It has been said that all Canadian writing inevitably reflects the almost impenetrable vastness of the land and the great distances that separate us. If ‘The Road We Once Knew’ by the Eisenhauers, the husband and wife duo of Jeremy Eisenhauer and Sheree Plett Eisenhauer, is any indication, you’d be hard pressed not to come to the same conclusion about Canadian music. Simple, spare and heartbreaking in its directness, the concepts of distance, time and the wavering arcs of separation and reunion have rarely been as compellingly explored as they are in this powerful debut album.

‘The Road We Once Knew’ is, at heart, a meditation on change that explores the dynamics of escaping from the city and moving to the country. In the Eisenhauers’ case, the move involved swapping life in metropolitan Vancouver for the relative seclusion of Kaslo, an old lumber town tucked deep in Eastern British Columbia’s Purcell Wilderness Conservatory. The decision to pull up stakes was motivated by the need to find a place with enough peace and quiet to care for Sheree’s mother, who was suffering from a terminal illness.  When she passed away not long after they arrived in Kaslo, they suddenly felt cut off and quite alone, with only the ‘trees, lakes, and world around them as friends.’  When Sheree plaintively cries ‘there’s a wilderness inside of me’, on the album’s final cut, it is obvious that she knows of what she sings.  Isolation brought unexpected rewards, however, as their seclusion allowed the pair to go inward and reflect, before eventually surfacing and writing music together.  This was something that they had been unable to do while they lived in the city with all of its competition and distractions.  After twelve years of living and making music together and recording eight solo albums between them as ‘Eisenhauer’ and ‘Sheree Plett’, ‘The Road We Once Knew’ is their first release under their shared family name.