Calgarians help put together star-studded song from artists
CALGARY — Jason Mccoy reckons the pieces all came together on Friday, April 17 at about 8:50 a.m.
By 9 a.m., the video for “We Are One World” was out in the world.
“We got it done with literally minutes to spare,” says Mccoy, the Ontario-based producer, songwriter and lead vocalist of country act The Road Hammers.
The song, which was co-written by Mccoy and Ontario businessman and co-owner of the OHL’S Barrie Colts Jim Payetta, was meant to recognize “unity, to celebrate the power of one, together in isolation.” Within five days of Mccoy hatching the idea, “We Are One World” had travelled the globe and picked up high-profile participants from Australia, Sweden, Greece and the U.S., not to mention homegrown stars such as Ed Robertson from the Barenaked Ladies, Moist keyboard player Kevin Young, The Hunter Brothers, Aaron Pritchett, Calgary’s Raghav, guitarist Pavlo, former Joydrop singer and current co-host of Hometown Hockey Tara Slone and Mccoy’s fellow Road Hammers bandmates Clayton Bellamy, Stephen Broadhurst and Calgary’s Chris Bryne, among others.
Members of the Harlem Gospel Choir chimed in from New York City. Nashville session players such as drummer Greg Morrow and guitarist Rob Mcneely contributed, as did Jackson Browne’s guitarist Mark Goldenberg, Australian Idol star Hayley Jensen, Greek accordion player Zoe Tiganouria and expat Canadians such as Deric Ruttan, Carolyn Dawn Johnson and Big Sugar’s Gordie Johnson. All told, more than 40 artists worldwide contributed to the initial song, which is helping raise funds for the Red Cross COVID-19 Relief Effort. All artists recorded their parts at home and sent them in.
FRIEND OF A FRIEND
“It just snowballed,” Mccoy says. “It was friend-of-afriend. That’s all it was.”
The formidable task of putting all of this together fell to two Calgarians. Local guitarist and producer Russell Broom, who has worked with Jann Arden, Ian Tyson and Dallas Smith, mixed Mccoy’s original song with all the guests. Sean Smith, who has worked in the Calgary film and television industry for the past 20 years, put together the music video.
There was a mix of footage coming in, from Gopro, iphones and webcams, says Smith, who has directed a number of videos for the Road Hammers over the years. One of the more interesting challenges was cobbling together the Harlem Gospel Choir footage, as they had all recorded themselves separately, onto one split screen.
But once things started rolling in, Smith put in an allnighter to get it done.
“All of sudden, in my inbox it’s ‘Ed Robertson has added to your Dropbox,’ ” Smith says with a laugh. “A lot of times, when you are doing a music video under normal circumstances, you’re not dealing with a lot of the artists directly. A lot of times you will get stuff from management. This was just Jason with fantastic contacts in the music industry. He was able to contact them directly.”
The star-studded, globetrotting video is actually only the first phase of the project. The idea is for artists of all levels from around the world to download the song or just the backing tracks from weare1world.net, with the goal to produce multiple versions in various languages.
“I want you to sing it,” Mccoy says on the original video. “In fact, we want as many, in as many countries, in as many different languages, singing together as one.”
As of earlier this week, the country singer says new versions have been flooding in.
“We starting to get all this action,” Mccoy says. “We had a guy remixed it from China. He’s a puppeteer and has all these puppets doing it like the muppets. We just got a video in from Ukraine. So, it’s just incredible.”
Visit weare1world.net to participate or donate or visit the Youtube channel @weare1world.