By Bill Forman
Jeremie Albino was 7 years old the first time he came down with a real case of the blues. It happened when Jeremie’s father—a Filipino mechanic who’d moved to Toronto to open a meter-shop that turned cars into cabs—brought him along on a trip to Best Buy to look for records.
“Being that young, I didn’t really know what style of music I liked or the names of the genres or any of that,” said Albino, who will bring his band to the Little Saint on Saturday, Feb. 22. “But my dad, who was a big record collector, said, ‘Yeah, you like blues,’ and sent me into the blues section of the store. So the first CDs I ever bought were compilations by B.B. King and John Lee Hooker. They’re still, like, my favorite records.”
Last year saw the release of Albino’s fourth album, Our Time in the Sun, which he recorded at Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach’s studio in Nashville. Praised by music journal No Depression for its “heart-on-the-sleeve” intensity, the 12-song collection pays the 32-year-old musician’s deep respect for not only the blues, but also early R&B, classic country, old-school rock ’n’ roll and a whole lot of Southern soul.
Albino started playing guitar when he was 14, back in the early days of YouTube. He soon found himself going down the rabbit hole, guitar in hand, watching performances by legendary artists like Skip James, Big Bill Broonzy and Furry Lewis.
“I’d find all these videos and live footage of them that I would just watch over and over,” he said during an early January interview. “I’d be trying to pick up what Lightnin’ Hopkins was doing on the guitar and trying to emulate it. And that stayed with me for a long time.
“I still drop in those little licks here and there,” he added. “I was also learning country picking, which kind of goes hand in hand, because it all kind of revolves around blues. And then on top of that, I was trying to learn banjo and fiddle. I was at that age where you’re like a sponge. You’re just absorbing everything.”
But it took a couple of more years for Albino to discover the sound that brought his music to the next level. “I was working with my dad, and it was kind of slow, so he was like, ‘All right, just go take a break,’” Albino said. “So I ended up walking down the street, and there was this hat shop. I was looking to buy a hat—I don’t know why, I guess all the cool blues guys had a hat.
“So I walked in and the guy who was working there was listening to Otis Redding. I said, ‘Who IS this?’ And he’s like, ‘You don’t know who this is? This is Otis Redding, man. He’s one of the greatest soul singers of all time.’”
Albino spent the rest of the day hanging out at the hat shop listening to records, and walked out with a couple of Otis Redding mix CDs that the shop clerk made.
Fast forward 15 years, during which time Albino busked on the street, moved to the countryside, worked farm labor, recorded a trio of albums and embarked on his first Canadian and U.S. headlining tours. But the biggest break came when Dan Auerbach tracked him down on Instagram and invited him to come record at his Easy Eye Sound studio.
Albino remembers the first time he walked through the door. “It was like going into a museum,” he said. “The whole studio is just full of vintage gear. He had this really beautiful guitar that I [started] playing, and he’s like, “Oh, that’s one of Hound Dog Taylor’s guitars.’ And it’s on my record!
“And then there’s another one in there that was Mississippi Fred McDowell’s guitar, which was crazy, because I remember growing up watching videos of Mississippi Fred McDowell, and this is the guitar I’d see him playing. So that one is also on the record,” Albino continued.
In addition to producing the album, Auerbach co-wrote a few of the songs and contributed some astounding guitar solos matched by a Stax-worthy rhythm section. The first song they cut was the rollicking “Rolling Down the 405,” which Albino described as “a groovy kind of Southern gallop of a song. A road-dog song, I call it.”
But as Albino and his band take the record on the road, their songs won’t all be cruising at the same speed, any more than they are on the record. Case in point: The plaintive title song, “Our Time in the Sun,” where the influence of smooth and soulful ballads by artists like Irma Thomas and George Jackson comes through loud and clear.
“There’s this Irma Thomas song, ‘I Wish Someone Would Care,’ and it’s one of my favorite songs of all time,” Albino said. “When she sings that line, it’s just so simple and powerful, and it means so much. I just wanted to write a song like that, where you just feel the heartache that the person is feeling. And I wrote ‘Our Time in the Sun’ hoping it could be something like that. I feel like I was finally able to write a song that comes straight from the heart and reminds me of the music that I’ve always loved.”
Jeremie Albino plays the Little Saint stage on Saturday, Feb. 22. Opening will be Benjamin Dakota Rogers. Tickets $25 plus fees at littlesainthealdsburg.com/happenings/jeremiealbino.
