The Young Novelists - In City & Country (2018)

I was born in a small Canadian town called Verona – fair Verona town! as Shakespeare would say. I moved away as soon as I was able, in part because I didn't necessarily appreciate what I had when I had it. Or, maybe, it's easier to look back through the dim haze of nostalgia and realize it was a pretty good way to grow up. In any case, I do love small towns. But I live in Toronto, and I also love living in a big city. Maybe I just love living anywhere; I'm easy that way.

The songs on this album were all written about, or inspired by, or influenced by, specific small towns in Ontario. In late 2015 and early 2016 I picked a bunch of towns where I had some history or some connection, and I travelled to each of them and I did some research on their history and then we sat down and we wrote a collection of songs. Thirty or so. From those songs we picked ten that seemed to go together, or maybe that we thought people would like to hear, and we decided to record them. It sounds easy when I write it like that, but there were long discussions about which songs to include and which to exclude. Such is the nature of album-making.

In late March 2017 I had an opportunity to go to the Banff Centre for the Arts for a songwriting residency. There I met a producer from Montreal named Howard Bilerman and had a great time working on songs and doing some recording with him while I was there. When it came time for us to find a producer for this album, it seemed a natural fit. We travelled to Montreal to record the album, which was a new experience for us – our previous albums were all recorded in Toronto. It was magical to be in a beautiful city, spending our time and creative energy in a phenomenal studio, working with fun and fantastic people who were equal parts talented and devoted to the project.

The result is this album. A few years of writing and rehearsing, creating and compromising, honing and harmonizing; just doing the work to make a few songs sound decent to our ears. It may (or may not) be shocking to know how some songs come together whole cloth and others take months to find the nuanced moment that makes them work, at least for us. Hopefully they sound decent to you, as well. Thanks for listening.