Sitting in the back of a dusty Chevy on a backroad in Kingsville, you get a sense of why Katie and Josh Pascoe write the way they do. There is a specific, quiet stillness to Essex County that either lulls you to sleep or forces you to scream just to see if the soybeans scream back. The duo, better known as Fresh Breath, has spent a decade refining a sound that sits somewhere between an alt-folk campfire and a Southern rock barroom brawl. They have cleared 100,000 streams on Spotify, a respectable number for an indie outfit, but their latest single, “Likes & Shares,” isn't celebrating the digital metrics. It is an indictment of them.
The track is the crown jewel of a four-song blitz they have been running since May. It is upbeat, it is a sing-along and it is deeply cynical about the way we consume art through a glass screen. The accompanying video is a love letter to their rural roots, but it also betrays a frantic need to escape the perimeter of their own lives. I caught up with the pair to talk about the terrifying reality of taking their music career full-time exactly when the world decided to shut its doors.
**I’m going to start with talking about new music because you guys have cranked out four new songs in three months.**
Katie says, “Yes, we have.”
It is an aggressive release schedule for any artist, let alone a self-managed duo. We started the post-mortem with “Tomorrow Today,” which hit the airwaves in early May. It was a pivot, a reaction to the sudden silence of the lockdown.
Josh explains, “Tomorrow Today was actually expedited and put out ahead of the other three songs because we had those ones, like I said, coming down the shoot, but Tomorrow Today we wrote in the first couple of weeks of lockdown and we dedicated it to the frontline workers. We wanted to get that one out first and because of the music video, we wanted to do a performance piece, but also put something that reflected the times. We had been watching a lot of those daily briefings that has an American Sign Language interpreter there, and my mom happens to be fluent in ASL, American Sign Language interpreter. So, we had her do a social distance video shoot with us and Katie wrote the lyrics and everybody’s been sticking together.”
The song functions as a time capsule. It lacks the polished artifice of their later work, opting instead for a raw, immediate sentimentality. It is the sound of two people trying to keep their heads above water while the industry around them sinks.
Katie adds, “It’s a song about how this is tough times, and it’s not easy to do. And it’s a lot about attitude, hope while just continuing to fight for what we know we can have, and eventually getting through this together.”
But hope doesn't pay the rent. For entertainers, the recovery period from the pandemic has been a slow-motion car crash. While other sectors resumed some semblance of normalcy, the live music circuit remained a ghost town. This hit the Pascoes particularly hard because they had just burnt the boats.
“Absolutely. It’s been hard,” Katie admits. “This year for us was actually our first year that we both are doing music full time. We’ve been playing professionally together for over a decade, but we’ve always also been working at other full time jobs. So, this actually was our first year that we are dedicating music a hundred percent. So, it was really difficult for us to watch all of those tours and gigs canceled. Having these releases lined up was a silver lining because we still feel like we can connect and put music out and be socially active that way.”
Then came “Make It Together,” a track that feels eerily prophetic despite its 2019 origins. It is a mid-tempo reflection on legacy and presence, recorded at Sound Foundry Studios with Brett Humber. There is a certain irony in writing a song about sudden change months before the world actually broke.
Katie says, “This was a single that we had written back in 2019. The last three singles that we put out, we recorded with Brett Humber in Kingsville at Sound Foundry Studios. Make It Together was a song that Josh and I kind of co-wrote. I had lyrics in an old journal that I had written a few years back, and I found them, and I thought they were something to re-interpret, maybe rework into a song. And so, it worked out kind of neat, it all feels pertinent to the times again with what we’re talking about. In a way, it’s like all of a sudden things could change in your life out of nowhere, and are you happy with what you’ve done so far? That’s the theme. So, I think again, it’s relevant to the times and the pandemic with everything that’s going on.”
Josh chimes in on the timing, noting how the song seemed to anticipate the very restrictions that would eventually cage it. “It’s crazy how this song that we had written and recorded in late 2019 and all the videos and stuff in 2020. It fell in line with a timeline of the lockdown and then all these restrictions and then things lightening up. Those three singles fit what everybody was going through at the time. So it was almost like seeing the future, I guess it’s weird. Make It Together dropped in once everybody was just trying to figure out what we were going to do. And the main thing was just to sit together and we’re all going to get through this together and I think kind of modeled that. It fit the times really well.”
If their previous work was about survival, their newer writing seems to be searching for a "new spin," even if it isn't strictly sunshine and rainbows. The gift of the lockdown, if you can call it that, was the forced reset of their creative mindset.
“We’ve actually been writing a lot in this time because, like I said we’re at home, a lot of our stuff has been canceled and I think that’s across the board for a lot of people,” Katie says. “But recently we have been writing and I don’t know if it’s actually so upbeat and happy, but there’s definitely a new spin on it. We’ll see what happens with all that.”
She continues, “Exactly. We’ve definitely been noticing that there’s also a gift in this time to take a break and maybe reset a little bit with just our mindset and approach to our career. So it’s been good and it’s been difficult, but we’re slowly figuring it out along the way.”
The third entry, “Time For A Change,” saw the duo leaning into their country sensibilities. It is a simple two-chord structure that smells like diesel and heartbreak, originally intended for a Calgary Stampede run that never happened. It is the most "small town" they have sounded in years.
Josh says, “Time For A Change again, it’s weird how we chose when to release these, a little bit before everything was happening, but this one came out a month after it had been discovered. So Time For A Change was when everything dropped on everyone. Everyone was like, ‘God. Okay, I’m done being in my house. It’s time for a change.’ But when we wrote it was actually for our tour in July and August of last year. A friend of ours in Calgary had come in and we were supposed to have a couple of shows in Calgary during the Stampede on the tour and he called us up and was like, ‘You guys need to brush up on your country because it’s cowboy boots and cowboy hat time in Calgary.’ Almost all the times are, everybody’s a cowboy at the Stampede. Katie and I looked at each other and we’re like, Oh, we had just had some personal turmoil on the weekend, go down. And we’re thinking let’s just write a country song because we don’t really have a genre that we fit right into, so were able to bounce around, which was nice. So we just stuck to a two code structure, a simple country song. We talked about getting away in a Chevy, and we had all the components of country, heartbreak, and booze, and all that. And then, like I said, when it got released just the title of it really fit the times again. Which is kind of crazy how that was happening.”
But if “Time For A Change” is the country side of the coin, “Likes & Shares” is the Southern rock response. It has a grit that brings to mind a softer, more melodic Lynyrd Skynyrd. It is the most polished thing they have done, though the road to that polish was paved with studio friction.
Most fans are willing to pay for the music, but it’s a matter of getting their money into the hands of the artists that make the music, right? So there’s this, it’s like Bandcamp that gives you 85% of your revenue, you get 85 cents per dollar instead of the 0.00067 cents per stream or something... you have to be on these platforms like Apple and Spotify to have legitimacy pretty much, to be on the level of everybody else, but also as an independent artist where you can’t tour, it’s like catch 22. Even if you have thousands of streams, it’s not exactly paying the bills.
Katie explains the evolution: “So Likes & Shares was a song that Josh wrote. Again, it was last year when he wrote it and recorded it again with Brett Humber at Sound Foundry Studios in Kingsville. And then this one, he wrote it, we re-wrote it and manipulated it for a long time. When we got into the studio, it didn’t quite come out the way we had thought of it. We were thinking of going a little bit more pop with it and everything that we tried didn’t seem right, and then we finally clicked it all in. We worked with Brett a lot as far as producing and arrangements, so this one he had a big part in. The three of us all putting our two cents in over a little bit of time and effort, we finally evolved into what we thought sounded most Fresh Breath. I think at the beginning we were making it something that it wasn’t, and that’s why we had a bit of a struggle. Josh wrote the lyrics and it was inspired after a couple of shows that we played that were disappointing with crowd reaction after certain songs. In particular, a girl got excited that we were playing a song, took video, posted it, you could tell she was posting it and put her phone down. And then when the song was over, she and her friends just didn’t clap or say anything. And we were thinking, that’s interesting, it’s all about the posts. Right. And so that’s what inspired it, it’s all about the likes and the shares.”
Josh cuts in with a blunt truth: “Nobody really cares.”
It is a stinging critique of the modern concert experience, where the digital proof of attendance is more valuable than the performance itself. We have all seen it—the wall of glowing rectangles blocking the view of the actual human being on stage.
“Social media is pulling us out of being social and actually interacting with the time at hand,” Josh says. “All of the new devices and social media platforms are great for what they’re worth, but it’s just a gentle reminder to try and be present when you’re enjoying something or be present when you’re around people. That’s what real connection is and where we went with that.”
Josh adds, “Yeah, you’re watching it through a three inch screen, you know what I mean?”
Katie agrees, pointing out the inherent loss of the moment. “Josh always says whenever you go, well before the pre-pandemic times, when you could go to a concert and you buy these tickets for yourself, go enjoy it for yourself, it’s not for anyone else. You know? You’ve got to experience that, don’t waste your time recording every single song and then posting it online because, I don’t know, to me it seems like that was a wasted opportunity of an experience for yourself, right?”
There is a dissonance to the song. It is a "downer idea" wrapped in a "sing-along" package. It is the kind of sugar-coated pill that works because you don't realize you're being scolded until the second chorus.
Josh notes, “And when it came like this, the way that we thought that it fit in again, is that now people are kind of over it. So now it’s back to people just sharing either misleading information or sharing things that are just not useful, but some of it is harshly funny or just harsh. And they’re just trying to create a story, all about the likes and the shares again, right? Instead of just living in the now trying to be present in your own life and making things better. It’s a bit of a downer idea set to a very uplifting, sing along song. We kind of pulled from Anne Murray on that one, I guess.”
The music video for “Likes & Shares” was supposed to be a grand Walkerville Theatre production with 100 extras ignoring the band. COVID-19 killed that dream, forcing a pivot to their home turf. Director Steve Shilson moved the shoot to the Pascoe farm, using their converted barn as the backdrop.
Josh says, “We’ve known Steve Shilson for a long time. He was a friend of a friend, and then we thought, we’ve just known each other because he believes in the arts. And so we’ve known each other for a long time and we both loved his work and so we talked to him quite a while back about shooting the video for Likes & Shares. And we put together this drawing board, we were going to rent Walkerville Theater and have a bunch of extras and do this really big production because we just thought the song could benefit from the visual of having a hundred people in the stands all staring at their phone while you’re performing, that kind of idea. But once the COVID hit and we realized we weren’t going to be able to do that just with distancing and whatnot. And when Katie and I decided to go through with the timeline and that was going to put everything out regardless, Steve came up with the great idea to be able to shoot it with just the three of us present. Socially distant, all of that, sort of did at the farm where we live and that stage that’s in that video where there’s nobody playing that barn is actually the converted barn for our concerts. So he came up with this great timeline of how we can still get the message across without doing the big production and we love the way that it came together. He did a great job.”
The business of being Fresh Breath is currently a series of question marks. They are moving away from the traditional album cycle, favouring the constant drip-feed of singles to stay relevant in a world where attention spans are measured in seconds. It is a survival tactic.
Katie explains, “You know, talking about it, we’re not a hundred percent sure of what we’re going to do. We thought maybe we would put them all on an EP or an album or something, but we’re still kind of up in the air with what we’re going to do about it. We did just release a full length album last June, 2018. So I think that’s why we thought like, oh we have these singles, we were really excited to record them and since we were going to be touring, in May we would have been on a whole Ontario tour for pretty much the whole month. And then again in July and August. So the idea was we’d have these singles to play and promote on tour as we travel throughout Canada. Right now I think we’re just going to leave them as singles. We’re currently working on a lot of new music. So I think by the end of 2020, we might, we’re working on a Christmas song and so that will be our next release, I think for this year. And then hopefully 2021 that we will either be putting out an EP or an album again of some sort.”
Josh is more focused on the cold, hard economics of the independent grind. “Especially in the times right now, it’s a matter of where you want to spend your money as an independent artist or whether you want to put together your EP and buy your physical copies, or if you just want to keep releasing singles periodically to keep putting new music out there and stay relevant. It’s hard to navigate right now because it makes sense to release singles and then tour them, so that you have new music and you can create far more than you ever would. But now that most of us are going to be trying to pretty much sell music again, instead of just streaming music, it might make sense to go with an EP and actually get some art work done and try and sell physical copies to bring in revenue, right? It’s such a hard thing to navigate right now.”
The math of streaming is brutal. Josh isn't shy about the numbers—the 0.00067 cents per stream that feels more like an insult than a royalty.
“I was starting a conversation online last week about just what people think we should do as artists, but what the fans are willing to do,” Josh says. “Most fans are willing to pay for the music, but it’s a matter of getting their money into the hands of the artists that make the music, right? So there’s this, it’s like Bandcamp that gives you 85% of your revenue, you get 85 cents per dollar instead of the 0.00067 cents per stream or something, you know? So it’s just like there’s a fine line of where you should be releasing the music and you have to be on these platforms like Apple and Spotify to have legitimacy pretty much, you know what I mean? To be on the level of everybody else, but also as an independent artist where you can’t tour, it’s like catch 22. Yeah, you’re on there, even if you have thousands of streams, it’s not exactly paying the bills.”
Katie adds, “We’re kind of talking on the idea right now of possibly releasing another single or maybe our EP exclusively on a download only site to test the waters and see how that goes and potentially make money off of our release.”
Despite the global ambitions, the Pascoes are inextricably linked to Essex County. They live on a crop farm near Cottam, growing soybeans and wheat. It is a quiet existence that fuels a loud creative output. The farm isn't just a place to live; it is a venue. They host "Barn On The Farm," an annual concert that has seen the likes of Sarah Smith and Christine Campbell grace their stage.
“I grew up in Essex County, so did Josh,” Katie says. “So where we live right now actually is just on a farm that’s outside of Essex near Cottam. We both grew up in a small town our whole lives, and I think it has a lot to do with our music. A lot of our lyrics are conflicting about our hometown, about how we want to leave or take off or runaway. And so that definitely shaped a lot of our writing styles, growing up where we have.”
Josh elaborates on that small-town friction: “There’s definitely been many songs that reference getting out of town or running away or just going out and looking for the bigger picture. That conflicting relationship you have with small town living. And also the deep appreciation you have when you go to big cities. And especially when you’re a touring musician, big cities is where you want to be because it’s where all the people are. Get people in the seats, you know? But it’s a very quick reminder of how grateful we are to have a quiet place to create and to get as loud as we want as well. The luxury of just turning up your amps and not having worry about who’s around you is a big plus for us too. The biggest way it’s affected us is that we’ve both grew up close to each other. We are each other’s musical driving force, I guess. So we’re lucky that we met. I don’t know if we could do this if we didn’t.”
The farm life is a labour-intensive reality. Katie notes, “Yeah, it’s a crop farm. So we grow soybeans and wheat mostly. So it alternates usually every other year, every two years. We’ll grow wheat and then soybeans is mainly our main half crop. We have big barns, lots to do on the farm, especially during the pandemic, we’ve learned there’s always something to do, if you’re bored you’re just being lazy. So we also throw and host our own concert at the farm. We call it Barn On The Farm. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but it’s an annual concert that we do and we’ve had all kinds of acts come and play on the stage, Sarah Smith and Christine Campbell and Blake Johnson from LP.”
Josh lists more names, including local acts like 5051 and Chris McLean. He describes the setup with pride: “We turned the cornfield in the back into a 120 seat, kind of theater almost. So we built the stage and there’s a big ceiling that the sound is really good up there. And then we have seating for about 120 and then standing room for about another 15 or 20. And the last three years it’s sold out, which has been great. And we go through, it’s just kind of a BYOB. The tickets are affordable. All the money goes to the artists so it’s very good for the artists themselves. We have a small staff of volunteers. We have a green room that’s set up in another barn. We try and make it as legit as possible and just make it a good listening experience for the audience. Yeah, but it’s finding the time. So hopefully we can.”
The 2020 edition was, of course, a casualty of the times. “This year, we canceled it, obviously it was supposed to be June 20th and we called it earlier because it’s just it’s a lot of responsibility and obviously you couldn’t gather at that time of that many people,” Katie says. “And so we rescheduled it for October, but we’re still just not too sure about it. We haven’t really done much more advertising because we’re really uncertain of how that will go. It just depends on how everything plays out, right.”
Beyond the music and the farm, there is the partnership. Katie and Josh have been married for 10 years, a milestone in any industry, but a miracle in the music business. They met at 17 and 18, gravitating toward each other over guitars at a party.
“We actually met when we were both learning how to play guitar around 17 or 18,” Katie remembers. “Josh was a couple of years older than me and we were both learning how to play and sing. So we naturally gravitated towards each other at a party. We both had some mutual friends that knew each other and we started playing together and we haven’t stopped playing together since we met.”
Josh adds, “We started writing original music pretty much the second we started playing together because Katie was writing her own songs and I was writing her own songs and we were doing it therapeutically. We were both going through some heavy stuff and so we were writing for therapy, and we met each other and we started the band before we started dating actually. So we wrote three full length albums that we never released. We just wrote, and wrote, and wrote and recorded and listened back, trying to figure out what we wanted to do, what was working, what wasn’t working. And then we put out our first body of work in 2010. So that’s called The Speed Of Sound, it’s everywhere. It’s online, you can find it on our website too. Then we just stopped playing and we got married in Jamaica 10 years ago and we went back actually this year for our 10th anniversary and we got to perform at the resort, which was an amazing time too.”
When asked if there was a definitive song that sealed the deal, they both struggle to find one. The early days were filled with "cheesy love songs" that were too personal for public consumption.
“To be honest, I don’t think so,” Josh says. “There was a lot of songs that never got recorded during our courtship, because we’re both songwriters so there was a lot of really cheesy loves songs being written in the beginning and I don’t think any of them ended up being recorded just because of how personal they were.”
Katie recalls a song about the band name itself as their moment of connection. “He learned and preferred cover songs that had a couple of songs that he was playing, I had a couple of songs that I was playing too. I don’t think they were anything amazing but we wrote one of our first songs together and it was about Fresh Breath and what we were trying to portray with it. I forget how it goes, but I just feel that was our definitive moment of being in a band together and our connection. We’ve been telling the story a little bit but we decided to call ourselves Fresh Breath in really early stages of us playing. There was one other name we picked first, but we quickly changed it. And so I think right around that time and we wrote the song about Fresh Breath so that was probably our way of connecting.”
The name "Fresh Breath" itself has evolved from a cheeky, unassailable pun into a philosophy of positivity.
Josh explains, “I remember now, it was put on one of the first early recordings that we recorded, but it’s not really used. I think the first line is Fresh Breath fills your mind with scope. But yeah, like Fresh Breath to us early on was always just like, what is something that nobody can bad mouth, you know? Like no pun intended, but pun intended. But you never hear anybody say, ‘Wow, your breaths so fresh, that’s terrible.’ Or there’s, ‘You have fresh breath.’ Some go, ‘You ever heard of Fresh Breath? And its terrible.’ You can’t really smear the shit out of it, like oh we think that works. We’ve grown up and found ourselves and matured more, so it’s turned into more of a positive and a grateful mindset reminder of let your breath be fresh with the words you speak, let the things that come out of your mouth be positive, grateful, fresh, and not negative, dark, or bad. So it’s kind of evolving as we grow and find ourselves, but it’s still something that is hard to argue that it’s bad.”
This commitment to positivity is the thread that pulls through their entire discography. They call themselves "positive rockers," a title that could easily feel cloying if it weren't backed by the genuine grit of their live show.
“We try to keep it that way,” Josh says. “There’s always conflict and resolution in a lot of writing. That’s how we write our songs together is we think of what’s the singable course that can help people get through what the lyrics just described, you know?”
Katie adds, “I feel like we’re also just generally pretty positive people. We laugh and call ourselves positive rockers because we are, we like to make people feel good. And I think that it’s something we want to share with people with our music, right? So that’s always been our outlook as far as writing and arranging songs.”
Josh concludes with a promise of authenticity. “And the live shows too, we’re always trying to meet new people. When they’re leaving they’re in a better position mentally then when they got there. We always feel better after shows being able to share the music that we love with people that are enjoying it. We just try to promote positivity whenever we can and be genuine as well. If you put on the positive face, when you’re not, people can tell instantly, right? So, in our live show there’s no holding back, we don’t hold back on stories, we tell them and the darkness that comes from life or just on how our outlook helps us through it.”
In a world obsessed with likes and shares, Fresh Breath is betting on the one thing that can't be quantified by an algorithm: a real, uncurated connection. It is a risky bet in a digital age, but out here in the quiet of Kingsville, it is the only one that makes sense.
