Focus Your Audio
Focus Your Audio — Transcript
Conversation between Eric Chan & Sarah & Bobby.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity, spelling, and readability. Music excerpts are noted where they appear in the episode.
Cold open
Sarah: And I thought, I’m gonna write a song about that. I don’t want to forget this woman, her story. She was a brilliant physician, woman, art lover, and she was slowly deteriorating from this disease.
[Music excerpt]
Eric Chan: In this episode of Inlet Wire, I spoke with Sarah and Bobby from Focus Your Audio.
They are a Vancouver duo making thoughtful, emotional songs about connection.
They’ve been making music together for almost a decade, starting as an acoustic duo and growing into a fuller band sound.
I’m Eric Chan, and this is Inlet Wire — your direct line to BC artists.
Focus Your Audio: We started as a duo nine years ago. Acoustic duo is always how we performed.
It really has only been maybe the last two years that we’ve been performing with full band, but we always recorded our music with full production.
So we’re a folk, indie pop, genre-bending kind of project, and it comes out in our music. That’s it in a nutshell.
[Music excerpt]
Eric Chan: That trust shapes how they write: space first, then meeting in the middle.
Sarah: We learned early on that we both have very different processes when it comes to writing songs.
Bobby will write the music, and sometimes he’ll just be playing something or he’ll voice memo something, and then he’ll give it to me.
Then I typically will just listen to it. I’ll come up with a melody, I’ll write the lyrics to it.
We come back together and we end up bringing it together and massaging some of the pieces.
But we learned early on that if we got into each other’s creative worlds that way, it kind of stifled each one of our creative flows.
The bones of it are usually when we’re apart. We’re not writing it face to face together on the couch.
Bobby: Yeah, we’re very much apart. But that’s just the bones and the foundation of it. Once we have that in place, then we very much do come together and start to blossom the idea from there.
Eric Chan: Every song they write is an exchange between melody and words, and that approach led to “The Long Goodbye,” a song inspired by a moment that stayed with Sarah.
Sarah: It’s written about a woman who has dementia.
Her daughter had said to me at one point over the telephone, “I don’t think I’m gonna be able to handle it when my mom doesn’t know my name anymore. I think I’m not gonna be able to handle that.”
She goes, “I guess that’s why they call it the long goodbye.”
In that moment, I was like, I hadn’t really heard that expression before. I don’t know why I’d never heard it. And I thought, wow, I was really impacted.
And I thought, I’m gonna write a song about that. I don’t want to forget this woman, her story.
She was a brilliant physician, woman, art lover, and she was slowly deteriorating from this disease.
Her family were walking alongside her in their own long goodbye. I have worked as a nurse, so I was there supporting them and helping them through their journey.
This woman was somebody that I didn’t want to forget.
[Music excerpt]
Sarah: For people that are going through that experience, I really wanted to capture the essence and the heart of it.
The funny thing about it is I never told the family. So the family to this day don’t know that I wrote this song about their mother.
I did try to reach out to them to find them, just to let them know, but I wasn’t able to connect with them.
So I presume one day I will be able to tell them that. She has since passed on, and this is kind of like a little jewel that I have.
One day I’ll be able to share it with them, I guess when it’s the right time. There are seasons for all things, so I presume when it’s supposed to be in their ears to hear, I guess it will be.
[Music excerpt]
Eric Chan: “The Long Goodbye” says a lot about Focus Your Audio.
The songs can begin with something very quiet, a phrase, a memory, a person they don’t want to lose.
But in the studio, they build those moments with real care.
A big part of that sound has come through collaborators like Mike Young from Mother Mother and producer-songwriter Adam Hurstfield.
Focus Your Audio: I absolutely love working with Mike, working with Adam. I think it’s two different things with each of them.
Working with Mike, he just pulls the best out of you. He almost demands it.
On top of it though, he’s one of the most amazing human beings. Just so patient and honest and kind when it comes to understanding a song.
If we’re sitting down and thinking about what we want to produce or what we want to record next, sharing the vulnerability of the song and the meaning, he just gets it. That’s amazing.
Bobby: Yeah, absolutely.
Sarah: He’s really good at that. He pushes you to bring out the best in whatever it is you’re doing, and I appreciate that so much from him.
We’ve learned so much from him in regards to bringing songs to life, bringing textures into them, figuring things out, and being patient with things.
That whole process with him is pretty amazing.
[Music excerpt]
Bobby: When I’m sitting down doing guitar parts with Mike, he brought out his whole Mother Mother rig, and I brought out my whole rig, and we just connected everything.
We were like, “What is this gonna sound like?”
We just started nerding out on all the pedals and stuff.
When you listen to “On Your Own,” it sounds like there’s a lot of synths and stuff going on in it. That’s actually all guitar.
That was a moment with Mike where I was like, “Oh, this is so awesome.”
It was early on in working with him, so it just made me want to explore that even more and go down that rabbit hole with him.
[Music excerpt]
Focus Your Audio: We have worked with Adam Hurstfield, who is also our manager, and he is a phenomenal creative force.
It was a master class in songwriting, getting to write a song with him and learning from him and Don Wolf.
They’re just at the top of their game. I don’t know if I’ve ever met more creative people.
It was an experience of a lifetime, and we learned so many things from that that we use now in our writing and how we approach songwriting.
With Adam, he goes into your psyche. He’s like, “Okay, what are you thinking? What are you feeling? What creative space are you in at this moment?”
Sarah: I did a day of tracking vocals for the song with Adam.
There was a point halfway through the day where he said he loved it when a vocalist gets to the point where they are breaking.
Their voice has been doing it for so long, and then it gets to a point where the voice just kind of breaks a bit.
I got to that point, and I didn’t even realize the emotional way that you can convey the lyric.
He really taught me that in the recording process, in a way that the audience can then hear it when it’s recorded.
That was a pretty big lesson for me. I didn’t even know I needed to learn that, or that was a thing. That was pretty cool.
Eric Chan: That emotional detail is really at the centre of Focus Your Audio.
Whether they are writing separately, coming together as a duo, or working in a studio, the song always comes back to connection.
That was Sarah and Bobby from Focus Your Audio.
I’m Eric Chan, and this is Inlet Wire — your direct line to BC artists.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability. Any transcription errors are ours.