On March 25 of 2020 Ron Leary emailed Dean Drouillard a phone memo recording of a song called “Bled To The Bone” that he had written the previous night. It was a poignant and revealing folk song about the struggles that can come with being a working musician and how it was looking particularly dire during the COVID-19 lockdown. This song would be the first in a series of reactive, emotional vignettes that Leary would send to Drouillard throughout the spring of 2020 while both remained in their separate homes in Windsor and Toronto, Ontario Canada.

Dean recognized the urgency in Leary’s songs and began working with them. He transferred Ron’s phone recordings onto his Akai 4-track cassette recorder and began adding his own sounds, working quickly to reflect the in-the-moment recordings from Leary. After the first few pieces were complete they realized they were onto something exciting and necessary. They decided to complete an album.

The sound of the album that would become “As Long As I Ain’t Thinking About The Future” is inherently lo-fi, largely due to the media (iPhone, 4-track cassette) it was recorded to. But the practice of making this recording follows a natural line of how Leary and Drouillard created recorded music together in the 90s, when Ron would pass along cassettes of his original songs for Dean to add additional instrumentation to, each welcoming the other to share their artistic choices.