Musicians Stephen Fearing and Andy White keep their long distance working relationship together through the brotherhood of friendship and song.
Fearing presently calls Halifax home and White has his headquarters in Australia, but the two are still driven through mutual camaraderie, respect and fun for their joint project Fearing and White. Luckily, fans didn’t have to wait 10 years like after the first self-titled album, with the majority of Fearing and White’s second release Tea and Confidences produced in a four day write-a-thon in 2012.
The duo last played live at last year’s Flood Benefit Concert in Calgary, and are getting ready to showcase Tea and Confidences in Alberta. Fearing and White play Communitea Cafe on April 3.
“We both grew up in Ireland, Andy in the north and me in the south, so we had a lot to talk about, and we’re around the same age, same references and I’m very familiar with his early career, so we just had a lot of connections,” said Fearing.
“It kind of went from there. He came through Guelph, Ont. where I was living. A little later that year a bunch of us got together put a band together around him just for fun and it’s sort of gone from there.
“We got our first record out and now we’re just launching the second one. We’d been working together off and on for 10 years and if you compressed all the time we spent actually together, it probably adds up to about four months total. But we really got to know each other while we did a bunch of shows; we wrote together, went to the studio to make demos, just as we remembered how the songs went, and it kind of gave us a template to work from.”
The working relationship has both musicians bringing melodic and lyrical ideas to the table when writing and recording.
“We’re both really picky about our lyrics and it gave us a really easy starting point for this record,” Fearing said. “We didn’t go into our four-day stretch with the intention of writing all of the songs on the record – well, because that would have been a really daunting task.
“If somebody goes, ‘you got four days to write your album,’ you go, ‘forget it, that’s not going to happen, that’s a silly thing to do.’ There was a point where we realized we had written six songs and we still had a day and a half left, so we just kept going and we left with 11 tunes and I think both of us felt good. You always, in the back of your head, go, ‘Well we’ll see, in a month. I’ll look at them again and see what I think,’ and we both just thought, ‘yeah, these are good songs.’ ”
The album was recorded at Scott Merritt’s studio, The Cottage, in Guelph, Ont.
“Scott is a maestro, he’s a great producer and engineer ... he’s got great taste and lovely microphones, he’s got beautiful preamps and all the stuff that you’d really want and given that there’s two of us for the first record it was the perfect place to work,” Fearing said on recording. “Even though his space is small, he gets great drum sounds, so we were able to record our drum sounds as well.”
Fearing says the big difference between the two records is the duo tried to rein themselves in on the first and let themselves have more freedom on Tea and Confidences. “We didn’t want to go too crazy with overdubs, we thought let’s minimally do what we can here, flesh the songs out, but not overdo it,” Fearing said.
“With this record we thought, Let’s let the songs dictate what we’re gonna do. If it feels like we want to have a drum kit and a couple of electric guitars, then let’s do that and that’s exactly what we did. On one song there’s actually two drum kits, so it was kind of the opposite again of the first record – we didn’t put any parameters on ourselves as to how we should make the record – we just let the songs dictate.”
The duo last saw each other at the Calgary Flood Benefit Concert, and they can’t wait to be Alberta bound.
“I love to play in Alberta very much; I mean, Alberta is the roots capital of Canada,” Fearing said. “It’s where this kind of music really thrives so it’ll be great to go back. You know, it’s not a static thing, but right now Alberta is where it is.
“It’s a combination of being a wealthy province, there’s money trickling down into the arts, it’s a province that has its own radio network that really loves this kind of music.
“Calgary alone has a disproportionate amount of folk clubs and the festivals are crazy. Calgary and Edmonton both have very successful festivals, it really is ground zero for this kind of music.
“The first three shows we’re going to do as a duo because Andy’s actually flying in on the day of our first show from Australia. I’m going to pick him up at the airport, we’re going to go to the Calgary Folk Club, sit in the back room and try and remember how to play some of these songs. Then we’re going to do three shows and then we’ve got a couple of days off and then the rest of the tour is going to be a trio with a drummer, which will be very new for us.
“I’m really excited to do that – it’s sort of the logical step after making this record. Anyone that’s seen us before will have seen us as a duo and most of the rest of this tour is going to be as a trio, so that will be a nice turn of events.”
