On his Sophomore EP, Chad Courtney finally says the quiet part out loud.
Chad Courtney doesn't tell you something new on I've Been Scared of This Feeling. He tells you something you've already felt and never had the words for. Across seven tracks, he sits with the uncomfortable parts of growing up and loving imperfectly, turning uncertainty itself into the project's heartbeat. It plays less like an EP and more like a conversation Courtney's been meaning to have with himself, and we get to listen in.
‘Halfway Gone’ opens the EP with a relationship that's been quietly unraveling far longer than either person wants to admit. Courtney isn't interested in assigning blame. Instead he turns the lens inward, reflecting on the compromises we make just to keep someone around. It's less about the breakup itself than the version of yourself you lose trying to prevent it. The song is filled with small, devastating details, from the confession, "I bit my tongue till I tasted blood / Then I called it keeping love," to the central image of trying to hold together something "already cracked."
‘Cornucopia’ reveals that the fear at the heart of the EP runs much deeper than romance. Courtney trades relationship dynamics for self-examination, unpacking the weight of every feeling left unspoken and every version of himself left unexplored. He isn't just mourning someone else. He's mourning every version of himself that never got the chance to exist. The repeated confession, "I'm full of songs I never sing / A thousand lives I never bring," is where that grief comes into full focus. The imagery stays deeply personal (a garden in his chest, paint drying, four familiar walls), but together it paints a much larger picture of someone wrestling with the life he hasn't quite allowed himself to live. It's a quiet but devastating meditation on what happens when fear keeps you from fully showing up in your own life.
Then comes ‘Furniture,’ arguably the EP's centerpiece and its sharpest metaphor. Courtney turns the familiar contents of a shared home into emotional evidence, using a favorite chair, a bare kitchen, and a wine stain on the table to ask whether it's braver to repair what's broken or simply let it break the rest of the way. Courtney never offers an easy answer, letting the uncertainty linger long after the song ends.
The title track arrives as a brief interlude, barely a minute long, but it does outsized work. It gives the whole EP its name and sets up the emotional freefall of what follows, functioning less as a full song than as a single sentence the rest of the project has been building toward.
Where the rest of the EP moves, chasing metaphors, circling truths, ‘Scarecrow’ simply stops. Courtney describes a kind of paralysis, watching everyone else keep living while he stays fixed in place, and the song's power comes from how little it tries to dress that feeling up. It's the sound of naming something before you fully understand it.
‘Jawline’ finds Courtney measuring love through its smallest acts: whether the new person understands what a shared song means, holds their hand like something fragile, or remembers to ask when they're overthinking. Even his own small confession, growing out his facial hair because they once said they liked it that way, carries unexpected weight. It's a refreshingly understated take on jealousy, one where the hardest part of moving on isn't losing the relationship, but wondering if someone else now gets to love them in all the little ways you once did.
Where the rest of the EP is occupied by hindsight, ‘Pier 39’ finally lets itself exist in the present. Courtney doesn't get closure, and he doesn't pretend to. He simply waits, patiently, for something that might never come, and somehow, choosing hope becomes enough.
Sonically, I've Been Scared of This Feeling finds a sweet spot between indie-pop and singer-songwriter, leaning into warmth over polish. Self-produced by Courtney over the course of a year, the EP feels thoughtfully crafted, with every creative decision serving the songs. From Emily Waldron's intimate vocal engineering to Amanda Marshall's understated string arrangements and Micah Pettit's spacious mix, each collaborator helps preserve the emotional honesty at the heart of the record.