The New Album From Matthew Barber And Jill Barber Out April 1st On The Outside Music Label
It was only a matter of time until they made an album together. Siblings Matthew and Jill have spent the better part of the past 12 years focusing on their solo careers, collectively churning out 14 albums, garnering over 30 award nominations, including 3 Juno Award nods. There had been guest appearances on their respective albums, and tours together, but never a record made. This past spring, the inevitable finally happened, Matthew and Jill began work on The Family Album.
Out April 1st on the Outside Music label, The Family Album consists of five new compositions, two by Matthew and three by Jill, that were written specifically for this album and exist largely in the folk/country/old-time-songbook world . Matthew's "The Sweeter The Dawn" floats dreamily and burns slowly while the ballad, "Grandpa Joe", is a tribute to the siblings' Scottish maternal grandfather they never knew. Jill's "Today" is a classic affirmation of love in the face of fear, and "Big Picture Window" is her country take on settling down and making a home.
The rest of the album is comprised of six covers; chosen from a long list of songs that were pitched, discussed, attempted and roughly recorded on an iPhone during a few sessions in Vancouver (Jill's home), Toronto (Matthew's home) and California (during a family vacation). The songs selected are of personal significance, relevant to the album's themes of loyalty, time, memories and, of course, family, or, simply for how much fun they were to sing.
Unintentionally (but perhaps not surprisingly) a bit of a Canadian theme emerged with selections by Gene MacClellan ("Song To A Young Seagull") and Ian Tyson ("Summer Wages") getting new treatments. The haunting French war-ballad "The Partisan" popularized in English by Leonard Cohen is revisited, as is Neil Young's classic "Comes A Time" which undergoes a lush transformation. The album is rounded out by Townes Van Zandt's "If I Needed You" and "I Must Be In A Good Place Now" by Bobby Charles, acknowledging the Barber's fascination with the songwriting of the south, and seasoning the pan-Canadian folk repertoire with a note of "Americana."
LISTEN TO "COMES A TIME" HERE
The Family Album was mixed by Grammy Award winning Micheal Piersante (Willie Nelson, Robert Plant & Allison Krauss, Elvis Costello, O Brother Where Art Thou OST) and features a band comprised of Julian Brown (Feist), Dean Stone (Apostle of Hustle), Joey Wright (Sarah Harmer), Drew Jurecka (Stevie Wonder, Dave Brubeck) and Robbie Grunwald (Doug Paisley)
Matthew speaks on honouring the song and the songwriter "We are indebted to the songwriters, original performers and previous interpreters of these great songs as well as to the people in our lives who helped us discover them. We hope we did them justice."
"We ultimately went with the cover songs that just felt most right for the overall feel of the album. They ended up all being from the 60's and 70's. I think it's fair to say we were trying to tap into a little bit of the magic of the North American folk and country records of that time. We had a great band and we cut the songs live off the floor with the odd percussion or string overdub. Chris Stringer engineered the recordings at Union Sound in Toronto. We were conceptually inspired by the great Alison Krauss and Robert Plant album Raising Sand and we were fortunate enough to have the mix engineer of that record, Michael Piersante, mix The Family Album. We sent him the tracks from Toronto and he mixed them at home in LA and sent them back. We worked back and forth over a couple of months mixing the record."
The Family Album will be available on CD, Vinyl (Classic LP Jacket) and via digital download.
You may pre-order the album via https://amzn.com/B01ATVMAHU
The tracklisting is as follows:
I Must Be In A Good Place Now
Song To A Seagull
One True Love
The Sweeter The Dawn
Today
Summer Wages
The Partisan
Big Picture Window
Grandpa Joe
If I Needed You
Comes A Time
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