Biography
"a great expressive range!" - CBC Radio
"staying focused and true to the soul of their songs" - VUE Weekly
"Lullabies for adult minds" - SEE Magazine
“If the rest of the music scene seems more concerned with pumping out the party hooks, F&M are still studiously crafting their own brand of cerebral melodies…. and stripping the music down to its most basic, heart-wrenching core.” - The Edmonton Journal
It’s a shame that ‘adult listening’ has been poisoned as a category by being used up on crappy and dull music, because there is a generation of excellent artists out there who emerged from their 20s more interested in making music than ever before, and with much more to say, but without the obsessions and ambitions of full-on youth. Their music is often stubbornly its own thing, difficult to neatly pin down as a genre since it draws on such a rich history of influences, and preoccupied with blurry emotional shadowlands.
Songwriters Rebecca and Ryan Anderson – Rebecca classically trained; Ryan a veteran of Edmonton’s indie scene – belong to this strain of music-making. The long-married couple is the heart of F&M, an Edmonton-based band that began life, as many bands do, as an entirely different project (in this case, one named after a local funeral parlour). It slowly dawned on Rebecca and Ryan that they were calving like an iceberg from the original band, bobbing in a sea of Their Own Thingness, and F&M was born in 2006, made up of just his guitar, her piano and accordion, and both of their distinctive voices.
F&M’s 2007 debut, Let Every Light Shine (Shameless Records), set them squarely in this brave new adult listening territory, bursting with powerful sentiment and lofty lyricism set to an odd folk-rock mutant soundtrack of Douglas Sirk-ian intensity. In its making, F&M acquired a couple new band members, and they launched energetically into performing and writing the next record.
Every Light Must Fade (2008, Shameless) came hard on the heels of the first record, and was almost like its B-Side: same themes of moral entanglement and grown-up anxieties, more complex, fuller sound and a more sure-footed execution.
Many live shows, some personnel changes, and many more hiccups and hurricanes of life later, Rawlco Radio offered the band a grant to make their third album. Sincerely, F&M is recognizably F&M in its themes, but the nuances are more deeply expressed, both lyrically and musically. If their first album dealt with the limits of life, and their second with the specter of death, this third is about finding the infinite in the everyday.
IN STORES:
Edmonton: Blackbyrd Myoozik (Whyte Ave) Listen Records Vancouver: Zulu Records
ONLINE:
CD Baby, KerfMusic, iTunes, Rhapsody, eMusic, etc