The Sheepdogs make the kind of shambling, foot-stomping Southern-style rock that’s made for barrooms. So you might think that the days spent inside during the pandemic left them pining for the stage. But as principal singer-songwriter Ewan Currie puts it, they made pretty good use of the time. “I kept relatively active with writing and recording music,” he tells Apple Music. “We tour so much during non-pandemic times, which often leaves me wishing I could write and record more, so being able to do more of that was nice.” One such recording he and his Saskatoon-based band made was an Apple Music Home Session, which they produced in Spatial Audio. “It’s definitely stoked the imagination beyond the usual stereo spectrum,” Currie says of the special circumstances. “Especially when lots of instrumentation or vocals are involved, the possibilities of creating a real spatial surround vibe excites me.” This time around, they traded the boogie of “Find the Truth” for something more laidback in nature. “I thought it would be fun to completely invert the energy,” says Currie. “It’s such a high-energy rocker that I wanted to see what it would be like to make it lazy as possible. We kind of tapped into a family sing-along vibe.” “Downtown,” from 2015’s Future Nostalgia, also gets a stripped-back treatment, as does their cover of “Texas Sun” by Leon Bridges and Khruangbin. “We wanted to do a cover that was relatively recent but still has that old-school flavour we favour,” he says. “Leon Bridges and Khruangbin are two of the best artists going these days. Leon really tosses off the vocals, and the band doesn’t deviate much. It really opens itself up to interpretation, so we changed the groove and found a few new licks to sneak in there.”