Meet Jonah Yano, the Toronto based singer, songwriter, whose journey into music began with recording music using his cellphone in 2016. Having played piano and guitar as a child, it wasn’t until Yano moved from Vancouver to Toronto in 2016 that he began putting his songs online, catching the eyes of Toronto’s thriving local music scene.

Yano’s souvenir, mixes his soulful, genre blurring vocals with searing, personal lyrics. With collaborations from talents like producers Monsune ("strawberry!," "delicate"), Leland Whitty of BADBADNOTGOOD ("poor me," "monarch," "anywhere"), and Jacques Greene ("what i can do to help"), souvenir touches on themes of family separation, healing, and reconciling with the past.

Having not seen each other in 15 years, Yano visited his father in Nagato in the fall of 2019 with the goal of making sense of their complicated relationship through music. Both being avid musicians, Yano then incorporated some of his father’s earlier recordings into his own, while making peace with their past. The result — the album’s final track, “shoes,” featuring his father Tatsuya Muraoka and written by him about a pair of shoes he purchased for Yano as a child. Most of the track was recorded live at some point in the 1990’s in Hiroshima, with Yano’s own vocals filling gaps between his father’s vocals.