The Young Fables, a duo made up of Laurel Wright and Wes Lunsford, almost didn’t happen. It took more than a few random moments that could almost seem like coincidences, if their personal and creative connection wasn’t so strong.

“I was in China for six months, playing jazz and R&B,” Lunsford tells Everything Nash. “I was doing contract work, and they wanted me to do another year over there. And I was like, ‘I’m gonna go back to the States for a minute.’ And while I was over here, I was hanging out with some friends of mine playing around, and a friend of mine was playing with Laurel at the time. Her guitar player decided not to show up to a rehearsal right before the show. And so my friend who was the drummer, he called me and said, ‘Hey man, can you come and do the show?’ And that was the first show we played together and we’ve played almost every show together since that day.”

Wright felt the musical chemistry with Lunsford almost instantaneously, but their personal connection took a little bit longer. In fact, they played together for well over a year before the romantic sparks began to fly.

“It wasn’t really love at first sight, like you’d think,” Wright says.

“It’s the opposite of most duos where they fall in love and then make a duo,” Lunsford adds. “We made a duo first.”

Wright spent most of her life making music, long before The Young Fables. The Tennessee native won the Texaco Country Showdown when she was just 16 years old, later making it onto American Idol as a solo artist.

“I did it three times. Three times is two times too many,” she says with a laugh of her time on the reality TV talent show.  “But the last time I did it, I made the Top 48. and it was kind of a weird time in our lives I guess. At that time, we had been playing together for about a year and a half, and I was like, ‘I don’t really know if I even want to be a solo artist.’ It was such a big thing. I was so grateful to be there. But when I was in Hollywood for two and a half weeks. I’ll never forget it. That’s when I realized I really wanted to be in a duo, and I didn’t really want to do a solo thing.”

Wright left Idol and decided to move forward solely as a duo, with The Young Fables. The pair just released their third album, Pages, an intimate look at some of their biggest personal challenges.

“In between our second record and our third record, we had about 60 songs.” Wright recounts. “We were trying to choose from all those songs, and we picked 11. And during that time, in between Old Songs and Pages,  I lost my sister and my father in 2018, just eight months apart. It was life-changing, and we had a lot to write about, I guess, ’cause we had a lot of songs. It was interesting to see the changes, I don’t want to say growth, but the changes in me musically and personally that kind of ended up on this record.”

Amid her profound grief, Wright also found an honesty that she had never tapped into, until pouring her heart out into the songs that became part of Pages.

“I think it did open my heart,” she acknowledges. “I think I’m already very comfortable with my emotions and being open with whoever on our social media and stuff. But I definitely think it opened my heart more, for sure.”

The Young Fables’ personal and professional lives might intertwine, but when it comes to creating music, Lunsford insists it is all business.

“When we are writing songs, I feel like we’re both pretty good at separating the business and the relationship,” he maintains. “Almost maybe too good at it sometimes, but we can be like, ‘Oh, that’s terrible. We gotta change that.'”

“You definitely have to separate the business and the pleasure part and try not to get your feelings hurt,” Wright adds.

Find Pages and all of The Young Fables’ music, as well as a list of their upcoming shows, at TheYoungFables.com.