Bet On Love, the new album from Pharis and Jason Romero, is a modern folk ode – to sentimental anchorings and to relationships between place, people and time. Recorded in Pharis & Jason’s banjo shop outside Horsefly, BC, with the help of producer Marc Jenkins (the duo’s 2018 Juno-winning Sweet Old Religion producer) and sound engineer John Raham, the album is quite literally homegrown. The songs come from the world the Romeros live in and the lifestyle they have chosen to lead, focused on balance, simplicity and intention (approaches held reverently by an entire culture of folk music nerds). Add in a bustling boutique banjo business and the raising of two young children with the busy life of active musicians, and the balancing act itself becomes an art form.
Ahead of the album’s release on June 1st in the UK, the songs New Day and We All Fall are to be released as a single this week. You can watch the accompanying video for We All Fall, a song with a life-lesson and also our Song of the Day – while it’s true that ‘we all fall from time to time’, the beautiful harmonies, floating above a wave of strings, is enough to lift anyone. Enjoy.
The title track from the album features Pharis’ most personal writing, and this intimacy reverberates throughout the record. Their second collection of all-original songs, “Bet on Love is the sound of songwriters, known more for telling the stories of others, turning inwards,” says their producer. “The new record brings us all closer to the real Pharis and Jason.
“They’re talking about self-love and new hopes for lonely societies. They’re questioning how honest we are with ourselves – are the stories we live the ones we tell to others?”
…And they’re finding that we may just get better as we get older, once we start loving what we have and stop minding what is gone. The oh-so-close couple gently offer up tone and song, bound together in something folk, something country, something that is the setting for the ups and downs of daily life.
John Reischman on mandolin and Patrick Metzger on bass complete the rootsy, alive-off-the-floor feeling.
Two tracks will be released as the first single – New Day and We All Fall in advance of the album’s official UK launch on June 1st.
http://www.pharisandjason.com/