There’s a particular kind of artist who only finds their voice once they step away from the noise, away from the scenes, the cities, the expectations. For Canadian-born songwriter and producer Joel Durksen, better known as Spouses, that moment arrived not in a studio, nor on a stage, but on a remote horse-breeding farm in southern Iceland. It’s here, in a loft above a stable, that I Could Be Your Dog was born, a stark, intimate, quietly radical alt‑folk record shaped by isolation, reinvention, and a refusal to compromise.

Durksen’s story begins in Saint Catharines, Ontario, but it rarely stays still for long. His childhood took him to the Cayman Islands, where he grew up far from the clichés of offshore wealth. His parents weren’t moguls; they were ordinary people, one of them a music teacher who sat him at a piano at age three and unknowingly set the course for everything that followed.

Church hymns, classical trumpet lessons, and a teenage obsession with 90s grunge, Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Smashing Pumpkins, all collided to form the early blueprint of a restless musician searching for something that felt like home.

That search eventually led him to Liverpool, where he studied at Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts and embedded himself in the city’s ever‑fertile underground. He played guitar for Brad Stank, Two Blinks, I Love You, and post‑rock outfit A Burial At Sea, learning the craft from artists who lived and breathed reinvention.

One summer, while “between living arrangements,” he crashed at the home of Liam Brown (Two Blinks, I Love You), who taught him Travis picking, a traditional fingerpicking style that would become the cornerstone of Spouses’ sound. A small moment, but a defining one.

By 2023, Durksen was performing at SXSW with Brad Stank, playing to large crowds and racking up streaming numbers most artists would kill for. But something wasn’t right. He describes it as a “deal with the devil”, the thrill of performing, but without the fulfilment of saying something that was truly his. A Burial At Sea, an instrumental band, let him hide from lyric writing. Session work let him stand in the spotlight without ever stepping forward. He knew he was capable of more. He just wasn’t doing it. So he made the kind of decision most musicians only fantasise about: he walked away.

Durksen moved to Iceland and built Kálfholt Studios, a makeshift recording space in the loft of a stable. No fancy gear. No amps. No distractions. Just a laptop, a few mics, and the determination to finally write the songs he’d been avoiding for years. His daily routine became almost monastic: journaling, transcendental meditation, poetry exercises, and long stretches of writing. Ninety percent of it was rubbish, he says, but the ten percent that remained was gold. The result is I Could Be Your Dog, a record that feels both ancient and modern, lo‑fi yet cinematic, rooted in folk but shaped by the electronic textures and post‑rock dynamics of his past life.

The album is steeped in religious imagery, not out of dogma, but because it’s the language Durksen grew up with. Catholic school. Hymns. A tragedy that left a mark. These symbols became the emotional vocabulary of his songwriting.

‘Unsaid’ revisits the suicide of a classmate during his school years.
‘Saint Christopher’ imagines a near‑death experience inspired by real family loss.
‘Lazarus’ confronts addiction and bipolar disorder through the lens of a friend’s struggle.

Leonard Cohen’s shadow looms large, not as imitation, but as inspiration. Durksen became obsessed with Cohen’s discipline, his willingness to wrestle with a lyric until it revealed its truth. He did the same with Beth, a song he calls the best he’s ever written. This is not a record of easy inspiration. It’s a record of work, of chiselling away at something until it finally breathes.

What makes I Could Be Your Dog so compelling is its sense of liberation. You can hear an artist stepping into himself, not as a guitarist for hire, not as a cog in someone else’s machine, but as a songwriter with something to say.

It’s raw. It’s vulnerable. It’s defiantly DIY. And that’s exactly the point.

Durksen’s message to other musicians is simple: “DIY! Don’t wait” - Start the label. Paint the artwork. Use the gear you have. Don’t wait for permission.

Coming from someone who walked away from the comfort of the scene to build a studio in a stable, it hits with the weight of lived truth.

A record born from solitude. A voice sharpened by struggle. A debut that feels like the beginning of something real.