Jackson Browne’s mariachi-inspired “Linda Paloma” was another record that Altameda fell in love with while on the road, this one planting the seeds for their song “Ramona Retreat.” Grice wrote the music and Snaterse wrote the accompanying love story. “Ramona Retreat” also features Spanish guitar from Jim Bowskill, who plays with The Sheepdogs and Blue Rodeo. “I think that whole song was done on one classical guitar that Troy borrowed from someone—like a $20 thrift shop classical guitar that doesn’t even belong to any of us, but it literally just got passed around on that song,” Grice recalls.

Altameda was originally set to record Born Losers in March 2020 in Portland. When the pandemic pressed pause on everything, it inadvertently allowed the band more time to reflect and write. “I think it ended up rounding out the record in an interesting way that it wouldn’t have otherwise,” Snaterse says. For example, “Dead Man’s Suit,” Grice adds, “was originally conceptualized as a short little acoustic song plot in between two bigger songs that we just kind of filled out, and then it turned into this whole other thing.”

And then there was the relocation to Toronto, with Snaterse arriving six months before Grice. They sent each other demos recorded on their iPhones in the meantime, with Snaterse setting up a microphone in his living room and bathroom, and Grice back at their makeshift studio space in Edmonton. “Wheel of Love,” a country-rock song that finds warmth in memories of friendship, was one of the tracks that emerged from those sessions. 

Altogether, it refined Altameda’s creative process. Snaterse has always been the primary lyricist—Altameda started out as his solo project—but when the band was a four-piece, they didn’t do much in the way of demos. Working as a duo reconfigured the way Snaterse and Grice approached arranging in particular. “This time around, Erik and I made a really conscious effort to demo every song, and make sure every melody or even just the instrumentation was all really well thought out before we went into the studio,” Snaterse says. “I feel like that was a really helpful process, because then we had a pretty firm idea going into the record of what we wanted to do sonically. It just sort of made everything a lot more streamlined and left more room for experimentation on the fly in that way.” 

The glimmering “Neon (& That’s Why),” which dreams of escaping to someplace new to become who you’re maybe meant to be, is the song Grice says felt like an “a-ha” moment. “It was a completely different thing that was demoed and recorded, and then completely revisited and turned around into this whole other thing. And it seems like everything fits just right,” he says. “And so as a template of something that we’re capable of, it feels really good to look at a song like that and see the beauty in its simplicity. It has elaborate keyboard lines and also very profound lyrics, but it is also about the hook. And, for us, it was a light bulb kind of moment. If all else fails, we can look at something like that and think, like, OK, well, this has kind of all of the elements that feel correct for like three and a half minutes, you know?” 

Born Loser’s ebullient title track had a similar transformation, moving from a Rod Stewart “Young Turks” vibe into an “Instant Karma” John Lennon post-Beatles swing. Altameda reworked it when Grice was finally able to join Snaterse in Toronto. The song, especially with its playfully contrasting chorus tag-line—“born losers, bound to win”— felt like the right representation for the body of work and everything they’ve gone through in its creation. 

It encapsulates, Grice says, “that feeling of being beat down by things, but knowing not necessarily that the grass is always greener, but that change, as hard as it is, is possible and can be incredibly positive. I think it kind of is the cherry on top of what all of those emotions really are: that no matter how shitty it gets, there’s always that sunrise the next day.”