Panama City-area author Michael Lister's new song debuts Saturday. Here's how you can listen

PANAMA CITY — Best known locally for his award-winning novels, singer-songwriter Michael Lister is switching gears and is ready to debut his new single.

A release party will be held for Lister's song, “A Certain Age," at 7 p.m. Saturday at the Center for the Arts, 19 E. Fourth St.

Shortly after Hurricane Michael devastated the city in 2018, Lister picked up his son’s acoustic guitar and began playing.

“It was so unexpected,” Lister said. “There was so much devastation and destruction all around us. We had no electricity, but I didn’t need electricity to begin playing my son’s acoustic guitar. And the moment I started playing, I fell in love. It was like I had discovered something missing from my life that I didn’t realize was there.”

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During the release party, local actress Daphne Lewis will serve as emcee, introducing performances from local musicians including Lister, Melissa Bowman,  Aaron Bearden and Lucky Mud. In addition, there will be featured artwork by local artist Kelly Smith Dyer and a tribute to Lister’s late friend Dave Lloyd, whom the song is about.

Lloyd died in 2018, months before Lister got into music. He said he wrote the song about him as an opportunity to heal.

“Dave was like a brother to me, and his death left a huge hole in my friend circle,” Lister said. “When I started writing songs, I knew I wanted to express how I felt about Dave’s death in one of them. So I wrote it as a tribute to Dave and an opportunity for healing for me.”

Over the past two years, Lister has been writing his songs. He practiced every day and learned songs by artists he admired, and after a year or so, he began gigging at local events, restaurants and bars in the area performing his music.

Although the novelist's transition from writing books to songs wasn’t easy for him, Lister said that discovering his passion for songwriting brought him to a new level of love and satisfaction for music.

“It was so cool to be able to play songs that I loved by artists I had been listening to for most of my life, but to be able to write my own songs expanded making music to a whole new level of love and satisfaction for me,” he said. “I’m used to writing novels of about 80,000 words, so writing a song with a few hundred was quite a challenge. But it has been more rewarding than I can say.”

“A Certain Age,” which was produced by Bearden and features background vocals by Bowman, will be released on all streaming platforms Saturday, with a special music video premiering on YouTube at 8 p.m. CST.

For more information, go to MichaelLister.com.

This article originally appeared on The News Herald: Panama City author to host a single release party for first song