by GERARD DEE

Canadian soul singer Remy Shand was not your typical teenager. He wasn’t worried about being popular or fitting in with the crowd, in fact, quite the opposite.

“I had no friends,” says Shand. “I struggled so much with people who talked down about funk music, they just didn’t understand it. And it was my thing, it’s what I was into. I was never into the whole getting into cliques of people and being influenced by those people. It was always like, this is what I’m doing, you guys on board or not?”

Shand says his taste for soul developed through a combination of exposure and experience. “My dad’s a musician and I basically grew up with every kind of music in the house. He would play Herbie Hancock records and Steely Dan and Marvin Gaye and all that stuff, and it just soaked in.

“Every other influence came from the blues. You know, going through break-ups and singing the blues. And really, I think blues is in every music. It’s just everyone sings the blues and everyone has their own way of doing it.”

Doing it his way wasn’t easy in his native Winnipeg, even though Shand says the prairie music scene is a lot more vibrant than most people think. “I think there’s a lot of misconceptions about what Winnipeg is all about, and the actual music scene there. I mean, the amount of musicians there is just staggering. But it’s really the venues—there aren’t the right kind of venues to hook up people with the same kind of influences. There were a lot of rock venues, a lot of punk venues, but anything for soul and R&B, no one who had that interest could really hook up.”

Shand’s struggle against the odds finally paid off with the release of The Way I Feel, his much-heralded debut release on Motown records earlier this year. He eventually wants to establish his own label so that he can work behind the scenes, and become a more diverse artist.

“I see myself as more of a songwriter than anything. And I love producing. I love being behind the board and engineering—and I love playing, but that’s a totally separate thing. It all comes down to just songs.

“Eventually I want to have my own label, I want to be able to travel in different genres. I want to keep it soul, but I want to get into more Latin and bossa nova and kind of mix that up. It just depends on how far I want to take things and how far I want to stray.”

For the time being, Shand isn’t straying too far from the soul of The Way I Feel, even though he says this record only reveals about one per cent of his artistry.

“I made this record very consistent with the first impression of it, which was the song ‘Everlasting.’ That was kind of like the blueprint for the content of this record. And I didn’t really step out of that realm in terms of tempo, so I think that’s where the other 99 per cent will go—just other songs and ideas. There’s so much stuff in my head right now.” :

With Bryan Adams at the Bell Centre
on Friday, Dec. 6, 8pm, $39.50–$65

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