Antarctic isolation fuels Pine Hearts’ new album well-suited to pandemic-fatigued fans

In February 2020, Joey Capoccia of The Pine Hearts returned to Olympia after four months at the South Pole — four months without seeing friends and family, four months without playing with his bandmates, and four months during which he couldn’t go outdoors without wearing a mask and other gear designed to protect him from temperatures of 40 degrees below zero.

With a suitcase full of new songs, he was ready to get back to the life he’d put on pause. He and bandmates Dean Shakked and Derek McSwain were gearing up for what looked like The Pine Hearts’ biggest year yet.

Then came COVID-19.

“In mid-March, I was literally packing the van, getting ready to leave on tour, when suddenly everything came crashing down,” Shakked told The Olympian. “We had expected to be on the road basically from March through the end of September or October.”

With touring off the table, the country-folk trio — which had built momentum in 2019 with coast-to-coast tours, a third-place finish at the Telluride Bluegrass Band Competition, and a series of radio spots in the U.K. — turned their attention to Capoccia’s new songs.

The result is “Lost Love Songs,” set to be released in June.

This album is unlike any other the Hearts have made, Capoccia and Shakked agreed. It will be the band’s sixth album and the third created by the current lineup, which coalesced five years ago.

“It’s our strongest album mainly because we recorded it twice,” Capoccia told The Olympian. “In my experience, I’ll record an album, and a few months later, I’ll realize that one song should have been faster or slower or in a different key.

“Because of the pandemic, we couldn’t tour anymore,” he said. “We didn’t have much going on, so we thought, ‘Why don’t we take this time and record the album ourselves and give ourselves time to listen to it and make the changes we want to make before we record in a studio?’ ”

So that’s what they did, spending two weeks in the spring creating a kind of rough draft and then taking a September trip to Enterprise, Oregon, where they recorded the final version from the stage of The Old OK Theatre.

The size of the theater, built in 1919, allowed The Pine Hearts to achieve a richer, lusher sound than a typical studio, Shakked said. That, along with sound engineer Bart Budwig’s skills, is one reason the trio is so proud of “Lost Love Songs.”

And then there’s the place where the “Songs” were born — in the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, where Capoccia worked as a carpenter supporting research scientists, snatching a few minutes here and there to work on songs in the station’s greenhouse or gym.

“They’re all science-inspired love songs — taking a closer look at what happens in our hearts and minds when we miss our friends and families or meet someone (who) changes our lives, or simply spend four months staring out at the vast emptiness of blue and white that is the Antarctic plateau, 10,000 feet in altitude and 40 degrees below zero,” Capoccia said.

The songs on the forthcoming album aren’t the first he’s written at the South Pole. The 2019-2020 trip was his fourth stint at the station, and as he puts it, “I’m always writing songs, so if I’m in Antarctica, I’m writing songs there.”

But in a year when so many people have been cut off from loved ones, friends and neighbors, Capoccia’s yearning for connection seems likely to resonate with listeners in a whole new way.

This story was originally published March 5, 2021 at 5:45 AM.