Focus Your Audio

Focus Your Audio is a Vancouver duo made up of Sarah and Bobby, and on this episode they talk about how a partnership like theirs actually works day to day.

They started as an acoustic duo nine years ago and have only recently grown into a fuller band sound on stage, though they’ve always recorded with full production behind the scenes. Sarah and Bobby describe their own sound as folk, indie pop, and genre-bending, all at once.

What stood out most to me was how they write. Bobby starts with a piece of music, sometimes just a voice memo, and sends it to Sarah. She listens on her own, finds a melody, and writes the lyrics. They learned early on that working too closely together at that stage gets in the way of their own instincts, so the bones of a song always come together while they’re apart. Once that foundation is set, they bring it back to the couch and build it out as a pair.

That process is behind one of their most personal songs, “The Long Goodbye.” Sarah wrote it after a phone call with the daughter of a woman living with dementia, who told her, “I guess that’s why they call it the long goodbye.” Sarah had worked as a nurse and had supported the family through that experience. She wrote the song so she wouldn’t forget the woman at the centre of it, though she’s never told the family the song exists.

In the studio, Sarah and Bobby talk about what their collaborators have taught them. Mike Young of Mother Mother pushed them to bring more texture into their recordings. Some of the layered sounds on “On Your Own” that sound like synths are actually all guitar. Producer and manager Adam Hurstfield, working alongside Don Wolf, gave them what they call a master class in songwriting, pushing them to get clear on what they’re actually feeling before they put a song down.

That’s Focus Your Audio: two people who write apart so they can come back together, building songs around connection and trust.