[Cover photo credit to Victoria Black]

Vancouver Roots-Rock artist Antonio Larosa has released Tried & True, a nine-track album bringing together his Country roots, love of vintage Rock, and early Rockabilly influences. The album spans songs about “love, life on the road and the pull of home.”

Larosa shares:

Tried & True is the first record I’ve made that feels completely like me. It’s taken years of playing, writing and figuring out where I fit to get to a point where I trust my own taste this much. With this album, I feel like I’ve been at the wheel creatively and haven’t compromised what I wanted it to be.

Larosa grew up listening to Johnny Cash, B.B. King, The Allman Brothers and Roy Orbison, and he wanted all of those influences to have a place on the album.

Working with Producer and longtime collaborator Marcus Ramsay, Larosa recorded most of the album at Vancouver’s Afterlife Studios. The album cover brings him back to The Princeton in East Vancouver, the first bar he ever played. The title is also “a nod to the love and support that have stayed with him along the way.”

Before selling out shows across the country, Larosa was playing a steady weekly gig at an Italian restaurant on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive, all while facing his fair share of rejection in the music industry. The album’s focus track “Burning Bright” speaks to the ways that playing live kept him going.

He says:

I was hearing a lot of no’s back then, and it could get pretty discouraging. But every week, I’d show up to that restaurant, pick up my guitar, and forget about all of it. I just loved playing music. For those few hours, none of the other stuff mattered. That’s really where ‘Burning Bright’ came from. It was a reminder to myself that no matter how many doors close, nobody can take away that feeling or the reason I started playing music in the first place.

Larosa, a three-time BCCMA Roots Artist of the Year winner, has spent much of this year taking his full-band show across Canada on independently booked tours.

With Tried & True, Larosa gives a “growing audience a fuller picture of the artist they’ve been getting to know on stage.” The record connects the music that first made him want to play with the experiences that have kept him writing and the sound that he’s discovered as his own.