The Fugitives - Trench Songs (2020)

Vancouver, Canada’s folk band The Fugitives have taken on an ambitious project: reimagining war songs from World War I for a modern audience. They took the original lyrics, written by soldiers, and put them to new music, sometimes without the band members ever listening to the historic musical arrangements. The purpose of the rewriting was “to more readily access the emotional content of the lyrics” and continue the folk tradition of innovating and reshaping older material. The majority of ‘Trench Songs’ was recorded live on the floor at Monarch Studios in Vancouver to capture the sound of a group of friends sitting around and spontaneously singing together.