Dan Frechette & Laurel Thomsen

All you need for a wedding, really, is a justice of the peace and a ring. But making beautiful music together ... that takes magic.

Monterey native Laurel Thomsen and Canadian-born Dan Frechette celebrated their first wedding anniversary this month by playing a free concert Sunday as part of the inaugural International MayFest Monterey, a free Memorial Day weekend event that concludes today at Custom House Plaza.

He’s a 38-year-old folk singer and acoustic guitarist. She’s a classically trained violinist who clearly took way too long to discover that she also has a remarkable singing voice. How they came together is a story that qualifies as a fairy tale beginning.

It began with the eight-month-long winter that froze Manitoba in 2012, capped by a May blizzard that left Frechette marooned and bored, perusing YouTube to fend off cabin fever.

He was attempting to watch the video of a friend — a fiddler from British Columbia — but instead found a violin tutorial that had been recorded and posted by Thomsen.

“I watched the video and realized that this person, whoever she was, had a really amazing command of emotion and intonation in the way she played,” Frechette remembers. “I love the violin and started thinking it would be great if one day we could do some music together.”

Frechette, already a solo performer who toured regularly in Western Canada, sent Thomsen a compliment on Facebook. She responded the same day. They began an Internet friendship, using Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and Skype, that evolved into an exchange of their personal music files. Still at long distance, they began blending their music together, adding her violin (and, later, her harmonies) to his recordings.

In May 2013 (a year after their original Facebook exchange), Dan traveled to Monterey, where Laurel had arranged a casual gig — a practice, really — just 12 hours later at London Bridge Pub.

“Until that night, we had only been able to trade files back and forth, and overdub ourselves,” says Thomsen, 33. “So we already had an idea what we would sound like, but we’d never actually sat in the same room and played together.”

The marriage of their musical stylings turned out to be a match made in heaven, christening a professional and personal relationship that has blossomed ever since.

Thomsen, turns out, also wrote songs — something Frechette had been doing since he got his first guitar at age 12. Almost immediately, they had a repertoire of more than 30 original songs, which multiplied as they began collaborating.
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They began touring in both Canada and the U.S. to refine their act, putting more than 60,000 miles on his Toyota Corolla, and another 4,000 on a Prius, along the way. As their music became increasingly seamless, so did their relationship.

“I think when you’re playing music with someone, it’s a very intimate thing,” Thomsen says. “There’s chemistry there, both musically and otherwise, and I think it’s a pretty natural process to just want to be with that person, want to share more than just a rehearsal here and there.”

Their mutual joke, she says, is that they haven’t been more than four feet apart in three years.

“It’s like a cosmic teamwork, a really powerful connection, and a lot of people remark on that when they see us live,” Frechette says. “They always witness that connection, which is becoming better and stronger as time goes on.”

Also growing is their reputation. Their official website lists bookings through May 14, 2016, including a Bob Dylan/Joan Baez tribute concert (the hairless Frechette does a near-flawless Dylan impression as a character he calls “Bald Dylan”) at Chamisal Tennis and Fitness Club this coming Saturday.

They’ll be interviewed live on the air by KPIG’s “Sleepy John” at 10:30 a.m. on June 21, and five days later they’ll open for the Wailin’ Jennys in Grass Valley. They’ll perform with Sugarcane Jane at Don Quixote’s in Felton on June 29.

A complete list of tour dates can be found at www.danandlaurel.ca, where their two CDs, “Dan and Laurel” and “New Disguise” also may be previewed and purchased. - The Monterey Herald