For a long time, Newfoundland roots-music outfits were known out West for a delivery manner that boils down to “Everything on max, let’s charge through this with a crash bang wallop, diddly-eye-day.” Though it became endearing, and a tradition in itself, the rampaging-Celt approach missed—by a league and a half—the deeper wells of music on the Rock. The Once takes a slower and more scenic route on its drive through the coves and outports of the singing island.

Each member of the trio hails from a different part of Newfoundland. Phil Churchill, who plays guitar, bouzouki, tenor banjo, and mandolin, is from the large town of Corner Brook in the West. Singer and percussionist Geraldine Hollett is from a tiny community on the west coast called Burin. “And I’m from a small place on the south coast on the Avalon peninsula, Coley’s Point,” says the Once’s multi-instrumentalist Andrew Dale, reached at a pit stop in Alberta. “We met at a summer theatre festival in the fishing village of Trinity, sort of by accident.”

The three had been scheduled to play together one evening but nobody let them know until the afternoon. “We started singing together a cappella round the table, then doing harmonies and our eyes widened. It was one of those light-bulb moments. Things went from there, doing scattered gigs around Trinity and in pubs in St John’s. We landed a festival gig in Lunenburg [Nova Scotia] that was super well-received and that ended with an anonymous donation towards making our first [self-titled] album. That was the turning point. Fast forward five or six years and we’ve been travelling as far as Australia and Europe, and all over Canada, and we’ve more than half done on our fourth studio record.”

The name is pure Newfie, as Dale explains. “‘Now the once’ is an expression that basically means ‘directly’ or ‘in a minute’—like ‘I’ll meet you down there, now the once.’ There’s a Newfie dictionary, thick with old words and phrases like that.”

Among the trio’s contemporary material is the rousing but nostalgic “Song for Memory”, cowritten with the poet George Murray. Murray’s lyrics also provided the title of the Once’s current album, Row Upon Row of the People They Know.

“He’s a friend of ours from St. John’s who approached us with the poem, imagining it as potentially a song,” Dale says. “We worked with him up to the studio. Some poets are pretty chained to the words as they’ve written them, but George was super accommodating and allowed us to manipulate his words quite a bit.”

Traditional songs, such as “Jack the Sailor” and “My Husband’s Got No Courage”, are cleverly arranged for the Once’s three voices and instrumental pairings , uncovering new layers of meaning.

“Geraldine is the kind of singer who wears her heart on her sleeve, and it’s got to be a song that speaks to her, the story needs to hold a truth,” Dale says. “We try to take as honest an approach as possible. Ultimately, it comes down to good stories. For us, that’s more important than getting people up, stomping, clapping, and drinking. If that comes from some of the music we play—cool. But if it’s people sitting soaking it in, that’s cool too.”