Not every Canadian singer/songwriter makes it onto the cover of the Wall Street Journal.
But when a Toronto-based folkie undergoes a series of unintended consequences and winds up funding an entire album (complete with 144 pages of storytelling) with Canadian Tire money, heads begin to turn.
Corin Raymond, brimming with tales of Canadian folklore and an acoustic guitar to back it all up, will be celebrating ‘Love at Legacy’ Feb. 14 at Legacy Guitar and Coffee House; the evening includes dinner, followed by an 8 p.m. show.
He calls it ‘the caper’…
When he and fellow songman Rob Vaarmeyer, wrote “Don’t Spend It Honey” in 2011 (a song that talks about Canadian Tire money) and began playing it live, Raymond had no idea where one song would wind up.
“Rob and I wrote this song and began playing it and loved it,” laughed Raymond. “It made people so happy in such a Canadian way, that people began coughing up Canadian Tire dough at shows.”
Eventually, Raymond, who was gearing up to record a compilation album that would be a tribute of sorts to his favourite singer/songwriters, was so excited to have $65 in Canadian Tire money in hand that he set out to buy a few rounds at a Toronto pub for his friends.
That’s when he was informed that the downtown Toronto studio he was planning to record his next album in, The Rogue Music Lab, actually took Canadian Tire money as payment for production costs.
“Through the caper, I learned there’s a lot of bars and liquor stores that accepted Canadian Tire money,” he noted.
“There’s not a single aspect of this adventure that was planned…this thing, this epic caper, rolled out — it took over a year, once we started, to pay the studio $7,333.75 in Canadian Tire money (for the production of Paper Nickels, released Jan. 2012).”
Recorded with his band, the Sundowners, Raymond’s final product is a double-disc album, enclosed in a small hardcover booklet, complete with 144 pages of stories, lyrics, chords and photos — documenting the journey of a ‘campaign’ that caught the attention of most major Canadian media outlets, creating something of a frenzy in early 2012; the album retails for $30.
And the storm hasn’t really died down for Raymond, who received 39,000 separate Canadian Tire bills, delivered in a suitcase that weighed 80 pounds to the studio as payment.
Raymond still receives Canadian Tire money in the mail — which he is putting toward paying the royalties on the 20-track album, which features 16 tracks written by other singer/songwriters.
“It’s the world’s first coffee table CD…we just did it from our own lives, our own stories…it felt so amazing to be able to tap into a piece of our Canadian lives.”
Raymond said that while Canadian Tire was impressed with the endeavour, he never approached it with the intention to create a marketing ploy.
Raymond, who is also a storyteller, will be turning ‘the great Canadian Tire caper’ into a one-man show (monologue-style), to be performed at various fringe festivals across the country; his last one-man show production was Bookworm (2011).
He said the production would centre around, “the relationship I had with my dad, told to me through the books he read to me as a kid,” and will document the caper.
Learn more at corinraymond.com.
