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Had a great interview with Terry Parsons - of CHMR-FM St John's Newfoundland

BrianBlain · Brian Blain interview with Terry Parsons

Biography

Brian Blain is a songwriter, performer and an acclaimed recording artist, as well as a producer, desktop publisher and editor. For more than 50 years, Brian has been performing, writing and recording his unique brand of slow-cooked, solid-groove folk blues.

Recognized for his tireless promotion of Canadian blues, Brian was honoured in 2020 with the Maple Blues Award for "Blues Booster of the Year," a lifetime achievement award.

Brian has played across Canada and a dozen States as well as Europe where he toured with Long John Baldry’s long-time back-up vocalist, blues-belter Kathi McDonald. Brian also got to back up Baldry and has jammed with blues greats like Gene Taylor, Mel Brown and Hubert Sumlin, who declared, "You've got something, Brian. Something gooood. I'm not going to forget you."

A master host, Brian established a residency at Toronto’s Tranzac Club in the 90s inviting many notable Canadian blues artists such as Morgan Davis, Michael Pickett, Madagascar Slim and Julian Fauth to his weekly sessions. His after-hours blues jams at the Toronto Jazz Festival attracted jazz luminaries Russell Malone and Roy Hargrove, who played 12-bar blues all night and loved it.

A who’s-who of Canadian blues stars have appeared on his recordings including Paul Reddick, Michael Jerome Browne, Richard Bell, Ken Whiteley and Harry Manx, who said, "Brian Blain has opened my shows on at least two tours, I had to shut him down after the last one because he was starting to make me work too hard to win the audience back... I just can't have someone stealing my crowd... no way! Seriously, the man has a groove. I'm into it."

Brian's Blues Campfire has been a highlight at festivals and conferences and most recently at Toronto’s Old Mill has many opportunities for up-and-coming musicians to jam with veteran players such as David Gogo, Matt Anderson, Gary Kendall and many others.

Brian traces his early blues roots to when, as a fledgling guitarist, he was captivated by the music he heard on a reel-to-reel tape of Reverend Gary Davis. Over decades his guitar style developed slowly and naturally. No slide. No alternate tunings. Just three chords and a good story.

Born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Brian tells the story of his adoption at birth in "Enfant Choisi," on his second critically acclaimed album, Overqualified for the Blues. After discovering his birth mother in early 2020 through DNA matching, he paused production on I’m Not Fifty Anymore long enough to write, record and include a new composition, "The Mother I Never Knew."

His first recording experience was in 1964 – a French song recorded with a folk group at RCA's three-track facility in Montreal. Fluently bilingual, Brian has included French material in all his albums.

In the early 1970s, he played bass and produced two ground breaking groups out of Quebec's Eastern Townships, pioneer indie-rock band Oliver Klaus and the iconoclastic folk duo Fraser & DeBolt.

Brian’s 1974 solo debut release, the single "The Story of the Magic Pick," (Good Noise/Polydor) is a cult classic. A spoken-word morality tale, it was recorded with members of Manhattan Transfer, The Blues Brothers band and The Mothers of Invention.

Brian writes songs about the tribulations of the music business and characters he’s met over the years. As Jeffrey Morgan wrote in the Detroit Times, "Now here’s something you don’t hear everyday: a bluesman singin’ the blues about how lousy the blues singin’ business is these days."

Along with early solo performances, opening for Lou Reed, touring with April Wine and sharing the stage with Loudon Wainwright III and Joni Mitchell, Brian spent five years as a bass player-for-hire with various ensembles – wearing a cowboy outfit one tour and a tuxedo the next.

During the 1980s, Brian performed as a "one-man-blues-band" at ski resorts in the Eastern Townships. In 1990, he moved to Toronto, and was playing in a blues band before he was unpacked.

Full of thoughtful and humorous commentary on the music business and wider social issues, Brian has released five albums, beginning with his 1999 debut release Who Paid You To Give Me The Blues. When a new label offered to re-release the album, Brian went into the studio to add a couple of bonus tracks and ended up recording a brand new album, Overqualified For The Blues (Northern Blues Music, 2005) released worldwide, garnering rave reviews.

In 2010, Brian put out an adventurous live recording with bass maestro George Koller. Five years later, Brian invited musician friends from far and wide to remotely add tracks to "sweeten" the live recording – a radical move at the time, though commonplace during the 2020 pandemic. He put it out as New Folk Blues 2.0. FYI Music's David Farrell called it "definitely not your rank-and-file blues album."

Around the campfire or in the virtual world, Brian is one of a kind, with his slow-cooked, solid-groove, story-telling blues and like a well-aged wine, a fine vintage… an "Elder Statesman of the Blues."

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