A speech pathologist and engineer fall in love and make beautiful music together. In this case, it’s not a figure of speech — musician J.R. Shore and wife Christina Ellerbeck did exactly that. You don’t have to take them at their word that the music is especially beautiful; they have proof. Shore won Best Song by a Newcomer at the 2007 Calgary Folk Music Festival Songwriting Contest, while Ellerbeck nabbed Best Song of Alberta at the same contest. In this year’s contest, another of Ellerbeck’s songs made it to the finals.

It was a speeding ticket that inspired Shore’s award-winning song “Southward.” The couple had driven through the States taking in music festivals. While on their way from a show in Minnesota to a bluegrass festival in Colorado, Shore was caught doing 120 miles per hour in a 60 zone somewhere in the middle of Nebraska. He chose not to pay the ticket, figuring they would be unlikely to head through Nebraska ever again.

“A couple of years later, we decide we are moving to Nashville, and sure enough, we have to go through Nebraska,” Shore says. “It was an idea in my mind and hers that we may be caught down there, and I may be hauled off to jail, hence the line ‘Nothing but Nebraska highways on my mind’ [in “Southward”]. A lot of the song is about getting down there, being down there and returning home, and how the return home was going to be as tough as leaving home was in the first place.”

Native Calgarian Shore met his Edmontonian wife while he was living in Edmonton, and they both moved to Calgary before deciding to try their luck in Nashville, knowing careers and kids were just around the corner (Ellerbeck is expecting their first child in December). Shore had played in a few bands like Highway 2 while living in the provincial capital, and learned “Live music is the best drug you could ever be on.” He started to write songs, and improved them when he learned how to use his desktop computer to record. Ellerbeck is not musical, but is prone to jotting down stunning lines in her diary. During their two years in Nashville, they saw live shows every week.

“It was pretty fascinating down there,” Shore recalls. “One reason I wanted to live down there was to get my southern chops, not as a piano player or a songwriter but because the area is so connected to the roots of music. I felt like I needed to live it for a couple of years. I needed to eat soul food in Memphis and live down the hall from some really nasty rednecks, to go into the African American part of town and feel scared or feel comfortable…. We weren’t really meant to be down there. ‘There’s blood on every dinner plate, there’s tears mixed in the wine’ [quoting “Southward”] — that wasn’t how we wanted to be and it was time for us to come home.”

Home to career and kids, yes, but also to awards and accolades proving that the trip indeed did foster Shore’s “southern chops.” As he says, “The reality is that my songwriting has likely gotten better. When you are watching Lucinda Williams exchange song for poem with her dad, who was a poet laureate for Bill Clinton, and you are sitting in the front row, well, you are asleep if you are not inspired and writing better after that.”