A warm, hopeful record straight from the heart of British Columbia.
Steve Martin once said that you just can’t sing a depressing song when you’re playing the banjo. He had a point: there’s an inherent buoyancy to the banjo; it tends to make you want to go jog merrily down the road, kicking stones into trees.
Now, the previous release by four-time Juno Award-winning songwriters and banjo builders Pharis and Jason Romero was, as you might expect from professional custom banjo builders, very banjo-centric. Not so with These Are the Days That Turn Into Years. The duo’s seventh studio record was recorded in a riverside barn in Horsefly (look it up), British Columbia, Canada. The arrangements in this new record are more varied, also featuring percussion, fiddle, and even the occasional keys. But while the record might be lighter on banjo (excepting Left Home), the buoyancy remains. These are songs that go through a variety of themes, no less the family life of the Romeros in the countryside, but they’re all imbued with a heartiness, an uplifting quality.
This is old-time music coming from a rooted, happy place. Pharis’ songwriting is tight, the instrumentation and production are polished but not excessively so. The vocals seem to shine most when Pharis and Romero harmonise, though on occasion we wondered if Pharis’s voice could generally be a little more centre stage in the mix. Highlights are Left My Home, Everybody Wants, and These Are the Days, the lyrics of which summarise the album pretty aptly:
“Beware, take care, these are the days that turn into years/One more time I’m so glad, so glad you’re here.“
This is a warm, hearty record of genuine music in times gone strange.
