JazzTimes is honored to present the premiere of “How Did I Know This Was the End?” by Canadian vocalist Angela Verbrugge. Co-written by Verbrugge and Gerry Teahan, this song is the closing track on the singer’s debut album, The Night We Couldn’t Say Good Night, scheduled for a Feb. 1 release on Gut String Records.
The year Verbrugge was born, a man sat in a canoe in the middle of a lake in rural Ontario, and the melody for what was to become “How Did I Know This Was the End?” came to him. Gerry Teahan was then a bassist in Windsor and Detroit, later taught high school band in northern Ontario, and is now a jazz pianist based in Vancouver, B.C. Despite a 40-plus-year age gap, Verbrugge and Teahan made friends at a jam session, and have held regular sessions singing and playing piano in his living room ever since. For most of those sessions, they covered jazz and traditional pop songs, many of them obscure. One day Verbrugge asked Teahan if he’d ever composed anything himself; Teahan responded by playing her a tune he’d written decades before. Verbrugge took the chart home and played the melody over and over until she heard the line, “Last night we went out dancing.” It occurred to her to write a contemporary “Tennessee Waltz” story, which now can be heard in the track above.
“It’s absolutely thrilling to be in my senior years, and hear such a top NYC piano trio perform my composition with Angela’s beautiful vocal and great lyrics,” Teahan says. “It gladdens my heart that after all these years, the song is getting radio airplay and reaching listeners from Hawaii to Mexico City, Toronto to Amsterdam, and everywhere in between.”
Backing Verbrugge on this track, as on the rest of The Night We Couldn’t Say Good Night, are pianist Ray Gallon, bassist / co-producer Cameron Brown, and drummer Anthony Pinciotti.
For more information on Angela Verbrugge, visit her website.
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