I Am YEG Arts: Loud in the Pines

After playing music together for nearly two decades, in 2023 Spencer Taubner and Kelin Flanagan officially launched the local contemporary-folk duo Loud in the Pines. With thoughtful lyricism and grounded acoustic guitar, Loud in the Pines craft songs dedicated to the places and people they love, transporting audiences from the wide-open prairies of their home to the forests and cliffs they dream about. In this week’s I Am YEG Arts feature, we chat with Kelin and Spencer about the themes in their writing, their top picks to introduce their music to new listeners, and their experiences working on their first full-length album, Every Colour Left—which just received a Canadian Folk Music Award (Producer of the Year).

How did Loud in the Pines first come together, and what sparked the idea for the band?

Spencer: I think the most honest thing we can say is it’s been a slow burn. We met playing traditional Irish music back in our university days. That relationship as bandmates turned into friends, then into being partners, and I think as that grew and established itself, we had an opportunity and a desire to begin working together again as musical collaborators in a new way. The idea of writing original music was appealing to both of us; we didn’t do much of that back when we first met. 

Kelin: We started learning covers and trying to play music together again after quite a while of the two of us not playing much together. Spencer was playing with a couple other bands, and I was singing in choirs and trying to do more musical theatre stuff. We took singing lessons, did a lot of work on our musical skills, and learned a lot of other people’s songs before we started writing our own. Loud in the Pines, as it is now, officially launched in 2023. We released our first home recorded EP and that solidified what we had been working on. 

Your songs often feel deeply rooted in place and nature. Why are those themes such an important part of your writing?

S: With respect to place as a theme, I think that was by design on our record Every Colour Left. We wanted to write a collection of songs to try to capture a moment and an actual place in our lives. A lot of those songs were written during the pandemic. Everybody, ourselves included, was spending a lot of time at home, and there were a lot of bad things going on in the world. We recognized that we had something pretty special at home in our community — we live in Garneau in a 100-year-old house that has all the charm and challenges that come with that. Through a lot of happy little accidents and alignment of various stars we had some of our best friends living near to us in that community. I think we realized this isn’t going to last forever, and so a lot of the songs were directed at that and about us processing that. I think that probably imbued a lot of the writing with a sense of place. 

K: I think that place and nature have a lot of intuitive and instinctive personal resonance for us. Whether it’s places that we live, places that we want to live, places that we’re imagining completely; there’s a lot of power in that for us. Spencer and I both spend a lot of time outside. Spencer grew up camping and fishing, taught me how to fly fish, so a lot of our relationship as a couple was formed outside at all these special places in our province. When we’re writing together, we naturally go back to some of those places. We also listen to a lot of music and read a lot of books that talk about nature. Poets like Mary Oliver, of course, are fundamental inspirations. To me, that’s the ​“heart” half of why these themes are important to us. And then on the ​“brain” half or the technical half, I have studied a lot of songwriting, and I think that in our lyrical writing, we try really hard to put listeners in a place. That is really important to us and how we tell stories — not only to communicate the value of those places but also the value of preservation and conservation and trying to look out for the things that are so important and so foundational for us all. 

If someone had never heard Loud in the Pines before, which song would you play first and why?

S: If I had to suggest just one song to a new listener, it would probably be ​“Weeds”. It was the first song we wrote for the full-length album; it sort of kicked off that whole project. It’s got some of the hallmarks of our writing and our performance — there’s vocal harmonies throughout, and there’s a healthy dose of nature. Many people seem to have resonated with that song. 

K: It’s also still a story with an overall theme that we revisit a lot, which is finding something good in the midst of something that is on the surface bad or challenging. That kind of resilience is a thing that we try to cultivate in ourselves by writing about it. ​“Weeds” is a good encapsulation of that theme. Some of our best friends from our Irish band days also play on it, so it’s extra fun. 

Last year you released your first full-length record, the Canadian Folk Music Award-winning Every Colour Left, with the support of the EAC. Tell us more about your experience making this album and working with producer Ben Plotnick.

K: This was our first full-length project, and we were lucky enough to get a grant from the Edmonton Arts Council for it, and that defined our entire year of 2024. We had a huge learning process going into it. We wanted to make something that was really Edmonton-centric, that felt very much like our home community. We wanted to prioritize how we made it as much as what the actual end project was. We decided that our priority going into it was to try to work with people that we really valued and loved, whose opinions we really wanted to listen to, and be able to have their feedback incorporated into what we were doing, and to leave with something that we are proud of. And I feel like we did that.

S: Ben Plotnick is a dear friend of ours; we’ve known him for a long time. I had collaborated musically with him in a bluegrass-ish band in Calgary — he’s from Calgary originally, now based out of Nashville. In passing, he had made a comment that he was interested in getting more involved in the production side of things. We got to talking and said to each other, well, if we’re ever so lucky as to have the means to get to work with a producer, that’s the first thing we’re going to prioritize because we just imagine it’d be so helpful to have a third person in that role. As a duo, we pretty well do everything together in terms of the songwriting; every song’s co-written and co-arranged. That can be really powerful, but can also be challenging if there’s two of you and if you’re in opposite camps on a particular issue.

K: Or often in our case, when we are just both in our heads about something and not sure when to let it go.

S: Yeah, exactly. So having a third voice was super valuable. We reached out to Ben and he agreed to produce the album. He’s an amazing human and amazing musician — I think it’s safe to say, one of the best violin and fiddle players on the scene today. He made so many contributions to the album: he helped us early on with shortlisting songs for the album, he helped us refine some of the writing and some of the arrangements, led the charge in the studio, and then of course lent his musicianship to so many of the tracks.

K: When our album got nominated for a Canadian Folk Music Award for production, Ben won the Producer of the Year Award for it. And we have yet to have him visit us since then — we have his award on our shelf right now!

The EAC is asking Edmontonians about why the arts matter now. Can you share how the arts have made a difference in your life? What do we stand to gain as a city when we fund the local arts, and what do we face losing if we don’t?

S: For me, and I think for a lot of us, art is the way that we contemplate and devote time to life’s most important questions. I know if it weren’t for art, I would probably go about my day-to-day and not put energy towards the things that actually matter. Art allows us to contemplate the big questions like, who are we? What are we doing here? What does it mean to be a good person? What do we owe to other people?

I also think art is advocacy. It is so often artists advocating for people or groups who might be underrepresented or for noble and meaningful causes that might otherwise not get the attention and the focus they deserve. I think that’s a vital role. To contemplate reducing funding for the arts or making it more difficult for artists to do what they do best really threatens that.

K: I don’t know a time in which the creative arts have not been a foundational part of my life. I started dancing when I was two/​three years old, I started playing violin and piano at age six/​seven, I was a very early reader and obsessed with books. The arts have always given me somewhere to escape to. They’ve always given me somewhere to find hope again, to find inspiration for the life I want to live. Edmonton has such a beautiful, wonderful arts community that we are constantly bragging about to our friends everywhere else. Our theatre scene is incredible. Our music scene is incredible. There are so many people here making such beautiful things, and I cannot imagine our city without support for the arts.

I feel like right now we are asked all the time to be under stress, to be isolated from each other, to sell things that are important to us, like our attention, our data, our whatever it is. [Art] requires so much presence, and it lets us be together and understand connections across divides. I think it can give us so much more empathy and resilience and can give us a break when we need it. If we lose it, we lose discovery, we lose experimentation, we lose connection.

S: I’ll maybe just shout out the EAC specifically on the topic of arts funding because we would not be where we are if not for the EAC. We weren’t sure how we were going to do Every Colour Left. Receiving grant funding from the EAC enabled us to get that project off the ground and work with collaborators from our community that we wanted to work with.

Tell us a little about what you’re currently working on or hoping to explore next.

S: We are super excited to be able to share that we were back in the studio in May, recording our next project, soon to be released. We got the writing and recording itch again and decided it was time to undertake our next project. We were back at Riverdale Recorders and working this time with the amazing Mallory Chipman serving as producer. We’re hoping perhaps later this year to be able to start sharing the output of that project.

K: The theme of it is connection and how we are tied to a place or a situation. We’ve written some fictional stories and some very true stories into this album. Earlier when we were talking about themes, we were talking about the idea of place, and I think the idea of place is still very present in this EP.

Looking ahead to the fall, we’re playing our first show at the New Moon Folk Club; we’re opening for the Sultans of String, which is a Christmas themed show. And then we’re doing a collaboration with the i Coristi Chamber Choir in December for their season next year. That’ll involve some choral arrangements of some of our songs that we’ll get to perform with them.

About Loud in the Pines

Loud in the Pines is an Edmontonian contemporary folk duo writing open-hearted music dedicated to the places and people they love. Audiences are captivated by their warm, heartfelt presence and leave feeling strengthened and restored. 

Spencer Taubner (vocals, guitar) and Kelin (kay-lin) Flanagan (vocals, keys, banjo) have played music together since 2006, when they met playing Irish trad music. Loud in the Pines released their first self-recorded EP, the conceptual and newgrass-flavoured bitter bright, in 2023. Their first full length record, Every Colour Left (2025), was supported by the Edmonton Arts Council and inspired by their community in Edmonton’s Garneau neighbourhood. It delivers ​“intricate, cinematic arrangements complementing heartfelt songwriting … a strong sense of home and the lives built there” (CKUA). The album won Producer of the Year (Ben Plotnick) at the Canadian Folk Music Awards in 2026. 

Variously and lovingly described by contemporaries as ​“musical ASMR,” ​“the sonic equivalent of a Still in Edmonton sweater,” ​“not like anything I’ve heard or dealt with before,” and ​“for the nerds,” Loud in the Pines continues to carve out their own space in progressive indie-folk music.