A multi-Juno Award-winning songwriter and producer, he is the founder of Sundown Sessions Studios and the founder and CEO of SyncSongwriter, with five songs from two SyncSongwriter alumni artists having recently been featured in a Cannes Palme d’Or winning film. He has produced numerous hit songs for radio including gold and platinum records for several major-label artists. His credits include working with Blue Rodeo, plus working on albums by major artists like Kris Kristofferson and Bryan Adams, among others. There is a free, online, live event coming up this Sunday, January 12th, that he talks about during this conversation.
“I've been doing this for 20 plus years, producing records. And one advantage I have with my new studio… it's … much more geared towards a production studio. So, people come to me with music that's really to kind of use the talents that we have on the production team, and we've got some amazing talent and we really are about helping people take their song from where it is to somewhere else.”
“I use a lot of world-class talent at the studio to really raise songs up to basically broadcast-ready. Things that are going to work and get on radio and get on TV and film. And we have a fairly big part in that.”
“We had great success in the Ottawa, northern U.S., Ontario area. We toured across the country a couple times. We got Ahmet Ertegun from Atlantic Records to come out to one of our shows just before he died, ya’ know, the founder of Atlantic, he signed Led Zeppelin and signed Crosby Stills Nash and Young, and a bunch of others.”
“If you're after a certain drum sound, how do you do that? … all the ingredients matter; the type of drums you're using, the room that it's in, the drummer you're using, the microphones you're using, how you're recording it, you know, there's all of these, sort of a recipe. You've got to have the right ingredients and then the right types of those ingredients. Are you using fresh time or are you using dry time? There's all these things that affect it.”
“I always put the sense of freedom and your ideas and your dreams first. And then you figure out how to make them happen. And I find that throwing yourself into the fire’s the best way to do that.”
“I'd never had a panic attack before. I don't think I've had one since, but I did that week. And just woke up in the middle of the night just freaking out, had some weird dreams and stuff. And that's how stressful it was.”
“Once I had worked there and was able to work with some people like Kris Kristofferson, Blue Rodeo and Garth Hudson from The Band and assisted on records like Feist record. And did some guitar tracks for Bryan Adams.”
“You also have to be good. It's just the way it is. You've got to be able to attract the people with your music, not just because you're an indie artist and you want help.”
“2017 was the big solid launch, but that was kind of like, you know those bands who have the hit song and you're like, ‘Oh, they came out of nowhere.’ It's like, ‘No, they were slogging it out for years before that. You just didn't know that.’ That was kind of like that.”
“You're wasting great songs on mediocre production, meaning that you might have these amazing songs that could do all kinds of things for you, they’re probably worth as much as a car and you're kind of, you’ve taken all this time to do it, and then you're releasing it and it can't go anywhere because it's not the best it can be.”
“The most important thing in music production essentially … is capturing the emotion of the song, like, literally kind of doesn't matter how you produce it as long as the hairs stand up a little bit when you're listening to it and you're just like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ Because if it does that for you it's going to do that for others.”
“Change of Heart” (Rob Larkin & The Wayward Ones)
“Reflections” (Ships Have Sailed)