Hard Time

There’s no counting the worlds Jeremie Albino has travelled to get to where he is today, and no telling which ones he might head to next. Born and raised in the bright and booming metropolis of Toronto, his heart led him out of the city and into Prince Edward County, where country living and a decade of working on farms gave him the time and space to hone his songwriting skills. His music nods to all manner of troubadours who rambled down similar paths throughout history—he nods slyly to the legendary blues singers who inspired him, offers a soft and insightful touch with his folk songs, and stomps and swaggers through soulful rock ‘n’ roll. But Jeremie Albino is a natural and an original, created by an alchemy that favours, above all else, that most mysterious and coveted of qualities: heart. And his wildly impressive debut, Hard Time, overflows with it. Albino grew up immersing himself in early field recordings and the music of legends like Lightning Hopkins and Skip James, first learning to play the harmonica and then moving on to guitar. On Hard Time, he pulls just as much as he needs from his influences, reverent to the musical forms that made him but actively sculpting his own voice. The easy groove of “Amelia” sets toes tapping to its fantastical love story as Albino tries to bridge time and space to connect with the ill-fated aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart over warm organ swells. “Lilac Way”—inspired by his mother’s love for the pale violet flower—envisions breezy country roads with blooming strings and nods to Jeff Buckley’s sparse, early New York café recordings. With “Hard Time,” he shifts gears into bristling dive bar rock ‘n’ roll, as a narrator behind bars wonders whether his partner-in-crime will be there smiling, leaning on the hood of a car, to pick him up at the end of his sentence. The dusty, understated “Shipwreck,” complete with the sound of creaking wooden floorboards, takes listeners a thousand leagues under the sea and back to 1883, witnesses to a lonesome grave. His storytelling reaches its peak on the doomy “Wildfire,” offering up a tale where Mad Tom and his old hound dog stand defiant in the face of flames creeping up the hill, determined to stop the destruction with his sheer force of will. The sagas of these out-sized characters and the vivid imagery they pass through are given proper treatment by the peaks and valleys of Albino’s music, dynamic enough to conjure something light as the sway of flowers in the wind, or the grandeur of an apocalyptic storm. “They’re stories I wrote that came from daydreams,” Jeremie explains, “about life, love, people, and another time.” Not only is Hard Time Jeremie’s debut album, but it also represents a slew of firsts for the young songwriter. Before embarking on the recording, he’d never been in a studio, played with a band, or worked with a producer. Jeremie’s earthy Americana has never been laid to tape until now. And Hard Time sounds just as untouched by pretension as you’d expect from a musician who got to this point simply by letting his heart lead the way. The first recordings were laid down at the Bombshelter in Nashville with producer Andrija Tokic (Alabama Shakes, Hurray For The Riff Raff, Langhorne Slim), and the rest was finished off at Union Sound in Toronto with the guidance of Albino’s manager and producer Crispin Day.

There is no shortage of confidence in Jeremie Albino's music. Whether he's playing rollicking old school rock'n'roll or delivering slower, g...