Jeremie Albino is currently on tour in support of Our Time in the Sun, with a string of U.S. and Canadian dates bringing him back home to Toronto for a performance this week.Serena Yang/Supplied
Jeremie Albino’s new album, Our Time in the Sun, doesn’t announce itself loudly. It begins the way a memory does, warm, familiar, a little uncertain around the edges. The songs move easily between soul and gospel, grounded by rhythms that feel lived-in. His voice is raw but unforced, as if it has always sounded that way, like someone trying, earnestly, to tell the truth.
Albino calls it his “soul record,” and that’s not a stretch. The album was co-written and produced by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys rock duo, and recorded in Nashville with a cadre of storied players whose resumes include names such as Elvis Presley, Dusty Springfield and Amy Winehouse. But more than the pedigree, it’s the feel of the record – its looseness, its deep pocket, its generosity – that marks a turning point for Albino.
He’s currently on tour in support of Our Time in the Sun, with a string of U.S. and Canadian dates bringing him back home to Toronto for a performance this week. When we meet at the Royal Conservatory of Music, a fitting venue for a conversation about craft and transformation, Albino is soft-spoken and gently scruffy, seemingly surprised by how far things had come.
“I told Dan I wanted to write something that felt like it was meant for the stage,” he says. “Something people could move to. Something that feels good. That was the whole point of this record.”
That clarity took time. Albino, who is of Filipino and Québécois descent, was raised in Scarborough, Ont., then spent much of his 20s in Prince Edward County, Ont. His first passion was farming. He worked at Vicki’s Veggies, planning to go to agriculture school. “But they said I’d learn more by staying on the land,” he recalls. Music was a bedroom project, something that happened between seasons.
Winters took him to Toronto, where he played every room that would have him. That’s where he met Crispin Day, a producer best known for his work with Canadian alternative rock band July Talk. Day wasn’t managing artists, but something about Albino’s demos inspired him to take the young musician on. Together they made his first record and Albino signed a short-lived deal with Cinematic Music Group in New York. “It was a weird fit,” he admits. “They had T-Pain and Joey Bada$$ on the label. I didn’t know where I fit.”
Still, that first record got him to Nashville, and introduced him to a circuit of folk and roots festivals. When the label let him go, Albino and Day released his second album independently.
Then Dan Auerbach came calling.
Albino isn’t sure what video Auerbach saw – maybe a festival clip, maybe something on Instagram – but it was enough to get his attention. They met for dinner when the Black Keys were in Toronto. Afterward, Auerbach invited him to The Piston, a small rock and soul club, where he was doing a low-key DJ set.
“It was all old gospel, deep soul, early R&B,” Albino remembers. “He’s got this insane record collection, and he knows every player on every record. He’s a total music nerd in the best way.”
They decided to write together before signing anything. Albino flew to Nashville. In two days, they’d written half the album.
The sessions took place at Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound, a converted bunker near downtown Nashville with a kitchen-turned-writing room in the back. “There’s this big round table where we’d sit and write,” Albino says. “You’d look around and there’d be Grammys tucked onto shelves like old books.”
The players were more than legends, they were architects of the sound Albino was chasing. Bobby Wood (Elvis Presley’s Suspicious Minds) brought gospel-soaked keys. Pat McLaughlin, a long-time collaborator of John Prine, shaped lyrics with seasoned ease. Tommy Brenneck (a guitarist who worked with Amy Winehouse) added melodic bass, while Barrie Cadogan and Malcolm Catto, of Little Barrie and the Heliocentrics, delivered the record’s wiry guitar and vintage-funk groove.
“Dan would pull something out and say, ‘Let’s write something that feels like this,‘” Albino says. “It wasn’t about copying, it was about feeling good, about hitting a vibe and seeing where it took us.”
That feeling, the warmth of 1960s R&B, the urgency of gospel, the raw emotion of blues, is what carries Our Time in the Sun. Albino’s voice, bruised and beautiful, is the anchor. The production wraps around it like a second skin.
Tracks such as Give It to Me One Last Time swing with handclaps and swagger, while Rolling Down the 405 drifts into dusky-road-trip territory. On So Many Ways to Say I Love You, Albino delivers a quiet, aching confession, his voice fraying just at the edges.
“I’d always been kind of folky,” he says. “But this time, I wanted songs that would move people. Songs that would come alive on stage.” he says. “I love writing, but performing … that’s where it really lives for me.”
This year marks his first full headlining U.S. tour. In Denver, he sold out a 300-capacity venue. “I didn’t know anyone in the crowd,” he says. “But they were singing along. That’s when I thought, ‘Okay. Maybe this is really happening.‘”
It’s the kind of moment he’s been quietly building toward, through early morning farm shifts, slow-burning bar gigs, and years of independent hustle.
“I don’t think I could’ve made this album any earlier,” he says. “It’s the first time I’ve made something and thought, ‘Yeah, this is who I am.‘”
