On September 27, 2025, I stood inside Wembley Stadium watching Oasis perform together again. I'd travelled from Edmonton, Alberta, across an ocean and thousands of kilometres, to see a band that hadn't performed together in sixteen years. There was something rather extraordinary about the experience, beyond the obvious excitement of seeing Liam and Noel Gallagher sharing a stage again. I was in a city where I didn't live, surrounded by tens of thousands of people I didn't know, watching two brothers from Manchester perform songs that had somehow become part of my own life. For reasons I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about since, it felt like a homecoming. I was about as far from home as I could reasonably be, yet I couldn't imagine being anywhere else.
I've admired Noel Gallagher's songwriting for years, although I suspect my appreciation for his music has changed as much as the music itself. Most people associate him with the great Oasis anthems, those enormous songs that seem to belong as much to the audiences singing them as to the people who recorded them. But some of his most interesting work, at least to me, came after Oasis ended in 2009. His career with the High Flying Birds offered something that the expectations surrounding Oasis might never have allowed him to pursue quite so freely. He could experiment, change direction, indulge his curiosity and occasionally make music that didn't sound much like what his audience had come to expect. Not all of it appealed to everyone, and I can't claim to love everything he's recorded. That's rather the point. He was creating something for himself rather than simply reproducing what had already made him successful.
His earlier solo work contained some remarkably introspective songwriting. Songs like If I Had a Gun... and The Dying of the Light revealed a more contemplative side to an artist whose public personality was often defined by confidence, sarcasm and an apparent indifference to what anybody thought of him. I've always appreciated that contrast. The swagger remained, but the songs suggested someone who was growing older, reconsidering things and becoming more comfortable expressing emotions that didn't necessarily fit the mythology surrounding his earlier career. By the time Dead in the Water appeared, there was something almost disarming about the simplicity of what he was doing. The scale of the music had changed, but his ability to make an ordinary human feeling seem important hadn't disappeared.
Then came the experimentation. Gallagher's work with producer David Holmes on Who Built the Moon? in 2017 took him into a more colourful musical landscape, with psychedelia, glam rock, unusual arrangements and electronic influences occupying space once dominated by guitars. Holy Mountain had an exuberance bordering on theatrical, while Fort Knox seemed more interested in building atmosphere than following the familiar architecture of an Oasis song. I love that these weren't cautious attempts to preserve an established sound. They were deliberately different, and they asked something of the listener too.
It's a Beautiful World is perhaps the clearest example of how far he was prepared to go. There's an almost hypnotic, electronic quality to it, and the French spoken word contribution from Charlotte Courbe feels like it belongs to an entirely different kind of record. Holmes produced the original, while later reinterpretations by Andrew Weatherall and by Mike Pickering with Graeme Park pushed the music further towards the dance floor. Gallagher continued exploring that space with Black Star Dancing, where disco and electronic dance music were no longer passing influences but part of the music's identity. The electronic connection wasn't new, of course. His collaboration with the Chemical Brothers on Setting Sun in 1996 was an early demonstration of how comfortably his songwriting could sit alongside a different musical language. What fascinated me about the later work was that he seemed increasingly happy to make that freedom central to his own records, even if some listeners wanted nothing more than another guitar anthem.
I rather liked that willingness to wander. There's an unfortunate tendency to expect successful people to keep doing whatever made them successful in the first place. We celebrate originality until someone becomes established, at which point we become strangely protective of the version of them we've grown accustomed to. Musicians are expected to reproduce their signature sound, and small business owners can discover that customers have become attached to a product or service just as they themselves are beginning to imagine something different. There's a peculiar pressure in being rewarded for an idea you once loved: what gave you the freedom to begin can eventually make you afraid to change it. Gallagher's solo career wasn't uniformly predictable or universally celebrated, but it demonstrated that creative independence sometimes requires accepting that the audience won't follow every decision. I think there's something admirable about being prepared to disappoint expectations in pursuit of an idea worth exploring.
By 2023, however, Gallagher seemed to have found his way back to something more familiar. Council Skies was a notably reflective album, filled with music that felt less concerned with proving what he could do and more interested in considering where he'd come from. Easy Now carried the emotional sweep that had always been one of his strengths, while Dead to the World was among his most affecting solo compositions. The title track drew on memories of growing up in Manchester, beneath the skies of a council estate and with dreams that extended far beyond what his surroundings might have suggested was possible. Gallagher has been careful to distinguish the meaning of that particular song from the themes of the entire record, but he has described the album more generally as reflective. To me, it felt like the work of someone looking back at the distance he'd travelled without necessarily wishing to undo the journey.
And even there, the musical exploration hadn't ended. One recording I especially appreciate is I'm Not Giving Up Tonight (David Holmes Remix), included on the bonus disc of the 2023 Council Skies deluxe edition. Holmes was revisiting a song from the very album that seemed to mark Gallagher's return to a more familiar sound. That contrast is what interests me. Coming back to something recognizable doesn't mean closing the door on experimentation. The original song remains, the remix offers another way of hearing it, and neither has to displace the other. I can't think of a neater illustration of why appreciating the past shouldn't mean limiting what might follow.
His willingness to reconsider familiar music didn't stop with his own songs. I particularly enjoy hearing what he does with songs written by other people. His interpretations of Bob Dylan's You Ain't Goin' Nowhere and The Mighty Quinn carry his personality without pretending that the original compositions belong to him. And in 2023, around the release of Council Skies, he covered Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart with the BBC Concert Orchestra. That was an audacious choice for a musician from Manchester, and the reaction was divided, not least within his own family. But I find the willingness to take such a recognizable song somewhere else rather compelling. A respectful interpretation needn't be a careful imitation. It can be an acknowledgment that the original deserves to remain alive in different hands. That's as true when someone reshapes a Dylan song as when an artist returns to their own catalogue after years of following entirely different ideas.
There's a wonderful detail about the title Council Skies that seems especially relevant to a publication concerned with creativity and commercial ownership. Gallagher borrowed it from the title of a book by Sheffield artist Pete McKee, but not before contacting McKee and asking whether he could use it. McKee agreed. It's a small story, and I don't suggest that every creative use of a title legally requires permission. What interests me is the instinct behind the conversation. One artist found inspiration in something another artist had created, acknowledged where it came from and sought his blessing. The resulting work was unmistakably Gallagher's own, yet the exchange recognized that inspiration doesn't somehow erase the contribution of the person who inspired it.
That exchange between Gallagher and McKee also makes me think of the people who start small businesses because they care deeply about what they're creating. An idea can begin as a personal fascination, something pursued after work or around other commitments, long before there's any certainty that anyone else will value it. As the business develops, its founder has to make room for customers, employees and obligations that weren't there at the beginning. Protecting original work matters because those efforts deserve recognition and because commercial independence can give people the freedom to keep creating. Yet protection shouldn't become a demand that the business never change. There's a difference between defending what belongs to you and becoming so attached to its first version that you can no longer imagine what it might become. The freedom to create ought to include the freedom to evolve.
Canadian copyright law recognizes some of these distinctions. It protects original expression without granting ownership over every idea or feeling that expression might inspire. It also accommodates criticism and review through fair dealing, although the fairness of a particular use depends on its circumstances, including its purpose. Commercial publication doesn't automatically make a discussion unlawful, just as admiration doesn't automatically make the reproduction of a photograph, recording or substantial passage permissible. The use of someone's likeness to suggest endorsement raises different questions again. I can write about Gallagher's music, explain what it means to me and examine the lessons I draw from his career without suggesting that he endorses this publication or has any connection to it. I don't need to reproduce his lyrics or borrow an unlicensed image to make that connection meaningful.
I think there's a broader lesson here for anyone running a small business. Owners have good reasons to protect their work. They may have put years into establishing a reputation, developing something original and earning the trust of people who value it. But there's a point at which protecting the business as it once existed can begin to restrict what it might become. Customers change, circumstances change, and the people responsible for the business change too. Sometimes a product needs to be reimagined, an early ambition set aside or responsibility entrusted to someone with a different perspective. None of those decisions necessarily betrays the original idea. What matters is whether the business remains free to grow from it. Gallagher's years beyond Oasis and the reunion that followed don't provide a formula for managing a company, but they illustrate a tension familiar to anyone who has created something loved by others. The more meaningful the past becomes, the more tempting it is to insist that the future leave it untouched.
Which brings me back to Wembley. I don't know whether Noel Gallagher imagined, while writing songs in Manchester decades ago, that someone living in Alberta would one day travel halfway around the world to hear them performed. I doubt any songwriter can anticipate the strange and deeply personal relationships people eventually develop with their music. A song might belong legally to its creator, but the memories attached to it belong to the people who have lived with it. There are songs that remind us of people, places and periods of our lives that the songwriter couldn't possibly know anything about. We hear them differently at twenty than we do at forty or fifty, sometimes finding meaning that wasn't apparent before. The recording hasn't changed, but we have. That's part of what makes music such an extraordinary form of creative expression.
For the millions of people who embraced the Oasis reunion in 2025, I suspect the attraction went well beyond nostalgia. Of course there was pleasure in hearing familiar songs, and probably relief that the brothers had found a way to share a stage again. But sixteen years hadn't stood still for any of us. People had changed jobs, grown older, formed families, endured losses and discovered new parts of themselves. The songs had accompanied all of that. I wasn't listening with the same ears I'd had when I first discovered Oasis, and I doubt the people around me were either. To insist that the experience could only be meaningful if it reproduced an earlier moment would have diminished everything that had happened since. The music mattered because it had survived those changes and gathered new meaning through them, not because it could somehow restore our lives to what they'd been.
There was something fitting about the sequence of Gallagher's own journey. After years exploring different sounds, collaborating with different people and developing an identity beyond Oasis, he'd released an album that looked back toward the council skies of his youth. Two years later, he was standing beside his brother again, performing the songs that had taken them so far beyond Manchester in the first place. I don't want to suggest that Council Skies was somehow a prediction of the reunion, or that his solo career was merely a long detour on the road back to Oasis. That would diminish a body of work that deserves to stand on its own. But looking back, there's an undeniable poetry to the progression. An artist spent years discovering what else he could become, reflected on where he'd started, and eventually returned to the band that had changed his life.
And perhaps that's what made Wembley feel so personal to me. I hadn't travelled to London simply to revisit the 1990s, nor was I expecting the concert to recreate some earlier period of my life. I wanted to experience something that had become meaningful through all the years in between. I'd followed Gallagher's music as it moved in different directions, appreciated the quieter and more introspective work, and enjoyed seeing him take risks that didn't always come with the certainty of commercial success. Yet when Oasis finally returned, I discovered that none of those changes had weakened my attachment to the music that had first drawn me in. If anything, the journey had given it greater depth.
That experience has stayed with me because I think it says something important about small businesses as well. People pour enormous affection into what they create, and it's understandable that they want to protect it. Yet affection can become possessive when it demands that the next version resemble the first. A founder who refuses to let an idea develop may preserve its original shape while preventing it from realizing its possibilities. Music offers a striking parallel. Listeners may want an artist to remain attached to the moment they first fell in love with the songs, even though the artist has every right to keep creating beyond it. We say home is where the heart is, and sometimes home really is a return, an oasis in something familiar. But it can be more than that. The people, music and work we care about can take on different meanings as our lives change. Allowing that growth doesn't diminish the love we felt at the beginning. It's how that love stays alive.
At Wembley, I was thousands of kilometres from Edmonton, hearing songs I'd carried with me for years. It was a return, and it was an oasis. I felt the comfort of something familiar in the middle of a life that had kept moving. But Noel Gallagher hadn't stood still, Oasis hadn't stood still, and neither had the people who filled the stadium. All of us brought sixteen years of experiences that the music couldn't have anticipated and couldn't possibly erase. That's what gave the reunion its weight. We could return to something we loved without requiring it to be exactly as it had been, and perhaps discover more in it because we'd changed. Home can be the relief of returning, but it's also the room we leave for what comes next. We can't protect the past by restricting the future. For one night, thousands of kilometres from the place I actually call home, I felt as though I'd come home too.