HARD WORK NETS $100K
Country artist a WILD winner
I was taught to work. I worked very, very hard at a young age. I bought my first bike. It was $250 and I was eight years old.
When Brad Saunders still lived in Gander, Nfld., his first job was not one that suggested a career as a hunky country star in Nashville awaited him.
But then again, he was only eight years old when a local fish plant would drop off massive drums of capelins to his family home. He would hang them on racks, dry them in the sun and prepare them for shipment.
“I was taught to work,” says the now Calgary-based country singer. “I worked very, very hard at a young age. I bought my first bike. It was $250 and I was eight years old.”
While this tale may not offer a lot of illumination into Saunders’ artistic process, it does offer a glimpse of the admirable work ethic that he has apparently maintained since those early years dealing with drums of the smelly forage fish. It presumably served him well in the summer, when he was among the 12 finalists to compete in a weeklong “boot camp” in rural Princeton, B.C., as part of the Project WILD artist development program.
Last Saturday after a showcase at the Palace Theatre, Saunders found out he won the $100,953 grand prize for the 2017 version of the program, a joint effort between Alberta Music Industry Association and WILD 953 — Calgary’s New Country.
The idea of working hard is a constant theme during a conversation with Saunders. So it’s hardly surprising that he sounds like he is delivering a bit of a can-do motivational speech when asked what his strategy was.
“It’s lots of going above and beyond,” he says. “You’re up against the elite, the best in the province, up-and-coming artists that are trying to get that spot. It’s just one of those things where you can’t take your foot off the gas, you have to keep moving forward.”
This is the second year Saunders participated in Project WILD. Along with developing songwriting, live performance skills and music-business acumen, the program also requires participants to add a philanthropic element to their efforts. In 2016, Saunders hit the streets for 72 hours to experience homelessness while donating time to shelters, handing out food and busking to raise funds for the Calgary Homeless Foundation. This year he conceived “21 Acts of Kindness,” a campaign that had him raising $35,000 for Little Warriors, donating a guitar to a student at Forest Lawn Elementary School and making and delivering lunches to needy schoolchildren. After the boot camp, the contestants were featured in live showcases throughout October, which were assessed by industry professionals. Saunders again took a page from his childhood when sharpening his onstage skills. When he was 11, he explains, his brothers gave him a guitar after his family moved to Calgary. He said he would practise for hours at a time until his fingers bled. He took the same approach when preparing for the showcases.
“I was growing, but I’m one of those people who wants to continue to move forward and be the best I can be,” he says. “So I literally practised five or six hours a day in my garage on stage presence.”
But Saunders says he also has an understanding that developing musical prowess, songwriting chops and live-performance skills do not make you the complete package in the dog-eat-dog world of Nashville. The boot camp also had experts flown in to teach marketing, media training, music law, radio tracking and social media.
Saunders, who ran his own painting business for 15 years, has been taking trips to Nashville for the past few years to work on songwriting and seems more astute than most when it comes to treating the music business as a business. He has already released a handful of singles and plans to release another in the spring. He says he has no plans of rushing into releasing his debut EP, which he is currently recording at OCL Studios in Chestermere. The $100,953 is specifically set aside for music. Saunders says it’s a “blessing” and he intends to be careful with it.
“One thing I’ve learned in the industry is that it’s quality over quantity,” he says. “A lot of artists will go out and do a full-length album and have very little money to put promotion behind it. From a business standpoint, that doesn’t make sense.”
As for his own music, he sees it as resting somewhere between Dierks Bentley and Sam Hunt, which is certainly a tantalizingly sellable sound for the head honchos in Nashville these days.
“Going back to the commercial side of the business, you have to go with the times,” he says. “You have to go with what’s current but do it in a sense where you’re not selling out as an artist. So, I think it’s imperative to record what makes sense to you and not just do what sells. But at the same time, for me, the songs have to feel good, have a hooky melody and also have substance to them. They have to have some sort of meaning.”