Jay and Jo’s album a hopeful balm
SASKATOON — Jay and Jo were supposed to be on tour at the end of July 2020. Instead, they pushed out the new album the tour was supposed to celebrate.
“It was bittersweet, because it wasn’t a great year to release an album, yet we knew there was no better time. It served us as much as it served other people,” Janaya McCallum said.
The folk-roots duo goes by the name Jay and Jo, but their full names are Janaya McCallum and Jolissa Trudel. Songwriters, performers, multi-instrumentalists — and of course, sisters. Their newest album “Victory” is the second released by the duo outside of work they’ve done with the rest of their family as the unsurprisingly named The Trudel Family.
Despite the pandemic putting a halt to live concerts and tours almost entirely, many musicians turned to creating and releasing new material as a way to keep busy during a difficult year. Although Jay and Jo had written and recorded “Victory” during 2019, the themes of the album — resilience, hope, and empowerment amid loneliness — felt like the perfect balm for a COVID-19-riddled year.
“With the times and the themes of the album, it just made a lot of sense,” Trudel said. “It felt like this was what the album had been made for, without us really knowing it.”
The duo had intended to have the album release coincide with a significant Western Canadian tour over the summer, before the pandemic shut things down. They chose to release the album anyway, to widespread critical acclaim. “Victory” placed sixth on the
Saskatchewan Music Awards’ list of Best Saskatchewan Albums of 2020, third on PlanetS Magazine’s list of Best Albums of 2020, and both the duo and the album are in the running for various Saskatchewan Country Music Awards.
Jay and Jo’s sophomore album feels like a clear step forward from their first album, “Grounded and Light,” released in 2016. “Victory” marks a clear refinement of the duo’s style, an evolution lyrically and musically, marked by soaring melodies and their trademark sisterly harmonies in the vocals. It’s an emotionally expressive album, and a departure from the more heavily bluegrass and country tones of the old Trudel family band.
It’s a little change in direction for the style of their music, but as Trudel puts it, style should never be static.
“Hopefully, every time as an artist you create something and present it, it becomes truer and truer to yourself as you as a person become truer to yourself,” she said. “But style is always going to be changing.”
“I can totally see myself in a few years wanting to go back to the roots of the music we grew up on … I think it’s just us moving with the seasons of our lives,” McCallum added.
The community, it seems, is fully behind the ever-growing talents and repertoire of the sisters. “Victory” was a crowdfunded effort, with Jay and Jo reaching their financial goal just eight days into a monthlong fundraising campaign.
They even produced two music videos to go along with songs on the album — one just before the pandemic began, and the other shortly after the early shutdown had begun.
Getting together to make music will be more difficult as time goes on, since the sisters no longer live close to each other. But their newest album isn’t intended to be the last for Jay and Jo. In a year repeatedly marred by hardships around Saskatchewan and the world, the duo wanted the release of “Victory” to feel like a true victory for those who listen to it.
“On paper, it was probably the wrong decision … it would have been easier on us to wait, but we just felt like people, somebody, might need to hear it,” McCallum said.