When Jeremie Albino was a kid growing up in Ontario, Canada, his uncle started calling him “Broadway,” not because he seemed destined for musical theater, but because Jeremie had…something. He was a paradox - a shy kid who could be coaxed into singing for the family and a budding folk musician inspired by street performers.
“Toronto's has this really big busker fest, and my parents would bring us down there,” Albino says in Episode 319 of The String. “And it wasn't just music. It was street theater and all that stuff.” He says the energy exchange was inspiring. “I was always so captivated by performer(s) just being able to do that with a guitar and a voice and a story,” and before long, he took his guitar to the waterfront in Toronto and launched his own performing career, reaching passers by one at a time. “That's still something that I always thrive for and search for - just that connection.”
As with other prominent roots artists who got started with a healthy dose of busking, folks like Charley Crockett and Sierra Ferrell, Albino throws his voice out there big and bold, enlarging his lyrics about negotiating life and love with an immediacy and electricity. We saw it in March when Albino played a solo set at WMOT’s Wired In, on the same day that this interview took place. In conversation, he is indeed a bit reserved, but on stage, the spirit of Howlin’ Wolf and Big Bill Broonzy is in there. The distance between Albino’s impulse to communicate and his impact on audiences in live settings is as short as it gets. He’s a live wire with an old-school sound and stories to tell.
Albino latched on to the blues in his early teens, not with the guidance of anyone close to him in particular but by chasing a feeling and a supportive dad who took him CD shopping. He says he started writing his own songs about age 18, something he cultivated through a Sunday song swap he found on Craigslist. His first song “Shipwreck” remains a popular item on his set list to this day.
Whatever he did worked out, because Albion’s sound was quite developed by the time he made his first album Hard Time in 2019. Produced in Nashville by analog recording guru Andrija Tokic, it rumbles with vintage rock and roll swagger. Around that time he met fellow Ontario roots artist Cat Clyde, and inspired by a shared love of early blues and country, they collaborated on the excellent covers album Blue, Blue, Blue, featuring songs popularized by the Carter Family, Blind Willie McTell, Bob Dylan and others.
After two more albums in two more years, Nashville’s ever-vigilant talent scout and producer Dan Auerbach latched on to Albino through some online videos. As with other artists on his Easy Eye Sound label, Auerbach reached out and invited the Canadian to his Eighth Ave. studio for a concentrated creative experience that resulted in the album Our Time In The Sun, which was released last November.
Jeremie isn’t the first guest on The String to describe being invited into Dan Auerbach’s creative world and his on-call roster of ace co-writers and studio musicians. But his version is especially vivid. The writing process was like an afterburner on his usual patient tempo of composing new songs, he says. And the studio environment encouraged spontaneous takes, resulting in recordings that are alive and funky.
The rhythm section of bass player Thomas Brenneck (the Dap-King) and English drummer Malcolm Catto (The Heliocentrics) provides a range of backbeats and sticky textures, while Albino croons and emotes in songs like the love song opener “I Don’t Mind Waiting” and my favorite, a song about evading fate and hard times called “Baby Ain’t It Cold Outside,” with a big grand chorus.
“From early on, what I realized is I just love singing,” Albino says. “I feel really fortunate that I have, I don't know, just music in me. It comes out and it brings me joy. So whether it be performing or just being at home, it's still a release.”
Episode 319 is split with Colorado-based songwriter and champion acoustic guitar player Tyler Grant. Find show notes for his segment here.
