When Jeremie Albino was a teenager, he started busking around Toronto, setting up along the boardwalk or on a street corner downtown, wherever he thought he might find some passersby. “Usually nobody was listening,” he says, “but occasionally one or two people would tell me it sounded great. They had places to be and things to do, but they would stop and listen for a little while. That kind of interaction felt very special to me, and that’s when I realized I really do love performing.
That’s when I realized I could hold a listener’s interest and give something back to them.” Since then, he has refined a vital and idiosyncratic mix of styles and sounds that are rooted in tradition but grasping toward the future: His songs are grounded in the gritty storytelling of classic country music, propelled by the rhythms of old-school R&B, played with the wild abandon of early rock ’n’ roll, and sung with the deep feeling of southern soul. Thanks to his sweaty, livewire concerts, he has been steadily growing his audience from a few passersby to packed houses around Canada and the U.S. Our Time In The Sun, his soulful fourth solo album, sounds like the culmination of what he started out on the street corners of Toronto.
Working with producer Dan Auerbach, he emerges as a sharp, observant songwriter who is quick with a clever turn of phrase and open to the emotional nuance of the stories he’s telling on “I Don’t Mind Waiting” and the raw “Struggling With The Bottle.” “I used to struggle with writing. Okay, I used to hate it. Whenever I needed to write new songs, I would just sit there for months toiling away.” When he signed with Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound label, however, they spent hours and hours bouncing ideas off one another, their sessions becoming a masterclass on how to write a good, solid song. Perhaps the most important lesson, he says, was to let the song come naturally rather than try to force it. It knows what it needs and will carry you in the right direction.
“Rolling Down The 405” came to life during a break, when Albino was messing around while Auerbach took a phone call. “The song came together so fast. I just started chugging on the guitar and singing lyrics off the top of my head… ‘Jimmy left me high and dry, rolling down the 401.’ It was originally the 401 because that’s one of the main highways around here. But 405 just sounded better.” Even Albino isn’t exactly sure, but he’s content to let them be whatever the listener needs them to be. He has a keen understanding of how to position a song between the specific and the universal, so that it will mean something slightly different to everybody who hears it. “The song grows from what you put into it.”
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