There’s a saying in Costa Rica that goes “The shortest distance between two points is as the crow flies; the longest distance is the short cut.” It’s an apt description of the making of Short Turn, the debut album by North American session supergroup The 501 East. The members of the quartet—who have backed up everyone from Corey Hart to Anne Murray to Kevin Breit—had been friends and colleagues for over 40 years before deciding to form a unit of their own seven years ago. They jelled so perfectly that making an album together seemed the natural way to go. And with a mutual decision to record it live “off the floor,” a quick and easy process seemed inevitable when they started work in earnest in 2019.

Flash forward to now, and the album is finally seeing release. There was the little matter of a global pandemic getting in the way, see, which necessitated a whole new approach to recording once the bed tracks had been completed. All the remaining parts were sent in remotely, meaning that once the last performance had been captured, the project had come to embody a second credo: “Necessity is the mother of invention.”