Life in Shelburne hit Falcon Jane pretty hard. The musical duo of Sara May and Andrew McArthur, originally hailing from Orangeville, with longtime Grey Bruce roots in Kilsyth and Hope Bay, have been pumping out their signature brand of “plez rock” since 2014. Moving to the junction of highways 10 and 89 a couple of years back had them readjust their spectacles and take stock of an entirely new outlook on the world – one that, coupled with the lockdowns of COVID-19, had a big impact on their music and the feelings that go into crafting an album.
Their newest release, Legacy, will be let out of its pen this summer, and we caught up with them in early spring as they were touring the area promoting the new album.
“I’ve always written in a way that feels right to me at the moment,” says Sara about her songwriting process. “I never really focused on genre too much until I felt a shift happen with this album.”
“We were still just figuring out our musicality – Indie Pop or Rock is a vague term now,” adds McArthur. “Ten years ago those were very specific genres and you knew what it meant. These days it’s evolved into broad terms.”
“It’s looking at these men, really, who had all of this power and have now almost fallen from grace and are looking back on their legacies and seeing people view them as problematic. I was asking questions about why they were the way they were and trying to better understand the dynamic between rural and urban, all the while having the benefit of having one foot in each place…”
During the COVID lockdown in 2020, the duo released a 5-song covers EP – one in particular being a John Prine cover, a go-to musical influence for Sara for years. “It just felt natural to play more country because we were listening to more country,” she says. “We didn’t set out to make a country album, but we had been surrounding ourselves with that genre and suddenly started paying attention to those influences.”
The evolution of musical taste may be inevitable, but their musical processes have remained impervious to influence or style. For Sara, that’s meant adopting a character-driven style of consciousness, imagining life from the perspective of another and allowing the lyrics to pour out naturally. The songs she writes are then shared with Andrew, a production operations manager by day, who begins crafting arrangements around her initial song structure, becoming a vessel to impart her feelings and emotions.
“Andrew’s been playing such a huge role in the development of the sound – we’ve been playing together for 10 years now and on our last four albums he’s played multiple instruments.”
“My bass sound and specific drum style I play – you can tell it’s me playing the rhythm section,” says Andrew. “Those musical choices are still pretty apparent. I’ll imagine where the guitars could go, where the drums could be and what happens. We make those choices together. It’s like ‘here’s the song, now…’”
“Build the world around it,” interjects Sara with a smile.
Not just bandmates, the two are also married. That kind of all-encompassing partnership in both music and life offers a much different perspective on them as individuals.
“In our relationship, I think I’m probably the more logical, practical one, laughs Sara. “He’ll say, ‘let’s do this crazy thing’ and I’ll think, ‘OK, I’ll book the flight and we need to leave at this time.’ In most of my life I think I’m very structured, and music is my time to be a little more flowy, dreamy, and organic.”
In creating Legacy, the themes and ideas Falcon Jane explored were familiar, but Sara felt more comfortable exploring the themes through the lens of fictional characters inspired by men in her life – one being an “unhinged” neighbour they met after first moving to Shelburne. The rural male archetype has adopted a comical reputation in popular Canadian culture, but the duo noticed a pain and a yearning for connection in the traits of both their Shelburne comrade and the town in general.
“Shelburne is a working class, classic rural town,” says Andrew. “People can be pretty tough.”
“The whole time we lived there, we noticed more and more unrest – people were just kinda angry – we would go out for dinner and immediately someone would come up to our table and challenge Andrew to fight. We’d never seen this before,” adds Sara.
They’re quick to defend the town – noting the profound changes it’s gone through in a short number of years. Geographically, it’s the meeting place of two major southern Ontario highways, 10 and 89. There’s constant movement here and perhaps it’s caught in the middle of an identity crisis with development engulfing the entire east side. That rural dynamic, being caught in the crosshairs of old school rural sensibility and being forced to change too quickly – became a pillar of exploration for Legacy.
The unfortunate reality is, people who drive truck, leave for weeks on end to work tough jobs, or struggle with substance abuse – real life, salt-of-the-earth folk with faults and weaknesses – have a tendency to be forgotten, or pushed aside by society – it’s often these archetypal rural paradigms that are moved to make room for progress. Legacy is an honest, open-hearted reflection on the feelings of people like Sara and Andrew’s neighbour, someone who needs, and deserves support, opportunity, and human connection as much as the next person.
“It’s looking at these men, really, who had all of this power and have now almost fallen from grace and are looking back on their legacies and seeing people view them as problematic. I was asking questions about why they were the way they were and trying to better understand the dynamic between rural and urban, all the while having the benefit of having one foot in each place,” says Sara.
It’s an album about coming to grips with the fact someone or something will always be looking to “pave over the dirt road you grew up on,” says Sara in passing. A profound statement that puts me back in my chair. It’s about the pain and nostalgia of having to drive by the house you grew up in that doesn’t look anything like the home you once knew. It’s about seeing the beauty in backwoods camaraderie and the complexities that come with navigating how it chooses to meet the world south of Superburger. In places like this, country music just makes more sense and Falcon Jane is rising to the challenge of articulating both the pride and pain of rural life.
You can check out Falcon Jane on their label’s website, Darling Recordings, or via Instagram @falcon_jane
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Words by Nelson Phillips, Feature image by Avalon Mohns
