We’ve all been handed stories and ideas about ourselves from the day we were born. We’re bombarded with messages about who we ought to be, how we should or shouldn’t expect to be treated, and how we should show up to the world around us. We’re made to believe that truth is finite and absolute, while taught to remove nuance and complexity from our existence.
Our new album is a collection of songs that engage with our own experiences of unraveling. Our own encounters with unmet expectations in life and love. Not only romantic love but the love we hold for ourselves and learning how to embrace the parts of our identities that our culture has shamed us into ignoring. Learning how to honestly look at how we contribute to the ongoing problems that are faced by people in our community. Trying to encounter it all with an open heart, ready to feel the grief that comes from letting go of a life we thought we knew and choosing to move forward in a more meaningful and liberating way.
This project has been slowly coming to life over the last three years. "When Will We Find Our Way?" was a question we were asking ourselves during that time - so it seems appropriate for that to be the title of the album. We often joke about how The Pairs started as three friends coming together to play music that soothed our achy hearts. It was our own little form of group therapy that has since changed our lives for the better, and continues expanding to include more and more people like you.
As we share this experience with one another, we’re learning to have the courage to voice how it is we truly feel, and this in turn creates an opportunity to connect with those that might feel the same way. We start to build a new way of looking at the world within and the world around us, and together we imagine new possibilities for what the future might look like.
Singing the songs on this new album feels like shaking off the parts of ourselves we no longer wish to carry - the shame, the avoidance, the self-ridicule - and while choosing a different path is uncertain and precarious at times, it is empowering to publicly share who it is we wish to become.
“When Will We Find Our Way?” is an album that aims to engage people in hopeful conversations about making real change within ourselves. By trusting that there is more than one way to live our lives, we can better show up for the demands of the world around us and better support our communities. It’s about rethinking our purpose as humans, and cultivating a more vibrant and expansive way of being together on and with this planet we all call home.
