Stephen Fearing and Andy White have just released their collaboration album, appropriately called Fearing & White, and will showcase their work at Art Space Tuesday at 8 p.m. as part of Apres Coldsnap 2011.
Fearing is a Canadian double Juno award winner and is well known within the international folk and roots music community as one of its most accomplished songsmiths, storytellers and guitarists.
White blends folk and pop stylings with a poet's sensibility and is a recently-published author. His on-the-road journal/novel, 21st Century Troubadour, has scored rave reviews.
White has lived through a rough Australian summer and hopes Prince George will truly be after its cold snap when he arrives.
"I have been here long enough to experience every kind of biblical weather possible," laughed White.
"Bush fires, floods, you name it -- locusts -- there were locusts this year! They started coming down from New South Wales and there were absolute sheets of locusts eating everything. The drought broke too, so it rained all summer.
"The change from here to Prince George -- I think I will be going from T-shirt weather to jumpers."
But White figures there's an upside to the blustery Prince George weather -- it feeds creativity.
"That's why you have so many singer songwriters -- because of the cold," said White. "That's why Canada has so many great big famous ones and lots and lots of tiny ones. In other countries it's a minor thing, but in yours, it's quite important."
Fearing & White met at the Winnipeg Folk Festival and clicked.
"We started our friendship eating toast and drinking coffee and talking about guitars," said White. "Then we started finishing each other's songs and after that we wrote a couple of originals. Then Blackie and the Rodeo Kings took one and recorded it. The song was called If I Catch You Crying and that's when we realized it was a really good song."
Their most recent album was a long time in the making.
"The album that came out March 8 started to be written 12 years ago," White said.
"It was written very slowly whenever I came over to Canada about once a year."
Just as White and Fearing settled on the idea there was no possibility of recording an album, they met Andrew Hogg of Alberta's Lowden Proud Records, who said he would make their record.
"It all happened from the meeting to say it's not going to happen," said White. "From there we went into the studio for two weeks -- like people used to do it -- and came out with an album. It was great fun. It's all about the harmonies and the words. That's what the heart of the record is, really."
The tour for the new album goes from Duncan on March 17 to Ottawa on April 9.
"By the time we get to Prince George we should know all the words," quipped White.
"The songs are recorded with great fun and passion but we wrote them really carefully so they're hard to play live because we've got to get everything right.
"There's something great about really refining songs so they sound completely spontaneous and I think we've mastered that art."
Tickets for the show are $20 and available at Books & Co., 1685 Third Avenue and Studio 2880.
