Erin Costelo, the award-winning singer, songwriter and performer who recently made history by being the first woman to take home the 2017 Music Nova Scotia award for Producer of the Year, is setting out to make an album. She’s going to record an album of original material, she’s going to do it in a unique timbre-frame house in rural Nova Scotia, and she’s going to complete it all in just ten days. Because that’s not pressure enough, Juno award-winner Amelia Curran is going to produce a studio documentary about the whole process. Understandably, she wouldn’t mind a little help.
Costelo and Curran aren’t just award winning artists and performers, but also close friends. They’re also dragging in a few more friends to collaborate on the project Big Brother style. Unsurprisingly, their friends are some legendary musicians, including Blue Rodeo’s drummer Glenn Milchem, longtime collaborator Clive MacNutt on guitar, Anna Ruddick on upright and electric bass (Randy Bachmann, Ben Caplan, Ladies of the Canyon), Leith Fleming-Smith (Matt Mays) on organ, Andrew McKelvie (sax) and Andrew Jackson (trombone), plus the Blue Engine String Quartet.
Though Costelo and Curran have admired each other’s work for more than a decade, this will be their first colloboration. Curran hopes that the process will provide unique insights into the making an album; a look through the eyes of a fellow musician.
“The studio documentary is a long standing tradition,” observes Amelia, “It allows an audience to study the engine of the music they love – pry open the casing, and view the bones.
What is particularly enticing and why Erin Costelo is a great candidate for studio documentary are her skills as a self-produced artist. This isn’t simply tapping a microphone and slogging through fifty takes. Costelo is a Band Leader in the sense of Duke Ellington and his ilk. Every note from under each performer is a considered move. How it tumbles through the studio environment and is engineered and conditioned out the other side to it’s audience is a rodeo of painstaking precision and delight.
Once completed, this project will be able to be viewed as one concise music documentary, or as eight shorter episodes, song by song. It may be released as the artists online portfolio or packaged and submitted to film festivals and broadcasters.”
Before the documentary is even released the crew will be sharing as much of the journey as possible via social media, email updates to supporters and videos.
To complete the project they’re looking for additional funding. They’ve currently raised $45,700 of their $71,700 total budget and are asking for help to raise the remaining $25,000. This includes the cost of musicians, studio fees, engineering, mixing, mastering, album art design, photography, travel, camera operators, equipment rental, tape, accommodations, an assistant director, editing and sound, vinyl pressing, cd pressings, and a photo book. It all adds up pretty quick.
To encourage your support though, they’ve included several perks on their indiegogo campaign that range from a $10 digital download to the $5,000 VIP wrap party invite platinum package. The final product will be released in September 2018 and the film will be submitted to film festivals throughout Canada and the United States. Costelo and Curran say they will travel together whenever possible in support of this project. The album will be promoted through international touring in Fall 2018 and 2019, with Costelo touring Canada, United States, Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, Netherlands, and the UK.
To donate and to get details on all the perks offered, click HERE.