AHI - We Made It Through The Wreckage (2017)

Toronto alt-folk singer-songwriter Ahkinoah Izarh is better known as AHI (pronounced "eye"), a name with which more and more people are becoming familiar since the release of his debut full-length album, "We Made It Through The Wreckage," last fall.

Recorded in Nashville with country music producer Eric Masse (Rayland Baxter, Charlie Worsham), the album has spawned the online hit "Ol' Sweet Day," which recently made the Billboard Spotify Viral 50 chart, amassing over 650,000 streams to date.

After cold emailing Masse and recording a trial song with him, AHI packed up his family and headed to Nashville last July, where he had just over a week to record his debut while Masse was taking a break from recording the latest Miranda Lambert album.

"The road trip was pretty great in and of itself and recording — it was probably the hardest I've worked as a musician all my career because we did the album in 10 days. One of the days when I did vocal takes, I did six songs. It was pretty intense," he said.

The song "Wreckage" is the oldest song on the album, pre-dating his 2014 EP "Indie Soul," but after returning to it and changing the key and the chorus, AHI said it "became the perfect message for the album," ultimately providing it with its title as well.

"There's this theme of two people, or a relationship, or a couple, going through stuff together," he said, noting that songs like "Ol' Sweet Day," "Drought," and "Escape" are also about being on a journey with another person. "There's a lot of like, 'We made it through this together,' and that theme kind of permeates throughout the album."