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With our time at home we’ve been working on rearranging some of the furniture in our living room; not just to freshen up our space, but also to make a slightly more aesthetically pleasing spot from which to play live shows from home. Because, like many of our friends and fellow musicians, we’ve been hosting a few livestreams, hopefully to keep entertaining folks who are staying safe at home but still want to hear live music, inasmuch as we still can. Here are a few of the shows we’ve done, and a tribute to one of the great songwriters of…    read more.

We are heading out to slightly warmer (and then much warmer) climates this coming month! We’re pretty jazzed to be touring in Florida for the first time as part of the Listening Room Festival. If you have friends in the area, please let them know where we will be! Spring seems to bring a cavalcade of new music, and we’re excited for new releases from amazing Canadian songwriters like Rose Cousins and Sarah Harmer! We are also working on new music, but what we’ve got won’t be ready until around about autumn. Keep your eyes peeled!

We’re swinging through a few towns this autumn, catching the changing of the colours as we play a bunch of duo shows and one rare full-band show near Toronto! We hope you can join us or help spread the word about our upcoming shows. We’re also excited to share a video we shot in Hamilton as part of the Unicorn Project — it’s a rare cover of “Into The Mystic” captured by the good folks at Soundstill Production. We don’t perform many cover songs, but this one is near and dear to our hearts, and we hope you enjoy it!

Calgary Folk Festival is celebrating their 40th year and we are celebrating our first appearance at the festival! We’ll be there from July 25-28 playing just about every day — some performances with a full band and some as a sweltering, harmony-beltering (not a word, I know) duo. The full line-up is rather amazing and includes folks like Sharon Van Etten, Sheila E., Belle & Sebastian, iskwē, Danny Michel, The Strumbellas, and about 40 other fantastic acts. Check out the festival’s official Spotify playlist to hear songs from the whole line-up.

Downtown Cobourg there’s a big, historic building called Victoria Hall that serves as a theatre, art gallery, museum, and county court. When I visited Cobourg I took a lot of pictures of it, circling it, crossing the street a few times to get close-ups and panoramic shots. My idiocy attracted the attention of an older gentleman who was heading into his favourite cafe (The Buttermilk Cafe). He asked me why I was photographing an old building, but before I could really explain he launched into a soliloquy about preservation, history, and the “differences between old buildings and old people.” He…    read more.

Old Man Winter! Some people love the winter, and some people are normal. Uh, more seriously, I’m very happy that some folks enjoy the season even if it’s not my cup of tea (although it’s a time of year when I drink many cups of tea!). I hope that wherever you fall on the spectrum of winter enjoyment that you are finding your own space to do what feels good for you! We’ve played our last show of the year — a wonderful shindig with Oh Susanna! — but we have some good holiday news to share anyway. As you…    read more.

I’m thinking to replace “awesome” with “autumn” in my vocabulary, at least for the season. Good idea? Bad idea? You decide. Come and see us on tour and see if I slip up on stage! Because we are heading out on the road this fall to debut our autumn clothing, which just means (for me) putting away my t-shirts and wearing more plaid. But I already wear lots of plaid! So…double-plaid?? We’re really excited to be hitting some shows in the northeast States and a few closer to home as well. We haven’t been to London or Wakefield for a…    read more.

In Owen Sound there is a street corner that has four churches, called Salvation Corners, and a block away is a street corner that has four bars: Damnation Corners. I visited both. From talking to some folks at Damnation Corners, I found out it’s a bit of a tradition to visit the bar on Sunday, shortly after services are done. Most small towns have sub-communities within them and I think this was an example of that: people build their communities around things like going to church, or going to the bar, or maybe a bit of both. This particular bar…    read more.

This song came very obliquely from two conversations –- one I had, and one I overheard. We played a festival in Red Rock, and the day after the festival we went hiking with some friends (Devin and Keri Latimer from Leaf Rapids…check ’em out!). At one brief point, in conversation with Devin, we were postulating the granularity of brain activity and what you could actually see with an MRI scan. It was a real nerdy discussion, but he is a Chemistry professor and I have a math degree and that’s just what we got up to talking about. We came…    read more.

This song has a rather complicated provenance, but ultimately it’s based on two things: an article about elections that I found when I visited Arnprior, and the superlative nature of the signs you see while driving into small towns. First, the article: it was about how several city councillors in Arnprior would not be running for re-election, and after the main thrust of the article it gave the brief history of some of the councillors – some of whom had long family histories full of council members. That kind of small-town dynasty is interesting, to me, because it involves both…    read more.