Frank Vasquez Turns Survival Into the Seven-Song Still Here

Frank Vasquez released Still Here on October 15, 2026, extending the recovery story he first shared with Exposed Vocals in September. The seven-song album is available now on major streaming platforms, with an official YouTube album playlist serving as the clearest public entry point.

Vasquez describes the record as “an album about surviving what changed you without pretending it never happened.” That distinction matters. Still Here is presented not as a clean victory lap after loss, but as a sequence of ways a person continues living while the effects of heartbreak, grief and changed identity remain present.

From obsession to endurance

The album follows Seven Deadly Obsessions, the September release Vasquez discussed in our earlier interview. He framed that project around the experience of someone continuing to occupy the mind; Still Here, by contrast, begins after something important has already been lost and asks what survival looks like from there.

That creates a useful continuation rather than a reset. The earlier interview connected songwriting with Vasquez’s recovery from a traumatic brain injury and his wider work in social services, writing and community advocacy. The new album keeps the focus on emotional translation, but shifts the central verb from understanding to continuing.

Seven songs, seven forms of loss

Vasquez’s notes trace a deliberate arc across the track list. The title song centers survival itself: carrying heartbreak, changes in identity and lingering habits while recognizing that rebuilding has meaning. “Until It’s Quiet” turns inward, using distance from noise as a route toward clarity. “Last Row Sunday” considers accountability and the idea that grace does not erase what happened.

“We Never Had” addresses grief for an imagined future rather than a shared physical life. “The Scar” treats the wound as evidence that something happened and that the person endured it. “Is Not Working” draws a boundary around repeated apologies without changed behavior. The closing “Heaven’s Ashes” moves into permanent bereavement, family memory and spiritual questioning.

These are the artist’s own thematic descriptions, not a substitute for a listening review. Together, though, they show the record’s editorial shape: different losses require different kinds of reckoning, and survival is not the same as forgetting.

A second chapter, not a summary

The strongest connection to Vasquez’s earlier EV conversation is his refusal to flatten recovery into a before-and-after story. In that interview, he said pain and hope can exist at the same time. Still Here develops the same idea through a full album title that functions as both fact and statement: the damage is acknowledged, the absence remains, and the person continues.

For an independent artist whose music, books and nonprofit work all return to communication under pressure, that continuity gives the release more weight than a one-off announcement. Still Here is the next documented step in a body of work concerned with what people do after life changes them.