The Romeros live in Horsefly, British Columbia, where they build and market quality banjos. Not being a musician, I am unlikely ever to do business with them, though I acknowledge that those banjos sound pretty good on their recordings, of which I have heard and reviewed most. Most recently it was their Smithsonian Folkways release Tell 'Em You Were Gold (in this space on 27 August 2022). I liked it, and I mostly like their act.

The qualifying adverb in the preceding sentence owes its source to my ambivalence about the varying kinds of material they choose to present to their audience. The Romeros' way with traditional songs stands out sharply and movingly. They understand and respect old songs and tunes, even as they arrange them in ways that, while not straying radically from the expected, emerge as fresh and innovative, often moving. That's more than ordinarily true of Tell 'Em.

I am sufficiently familiar with their approach, however, to spot the warning signs. I find myself wondering how long it will be before they join the unwashed hordes of singer-songwriters who decades ago claimed the mantle of folk artists, forcing me (and others) into the position of having to clarify our taste in music to naifs weaned solely on rock, pop or country. In an ideal world in which words have shared meanings, folk music should be songs that are either traditional or audibly based in tradition, not just inward-gazing recitation, accompanied on acoustic guitar, of personal troubles but otherwise unlinked to grassroots and time.

By the time These are the Days That Turn in to Years showed up in my mail recently, I had grown sufficiently uneasy about the Romeros' continuing allegiance to actual folk songs. Thus, I proceeded quickly to scan the table of contents. Two of the 11 tracks possess titles attached to the venerable and authentic ("Cannonball" and "Georgie"), leading me to the provisional conclusion that the disc's grooves preserve at least something I'm bound to like, and probably by a lot. It turns out that neither is the song I took it to be. I'm sure Pharis Romero, who composed everything here, consciously borrowed those titles as if to nod to the couple's roots. The roots here and elsewhere, alas, are only fleeting, encounterable in ghostly lyric and melodic allusion.

Otherwise the content carries little to surprise a wary listener. It's mostly reflections on quotidian life matters, domestic satisfactions and discontents, personal memories. None of this is truly bad, and as vocalists and instrumentalists the Romeros retain their gifts. Not being (I prefer to suppose) an egomaniac, I freely concede that they have every right to do what they want with those gifts. It is only as a reviewer with a given set of expectations that I step forward to grumble. But I stubbornly continue to wish they were doing here what they do best, at least to my ears. I'd be surprised if they were my ears alone.

Canada's greatest contributions to the folk revival of the latter 20th century, I think all who know the subject would agree, were surely the singing-songwriting likes of Ian Tyson, Gordon Lightfoot and the McGarrigles. They made for a high standard indeed. If These are the Days does not meet it, and it doesn't, it is not up to me to pretend otherwise. Neither is it my place to demand that the Romeros, whose labors these are, please me as opposed to themselves. But I still lament -- no doubt self-servingly -- that they aren't playing to their strengths. And really, how many more singer-songwriters does the world need?