Artists

Harmer has been making music practically since birth. She hails from an artistic family, including her aunt and labelmate Sarah Harmer (Georgia’s parents, both professional musicians, met while playing in Sarah’s band). “I grew up having access to any and every instrument that I wanted. My dad would give me these little guitars that he would tune to an open chord so I could just strum and sing along,” she recalls. Harmer started recording her own songs at 10 and, while still a teenager, hit the road as a backing vocalist for Alessia Cara, touring and playing every latenight TV program for eight months. But when it came time to make her own album, Harmer knew she needed to find her own people.
After dropping out of university to pursue music full-time, Harmer began jamming with jazz students at Humber College in Toronto; it was there she met the musicians who would help her shape her album Stay in Touch. The final piece of the puzzle fell into place the night Jasper Smith, who engineered and co-produced Stay in Touch, caught Harmer performing and offered to help her make a record.
Harmer and her new band of jazz school misfits—guitarist Dylan Burchell, drummer Julian Psihogios, and bassist David Maclean—assembled to record at ArtHaus in Dufferin Grove, a lively, tree-lined Toronto neighborhood full of young families. “It’s essentially a garage converted into a recording studio, and it’s meant for overdubs and writing sessions, but we somehow managed to fit an entire band’s live recording setup in there,” says Harmer. “It was nice because we could just play how we’re used to playing, crammed in a room together, and capture the natural feeling of that.” Smith didn’t tell Harmer that he had never engineered a record before until after it was complete.
Despite their stripped-down recording process, there is nothing lo-fi about Stay in Touch. It spans everything from intimate folk and strummy country to sophisticated jazz and pop-kissed rock. Harmer and her band created musical landscapes that live up to the lyrical richness of the songs. “The band completely understood the world the songs needed to exist in,” says Harmer. The record sparkles with the lightning in a bottle feel of a band in thrall to their musical chemistry, adding more depth to the record’s
themes. Stay in Touch is inspired both by the relationships of Harmer’s past and the joy of finding your people in the here and now.
Intelligence, vulnerability, sincerity, play—these are what make Stay in Touch an unforgettable statement from a new artist with a heartbreakingly simple message: when you stay in touch with the experiences that have shaped you, you stay in touch with yourself. For Harmer, this is a record about “staying in touch with the aspects of yourself, your life, the world, that keep you aware of what’s most important. Whether that’s people, relationships, deep feelings, the value of togetherness and support. It’s about finding the balance between holding on and letting go, between the beauty of the world and the pain in the world.”