Happy Together

Seven years ago in Toronto, Canada, three friends – Kerri Ough, Caroline Brooks and Sue Passmore – decided to take a chance on the fun thing they were doing and give up their day jobs to be The Good Lovelies full-time.

The gamble has paid off nicely. Not only did they get the Best New Emerging Artist Award at the 2006 Canadian Folk Festival, their first year as professionals, but their 2009 eponymous debut album won the 2010 Roots & Traditional Album of the Year Award for a group at Canada's equivalent to the ARIAs, the Junos, while their latest album, 2012's Live At Revolution, won them Best Vocal Group and Best Ensemble gongs at the 2013 Canadian Folk Music Awards. On top of that, the group got to tour all over North America, the UK and were last in Australia mid-2011.

“I remember when we decided to do this full time,” Ough admits. “We all had office jobs and I don't know what got into us but we quit those jobs and decided to tour. We thought, 'If we don't do it now, we don't know when we'll ever do it so let's just go'. I wanna go back and tell that girl in 2006, 'You have no idea what's gonna happen',” she laughs.

“I remember at school doing my French project on Australia, and I wrote about the animals we don't have, the places and how the country is divided up geographically and I remember getting so excited about this but I never thought I'd actually get to go – and then music brought me there.”

The “secret weapon” The Good Lovelies had – apart from bright, self-deprecating personalities; a bunch of great songs; and strong instrumental prowess on guitar, mandolin and banjo – was their harmonies.

“I have three sisters, so we sang harmony when I was growing up, but it is very rare I think to find two random friends who you want to make that kind of harmony with, but I think we just got really lucky that we blend so well together and then became a band, all very accidentally. So I would like to thank my lucky stars for Caroline and Sue.”

While they share the writing credits together – “It's never a Good Lovelies song until everybody's kind of put their thoughts into it” – the three are each songwriters in their own right, and it was their individual stockpiles of songs that provided the basis for their first two studio albums. They're currently working on the next studio album but, “between touring all the time,” Ough chuckles, “Caroline having a baby, Sue moving to the west coast of Canada, I just moved to the east coast, this next album is taking a little bit of time –it's coming a little slower – but I think the subject matter is going to be interesting!”