Newfoundland’s Fortunate Ones have announced a new album entitled That Was You And Me, set for release on June 3, 2022.
Catherine Allan and Andrew James O’Brien have shared the album’s opening track, “Day to Day”, along with a stunning performance video.
“Day to Day” is a song that talks of finding meaning in the day to day—and finding meaning is an overarching theme on this album. “I had a tumour removed from my hand in the summer of 2019,” explains Andrew. Recovery left him unable to play guitar in any serious way—and slow days at home had him rethinking what a career in music would or could be.
“Day to Day was written in the time it took to fry eggs in the silent pre-dawn dark of an early morning workday,” explains Andrew. “I had taken a job at The Inn by Mallard Cottage where shifts often started before sunrise – each day back and forth across town to a job that had nothing to do with music. Deliberate time away allowed a creatively dry well to refill in it’s own time. Soon ideas began percolating. Early mornings alone at the front desk quietly strumming the guitar and no pressure to create became the catalyst for the clarity and space that gave Day to Day and many more songs the chance to be born. The song is a meditation on finding contentment in the mundane, comfort in routine and making genuine peace with the softening of the ego – finding meaning in the day to day.”
The video for “Day to Day ” was captured in what the pair describe as a little “salt box house by the sea” where they spent a pandemic summer writing, refining, and recording songs. They would then send them to their producer Joshua Van Tassel in Toronto. O’Brien credits a feeling of true freedom—freedom from the pressure of the music business delivered by a pandemic that stopped touring on a worldwide scale, freedom from his own sense of what he ought to be doing, and freedom to simply follow his own curiosity.
For Allan, the experience allowed her to examine a fundamental question of existence.
“What is your life when everything else is stripped away and you have nothing else?”
At the end, there’s love. And That Was You and Me.
Check out the video for “Day to Day” below, and stay up to date with Fortunate Ones via their socials.