Georgia Harmer

While the intimacy of her music evokes a solo folk artist strumming an acoustic guitar
onstage, Harmer is a band person, playing in four different bands throughout
elementary school (she’s 22 so this is recent history!). After dropping out of university to
pursue music full-time, Harmer began jamming with jazz students at Humber College in
Toronto; it was there she met the musicians who would help her shape Stay in Touch.
The final piece of the puzzle fell into place the night Jasper Smith, who engineered and
co-produced Stay in Touch, caught Harmer performing and offered to help her make a
record.
Harmer and her new band of jazz school misfits—guitarist Dylan Burchell,
drummer Julian Psihogios, and bassist David Maclean—assembled to record at
ArtHaus in Dufferin Grove, a lively, tree-lined Toronto neighborhood full of young
families. “It’s essentially a garage converted into a recording studio, and it’s meant for
overdubs and writing sessions, but we somehow managed to fit an entire band’s live
recording setup in there,” says Harmer. “It was nice because we could just play how
we’re used to playing, crammed in a room together, and capture the natural feeling of
that.” Smith didn’t tell Harmer that he had never engineered a record before until after it
was complete.
Despite their stripped-down recording process, there is nothing lo-fi about Stay in
Touch. It spans everything from intimate folk and strummy country to sophisticated jazz
and pop-kissed rock. Harmer and her band created musical landscapes that live up to
the lyrical richness of the songs. “The band completely understood the world the songs
needed to exist in,” says Harmer. The record sparkles with the lightning in a bottle feel
of a band in thrall to their musical chemistry, adding more depth to the record’s
themes. Stay in Touch is inspired both by the relationships of Harmer’s past and the joy
of finding your people in the here and now.
For Harmer, music has always been a way “to process what was going on under the
surface of a moment, a way for me to understand in retrospect what something meant.”
The tone is set with album opener “Talamanca,” a song that begins with a story about a
trip to Mexico and expands to encompass the communion that can occur between close
friends—”Speaking without words/ Languages of seeing and being seen.” The
arrangement is built around Harmer’s evocative voice and bass harmonics contributed
by Ben Whiteley (The Weather Station, Julia Jacklin) with reverb giving the song a
dream-like texture to reflect Harmer lyrically moving through her memories.
A similar theme is explored on “Headrush,” a sunny pop song that captures the
bittersweet sensation of being so happy you’re almost sad, a yearning to capture a
moment in time like a beam of light refracting on a suncatcher. The dusty, grungy
“Austin” recalls a day on tour with Cara in Texas, when a homesick Harmer felt
particularly connected to her father and his own experiences as a touring musician.
Harmer’s father plays lead guitar on the track; they recorded his contribution in the
family dining room.
Harmer calls herself a sentimental person and Stay in Touch is full of romanticism—a
rare quality in an irony-soaked culture. The closest Harmer gets to irony is on “All In My
Mind,” a song that looks back on a relationship where she was made to feel crazy.
Transforming a “hard experience” into the record’s breeziest rock song “is sort of like a
little bit mocking, which to me is empowering,” says Harmer. “To be like, I'm rocking out!
You’re able to sort of laugh at something, and to think, ‘Well that was dumb of you.’”
Intelligence, vulnerability, sincerity, play—these are what make Stay in Touch an
unforgettable statement from a new artist with a heartbreakingly simple message: when
you stay in touch with the experiences that have shaped you, you stay in touch with
yourself. For Harmer, this is a record about “staying in touch with the aspects of
yourself, your life, the world, that keep you aware of what's most important. Whether
that's people, relationships, deep feelings, the value of togetherness and support. It’s
about finding the balance between holding on and letting go, between the beauty of the
world and the pain in the world.