Pharis and Jason Romero—whose old-time, country-folk, and early roots music has made them three-time JUNO Award and seven-time Canadian Folk Music Award winners—have announced the release of their new album, Tell ’Em You Were Gold, out June 17, 2022 on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. It’s Pharis and Jason’s seventh album as a duo, and the first since 2020’sBet on Love, which won praise from the BB, NPR, and American Songwriter who said, “To call Bet on Love anything other than masterful would be a disservice.”
Tell ’Em You Were Gold was written and recorded in an old barn on the couple’s homestead in Horsefly, British Columbia. The barn had long been run down, and between building banjos, adventuring outdoors, and loving up their two kids, Pharis and Jason restored the building themselves, milling their own spruce, hoisting beams, and rebuilding a roof originally covered in tin printing plates. “The music made on this record was made in the spirit of that working transformation and in the spirit of the history that old barn contains,” they write in the album’s liner notes. And while the intimacy of the old building does make its way onto the record in the form of crackling stoves and tapping feet, the sense of ease that glows from the album’s center gives it the warmth of a hearth in a cold BC winter. Like many albums recorded in the past couple of years,Tell ʼEm You Were Gold is an at-home record, one where the performers’ sense of being at home with one another is obvious in their effortless interplay.
Today, they are sharing the first single and video for “Souvenir” as well as a bonus track, “Pale Morning”. “We made this record over six days of playing live in an old barn,” says Pharis. “Sometimes the songs took new and surprising directions. Souvenir was made on the last day of recording; the film crew and guest musicians had left, and it was just the two of us and the engineer together in the barn. The banjo and guitar vibe changed as soon as we sat down to play it. Jason retuned the banjo and switched from clawhammer to a rhythmic fingerstyle; I slowed the guitar down and played heavy on the downbeat. A couple takes in, and the song sat where you hear it now. The words are about how experiences in life become souvenirs of times, places and people. It’s about keeping yourself centered as you carry them. In other words, the souvenirs don’t become you – you are at the core of them, and you are gold.”
