Call it ‘newgrass’

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This article was published 17/05/2018 (2760 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Four years ago, in the wilds of the Winnipeg Folk Festival campground, a lifelong partnership was formed.

Musicians and then-strangers Aisha Belle and Donovan Locken both brought their instruments to the festival to jam; they stumbled across each other and ended up playing together for five hours.

At the end of the night, they parted ways, only to be rejoined by music a year later when they ended up on the same tour. They got married less than a year after that.

Now the duo acts as the core songwriters for contemporary bluegrass/progressive folk five-piece Spruce and the Meadowlark.

Belle, a violin player and vocalist, brings her classical, folk and orchestral background to the table, while Locken, who plays mandolin in the band, produces a sound that’s based in traditional bluegrass but with contemporary elements (dubbed “newgrass.”)

“We’ve kind of bound those two things together to create our sound,” Belle says. “When we write music, it’s a total collaboration of those two things, which is really neat to hear and experience. Even for us at the beginning when we started writing together, we were like, ‘Hey this is a really new sound, it’s pretty cool.’ It’s neat when two people can get together and really collaborate like that.”

Melding their two esthetics didn’t result in an instant success — Belle describes the process as one full of push and pull; each artist would take a song in the direction they felt it should go, while the other would guide it back toward their own sound until they eventually met somewhere in the middle.

“It did take some time to actually find a good mix for the two of us,” Belle adds, “because I write my own music too and have my own solo project, which is very, very different than what we do as Spruce and the Meadowlark, so coming into making music with Donovan was very natural — because it is when you’re connected to a person — but difficult at the same time because we would have different ideas.”

Now, a few years down the road, the pair are adjusting well to not only balancing their musical preferences but their business and love relationships as well. However, Belle says it does sometimes get difficult to draw a hard line between work and home life.

“It’s pretty great in some ways because you get to know each other so well when you’re in any relationship, especially a partnership like a marriage, so we understand each other on a deeper level than another kind of music pairing could, I guess. But then it’s also really difficult because you learn to take each other for granted because you’re always around each other and always there and you kind of forget to make it into your career at the same time,” she says.

“That has definitely been the most trying thing between the two of us, because it’s hard to find the time to actually do the business side of things and work on our music on a regular basis and treat it like our jobs. Whereas before, he would do his thing and I would do my thing and it was just part of our lives, but now it’s a little more difficult because it’s just so accessible and there’s no outside perspective.”

But this week it’s all business as the band prepares to drop their debut full-length record, Orchard Season, marking the occasion with a release show at the West End Cultural Centre tonight at 8 p.m.

The album was recorded completely live off the floor and captures the raw, rugged and emotional vibe Spruce and the Meadowlark emits at their shows.

“It’s just a perfect representation of what kind of music we like playing and making as a group,” she says. “There’s nothing overproduced; we just got together in a recording studio, set up our mics, stood in a circle and played our songs and that’s the record.”

erin.lebar@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @NireRabel