makes the song just work for me," Kevin says, "The fact that I can hear all those voices, and that I know who they are, and I know that they're out there spreading that message too."
The day after Alanna sent Kevin that 1:00 AM demo, they recorded the final vocals. Alanna, put Kevin in a room, told him to do his thing, and walked away to let him work.
About 10 minutes later, she came back with an unusual request. Alanna told him " A lot of times I tell singers to get their body involved. I want them to move a little to feel the music, but whatever you're doing is shaking my house. It's old and I'm a little worried my floor is gonna fall in. So please just move a little less."
Kevin couldn't help it. The mix Alanna had assembled, delivered exactly the energy he wanted from the song. He wanted it to make him jump up and down, and it did.
It's a fitting image for what "Love Is My Superpower" became. A song about love as energy that doesn't dissipate. Energy that forms ripples, spreading outward from where it started. Amplified by voices and movement and belief. The kind of power, a remarkable kid wielded and understood instinctively, now captured in a song that can not only make floorboards sway, but move hearts as well.
"Songs Never Heard" is created and produced by me, Robert Howell. It's a tribute to all the seldom heard music that, in my opinion, rivals what you'd hear on the popular charts. If you're interested in having one of your songs featured, drop me a note at rrobhowell@gmail.com.
Until next time, keep writing.