Wow, what a year it has been! From start to finish, 2014 was a wild ride for us, and let me first express how thankful we are to have an amazing community of friends and fans who have been with us through it all! Thank you for all your support on and off the road! We love being able to create music for you to listen to, and we’re so excited to do that, and more in 2015.
I thought I’d finish off the year with a look back at some of the most memorable moments of 2014, and there sure was a lot of them! Let’s take a little walk down memory lane, shall we?
2014 started with a few months off in Brooks, AB, splitting our time between painting houses, teaching piano, and writing new songs and rehearsing in our storage unit practice space! It was a hard winter for Zoltan and I, but the hard times make for the best songs, right?
In early spring we entered the CBC Searchlight contest, which was a crazy journey in and of itself! People came out of the woodwork to show their support with shares and votes, and we even got endorsed by the Mayor of Brooks, Mr. Martin Shields!
After two months of intense voting and many nerve-wracking rounds, we won the CBC Searchlight contest and found out via phone call on CBC Q!
One of the prizes for winning was getting to play at CBC Music Fest at Deer Lake Park in Burnaby, BC on June 20. It was an amazing day of seeing some of our favourite Canadian bands and meeting lots of CBC personalities.
On our spring tour we stopped in Prince George, BC and I got to visit a ukelele class at a local school and play some songs for them. And then they surprised me by playing and singing I Lost Myself! It was one of the sweetest experiences that I will never forget.
In July we got the amazing opportunity to fly to Ottawa to be part of the Canada Day celebrations! I played in the CBC Songwriter’s Circle that was broadcast live from Major’s Hill Park, and then we played a full set at Jacques Cartier Park in Gatineau and finished off the night by watching the fireworks over Parliament Hill. It was pretty cool to get to celebrate Canada Day in the nation’s capital.
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We kicked off our summer tour by doing a session with Grant Lawrence on his CBC Beetle Roadtrip at Dinosaur Provincial Park! We played a song live in the badlands, and then went on a hunt for dinosaur bones!
Our summer consisted of playing a few really cool festivals and outdoor music in the park shows. Some of the highlights included playing at the CBC Stampede Breakfast…
Playing an outdoor show for over 2000 people in Thunder Bay…
And a HUGE storm at Harvest Sun Festival in Kelwood, MB that meant we actually couldn’t play! We still had a great time, and before we left I was able to play a song in the tent while we all tried to stay warm and dry.
One of the biggest events of the year for us was being part of the Peak Performance Project, hosted by Alberta Music and The Peak 95.3. It was an intense, 5 month talent development project, and one of the first assignments was to make an intro video. We had a lot of fun with this, filming it with our friend Cole Bennett while on tour in Ontario.
In September we spent a week at Rockridge Canyon in Princeton, BC for the Peak Performance Boot Camp with the eleven other bands from Alberta, and twelve bands from BC. We paired up with Jon Bryant and wrote and recorded this super fun pop song, Every Good Thing.
Following boot camp, we made our way to Pender Island, BC and filmed Where the Ocean Meets the Sky: A Visual EP. It was a lot more work than we thought it would be when we initially planned the project, but it was all worth it. We recorded and filmed six songs in six different location on the island in 5 days, and put all the songs plus a 30 min behind-the-scenes featurette together on a DVD. Looking back, I can’t believe we pulled it off, but we had an amazing team of people involved who helped make it happen. Mad props to Dustin Heigh, Owen Marmorek, and Ross Bodenman who were instrumental in making it all happen.
In the fall we did a campaign with charity: water, hoping to raise $10,000 to build a well in Ethiopia. With your help, we made our goal in just two weeks! It was an honour to see so many friends and fans who support our music help us do something for a community across the world.
On November 4 we found out that we made it to the top 3 of the Peak Performance Project, and on November 27 we played the final showcase and found out that we came in 2nd place, winning $75,000 to go towards recording our next record. It was such an honour to get to that point, and share the stage with 36? and The Wet Secrets and it means that we’ll finally be able to head into the studio in 2015 to record a new album!
To finish off the year, Zoltan and I made the move from Brooks to Calgary, finding a place to live and diving into city life, complete with me getting day jobs at DAVIDsTEA and Goodwill Thrift store, and Zoltan doing sound and painting. We started an Exclusive Content Project through our brand new website where we’ll be giving subscribers exclusive access to new songs, demos, collaborations, videos, etc every month. We’re excited for the opportunity to connect with fans even more, and constantly be coming up with different creative projects to share!
Wow. As I’m typing all this and looking back through photos and videos from the year, I can’t believe that all of this (and more) happened in one year. When we started 2014 we thought we would just be at home a lot, laying low, and not doing too much touring. But that changed very quickly, and the number of opportunities we had and things we accomplished is still blowing my mind.
Thank you so much to everyone who stood by us through all the ups and downs, who voted for us, celebrated with us, cheered us on, listened to our music, shared our posts, sent us emails, came to our shows, danced with us, and have honestly been the best group of people we could have by our side. You all mean the world to us, and we can’t wait to make more music to share with you!
I hope that 2015 brings so much hope and love and happiness to you and yours, and that you will find yourself on many new and exciting adventures!
See ya next year!
Lauren.
Lauren Mann 