Gordie Tentrees - Double Takes (2025) Hi-Res

“This album was kind of a bucket list project for both of us,” Gordie said. “Going to Nashville, working with a studio stud like Nash, and hearing Charlie McCoy play harmonica on your record—the same man who played on Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan records—you feel great in realizing this is what can happen if you stick with something. We have been working hard for years and enjoying the beautiful possibilities that come with it.”

Those already familiar with Gordie and Jaxon’s stripped down approach will immediately be enamoured with the intimate sound of Double Takes. For the uninitiated, the album plays like a gathering of old friends, with songs like the first single “Time” reflecting upon how life’s twists and turns ultimately lead people to places they were always meant to be.

Gordie and Jaxon’s undeniable chemistry throughout Double Takes suggests it was inevitable that the pair would ultimately team up. As Gordie relentlessly toured the world in support of his solo albums—the most recent being 2021’s Mean Old World—Jaxon was charting a similar course for his Winnipeg-based band the D. Rangers and producing records like Sharpen The Plow, the last collection by the beloved Canadian singer-songwriter Willie P. Bennett, prior to his death in 2008.

In many ways, Willie’s longtime partnership with fellow Canadian legend Fred Eaglesmith inspired Gordie and Jaxon to forge their own creative bond, formally unveiled in 2014 at their first show together in Beaumont, TX. They haven’t looked back since, and with Double Takes, those who have yet to experience them in concert can now finally hear their distinctive sound that draws from a century of North American music traditions and is rooted in truth, social justice and the human condition.

After playing over 1,100 shows together in 11 countries over the past decade, Canadian roots artists Gordie Tentrees and Jaxon Haldane have finally captured their dynamic musical partnership in the studio on their first collaborative album, Double Takes. Comprised of 10 original songs, the album was recorded during a whirlwind trip to Nashville, where the pair managed to corral some of Music City’s top players.

Having known each other for two decades, and after recording a live album in 2018, Tentrees and Haldane combine in a Nashville studio under the auspices of producer Nash (brother of Kacey) Chambers.

The pre-released pair ‘Time’ and ‘Arcata’ are both Tentrees songs: the former is a bluegrass number on county road time, where quad-biking, fishing and skinny dipping goes on because “nothing happens till we make it happen”; the latter is a musician’s picaresque journey in which his “lost, forlorn…blue” narrator drives through the redwoods to get home to his beloved and her “morning breath” down in that California town.

The quirky ‘Tinkering’, which appropriately took Tentrees two years to finish, begins with our narrator noting his “bald spot” and “dad bod”. As Toby Keith recently did, he advises the listener not to “let the old man in” and “give more than you take” over an insistent beat and a wibbly-wobbly fiddle-saw; best ignore the advice to “box a kangaroo”, though.

Tentrees also wrote ‘Bygone Days’, a Canadian history lesson which references the Indigenous trio of Kate Carmack, Elijah Smith and Edith Josie, with extra fiddle from Tania Elizabeth; the kicker is that people who help dig for gold are either “trying to get paid or trying to get laid”. The fiddle returns on ‘Crystal’, a chirpy Haldane composition whose arrangement is in opposition to the dangers of crystal meth (“I was her little puppet to play”).

Haldane, usually of Canadian band D. Rangers, goes back into his family history for ‘Bobbi & Gus’, his mum’s parents who “had two nickels between ’em” (as well as “two good legs” due to their respective amputations) and who taught their grandson about “freedom and tolerance, fairness and trust”. He thinks the listener might reckon he is “trying to demean ’em” but he’s doing nothing of the sort, especially with the charming arrangement and whistling solo.

He is, however, demeaned on the opening track ‘Drive or Push’, a 12-bar blues that begins with a car crash and ends with a punchline: “left me here, flipped me off in the rear-view mirror”. The word “ditch” makes you guess what’s coming but another b-word, “boy”, is used instead. Harmonica comes from the Country Music Hall of Famer Charlie McCoy.

On the head-noddin’ ‘Franklin’, where he offers a closing holler akin to Bob Wills, Haldane describes an old house, complete with “newspaper in the walls”, as “a palace” in which he and his beloved “get naughty”, and even notes its dimensions, “two-by-six” and “nine foot nine”. He plays mandolin on that song and on ‘Nowhere Fast’, a musical homage to ‘You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere’ by The Band on which he complains of being “always indisposed” and of having “no R with the SVP”.

Closing track ‘Gratitude’, written by Tentrees, ends the album with more wise advice (“with a little sweat you can get your own ride”) and more of McCoy’s mouth organ. Let us hope this is not the pair’s last project together.