Since their 2020 collaborative album, Philadelphia, Joseph Shabason and Nicholas Krgovich have been locked in a musical orbit that centrifugally extracts beauty and grandeur from the lesser details of their daily lives. Across their joint discography, they’ve created a small universe where wry and melancholy micro-moments quietly bloom into full-scale wonders of the heart. But where the pair’s previous mutual efforts showed them peering at pop songs from tidepools of mutated adult contemporary and first-thought-best-thought poetics, Four Days in June snapshots an unself-conscious reach toward the kind of CD era songcraft that lives in your car’s center console, always ready to be thrown on while life happens. It spiritually grafts its scope from heyday all-timers like “Harvest Moon”, R.E.M., or K.D. Lang’s “Ingenue”, while winking at 90s pop country via flutters of pedal steel, banjo, and fiddle. Yet all of these inspirations remain self-honest and unborrowed, modifying and underlining the crystal-clear sincerity that has come to define Shabason and Krgovich’s co-output. Four Days in June is a document of its authors looking back on their lives half-passed, finding contentment with how things have unfolded. By that very same process, Shabason and Krgovich manage to find quiet confidence in the most naturalistic version of their own creativity.

Four Days in June was indeed born in the summertime, as its title suggests. Spurred by the recruitment of pedal-steel player Ian McGimpsey, Joseph began summoning his tried-and-true core lineup (bassist and keyboardist Bram Gielen, guitarist Thom Gill, and drummer Phil Melanson) to his Toronto studio before he was certain that Krgovich would be able to trek from Vancouver. Nick was fresh off of producing a new album for Tsunami’s Jenny Toomey, and seemingly enjoying the mental space he found when not preoccupied with music. Meanwhile, amid the stress and joy of parenting young kids, and the worsening Parkinson’s complications of his mother (for whom his 2019 solo album Anne is named), Joseph was finding a buoy for day-to-day gravity by diving headlong into music-making.

Shabason and Krgovich found themselves standing on opposite sides of the muse, in alternate dimensions of early middle age, unconvinced that Four Days would bear both of their names. However, Krgovich was tipped into formation upon hearing that his old friend Phil Elverum, and the folk musician Sam Amidon of whom he was a new fan, would be converging in Toronto for respective tour stops at the time Four Days in June was scheduled to be tracked-- In fact, the Four Days lineup would go on to be Elverum’s backing band for that date, and Amidon himself would stop by the studio to contribute banjo and fiddle. The planets had finally aligned, and Four Days in June was born amid an historic Toronto heatwave.