About David Gaskin
I'm a songwriter, musician, and producer based in Victoria, BC. I release my own music as The Hidden Gold. This is my story.
When I was 15, my best friend played me Radiohead's The Bends. I don't know if it was my age or the season (it was fall) but something flicked on in me. I picked up my brother's guitar, which he'd lost patience with after a couple of months, and started learning to play.
I started writing my own songs and formed a band called Epic (later White Elephant). For six years, I was its frontman and primary songwriter. I always loved music that spoke to the restlessness in me, and tried to write songs that captured some of that same angst—probably par for the course for a teenager growing up in Southern Ontario in the '90s.
But around the age of 18 or 19, I started losing my hair, and it changed how I saw myself—and my future in music. For a guy who thought looks were everything, I was devastated. I thought to be a singer in a band, you had to look a certain way. I've since loosened my grip on that belief, but at the time, it shook me more than I knew. As my appearance changed, my confidence began to unravel, too. Eventually, anxiety and a steady decline into low self-esteem found its way into almost everything I did, even the music.
After six years, I left the band unexpectedly, bitter after one too many times of someone being late for practice. It was a frivolous, passive-aggressive excuse for leaving, but looking back, I think I was afraid of being under the spotlight any longer.
In a funk and not knowing how to move forward, my parents urged me to study music. I suspect they figured it was better than me sitting in the basement all day. I studied audio engineering for a year at Recording Arts Canada and composition and production at Humber College in Toronto.
I learned a great deal about music and met some remarkable musicians. But while I grew musically, my confidence continued to shrink. Back home, I'd been making music in my own little world, largely unaware of what other musicians were doing. At Humber, I suddenly found myself surrounded by talented players who seemed so much more confident and capable than I felt.
But I never stopped making music. I still played guitar, sang, wrote songs, and kept trying. For a long time, I kept most of it to myself.
Eventually, in my late thirties, living in Victoria and working a job that didn't bring me much joy, I realized I was approaching 40. I'd spent years struggling and waiting to feel ready, but I knew if I kept waiting, I might never do it, and I didn't want to look back and regret never trying.
The fear of never really giving music a chance became greater than the fear of trying.
In 2023, I started an online songwriting group called SongFarm, a place to share your songs with other songwriters. Through their encouragement, I produced my first song in years, The Road Again released in Feb. 2024, followed by Hidden Gold in Jan. 2025.
The name The Hidden Gold came out of a melody I was playing with one day while writing the song. It seemed to capture something about my own journey: the belief that there's something buried inside that is worth uncovering.
Around the same time, I started going to open mics, playing the odd solo show, and connecting with some other musicians, as a collaborator, producer, and artist.
A few of those artists became part of The Hidden Gold, my artist project where I'm finally beginning to bring some of these songs I've kept buried to life.
These are songs about feeling lost and finding yourself, letting go of control and learning to trust, and the still space between the dark and the light. They're for anyone who knows there's something inside of them that's still yet to be uncovered.
I don't pretend to know all the answers, but my songs are me asking the questions.
Outside of my own music project, I work with other songwriters and artists to develop, record, and produce their music.