Saturday May 10th, 2008

1pm-4pm

@ The Tom Lee Music Hall

3rd Floor, 929 Granville St, Vancouver, BC

FREE for full paid members of Music BC (not sure if you're a member? Call us!)

$25 for non-members

Panelists: (see bios below)

Jim Vallance (Bryan Adams, Aerosmith, Ozzy Osbourne)

Dave Genn (54-40, Matthew Good Band )

Shaun Verreault (Wide Mouth Mason)

Bring your demos! Music BC members will have the chance to enter one song from their demo into a random draw at the seminar. CD's will be chosen at random to be played at the seminar, and critiqued and given feedback by our three amazing songwriters. Your song will be played and discussed in front of the audience, so be prepared! We are going to try to listen to as many songs as possible during the seminar. Here's your chance!

-  Must be a Music BC member
-  CD format only, with song specified
-  Must submit your CD at the seminar, and be present in case your song is chosen to be critiqued.

JIM VALLANCE

Jim Vallance has written songs for Bryan Adams, Rod Stewart, Paul Anka, Tina Turner, Aerosmith, Heart, Bonnie Raitt, Joe Cocker, Ozzy Osbourne and many others, representing 100-million CD sales. He's won four "Composer" Juno's and dozens of SOCAN, BMI and ASCAP citations. He's a director of the Songwriters Association of Canada and the Society of Composers Authors and Publishers (SOCAN). In 2007 he received the Order of Canada for his musical and charitable work.

DAVE GENN

Born and still residing in the Vancouver area, thirty-five year old Dave has been a staple of the Canadian music scene since his first bar gigs in the mid-eighties.

Although probably best known for his six years spent with the Matthew Good Band between 1995 and 2001 when he played guitar, keyboards and co-wrote many of that artist’s best known songs, Dave has had a long and prolific musical career both before and after. His association with Canadian punk legend Art Bergmann garnered Dave his first of several Juno awards for Best Alternative Album in 1995 for Bergmann’s “What Fresh Hell is This?”, an album on which he performed co-writing and keyboard duties. As a founding member and guitarist for Vancouver hardcore veterans DSK in the early nineties Dave fostered relationships within the Vancouver music community that have led him to record and tour with artists as diverse as Strapping Young Lad, Grapes of Wrath, Pure, The Lowest of the Low, Bif Naked, Emm Gryner, Sweatshop Union and Theory of a Dead Man. 2002 saw him co-writing, recording and acting as musical director for Holly McNarland’s “Home is Where My Feet Are” album and subsequent tour. Dave is currently performing and recording with Canadian icons 54-40.

With several film score credits to his name, including the shorts “Second Date” and “The Dogwalker” written and directed by his brother James, as well as the National Geographic documentary “Yukona”, Dave is constantly developing and diversifying as an artist. His more recent forays into production have seen him work with West Coast up-and-comers Pepper Sands, The Dirtmitts, By a Thread, Lillix, Armchair Cynics, Honeysuckle Serontina and Mariana ’s Trench.

SHAUN VERREAULT

Recorded on a Canadian Pacific train travelling from Montreal to Vancouver, “Two Steel Strings” is the second solo-acoustic release from Shaun Verreault.

Verreault is best known as the virtuosic singer/guitarist/song-writer for blues-rockers and Canadian live favourites Wide Mouth Mason (currently at work on their 7th album together while also enjoying a lack of musical monogamy).

In 2006 and 2007, WMM performed on Canadian Pacific’s Holiday Train, an annual month-long food/funds/awareness drive benefiting local food banks in communities of all sizes. After riding the 2006 train across the country on what is no longer a passenger line and being invited to perform again in December 2007, Verreault recognized what a rare musical opportunity it would be to record an album on the journey.

As a student of acoustic blues, folk and country music, Verreault was aware that the train’s clickety-clack rhythm had inspired much of the backbeat of 20th century music; its whistle had been emulated by harmonica, guitar and brass players, and singers, its cars had transported scores of recent immigrants and their instruments, stories and folk songs to their new lives across North America, spawning new hybridized musical styles and culture. During the depression, the train also transported itinerant workers (usually illegally) and their guitars around the country where they became singer/songwriters, their protest songs and musical oral history shaping much of Canada’s early identity.

CPR’s enthusiastic support of the recording project gave Verreault unprecedented access to the train (the locomotive, the sleeper car (circa 1916), the dining car (1928) and the passenger car), where the bulk of the album was recorded. The train provided the rhythm and background creaks, squeals and whistles, serendipitously always in tune and in time with the music being made by Verreault’s guitar and voice. In addition to the train, one song was recorded in the bathroom of a hotel once owned by CP, another in a small hundred-year-old church next to the tracks.

The songs themselves, while not all specifically about the train, were inspired by its rhythm and wanderlust. “Two Steel Strings” is a Leadbelly-esque shout about travel as risk and redemption, while “Long Distance Love” is about the challenge of staying close while physically far apart. “Outsourced” studies the effect on small towns when businesses move away. “The First Time” is about the addiction problems exacerbated by isolation. The Woody Guthrie-esque “Ballad Of Joe Verreault” stars Shaun’s grandfather, who operated a ferry near the town of Batoche, Saskatchewan (and married his Métis wife there). Batoche was the setting for the second Riel Rebellion, quashed in large part by the hastily constructed railway in a bid by its builders for government funding, without which it would have folded unfinished. In the surreal “The Last Spike,” Verreault imagines riding through the whole history of the west in one night with Louis Riel, Crowfoot and a car-full of immigrants dancing and playing guitars and fiddles on the way to a climax at the end of the railroad.

Apple’s Jeff Booth was sufficiently excited by the novel concept to supply Shaun with a MacBook Pro laptop computer and the music software Logic. Grammy-winning producer Randall Prescott (producer of the Holiday Train) supplied microphones, outboard gear, instruments, encouragement and on the only song to have a guest appearance, harmonica. “Two Steel Strings” was mixed by Jay Evjen (Hot Hot Heat, Odds, Wide Mouth Mason) and mastered by Ryan Dahle (Age of Electric, Limblifter).