Curve Music Artists
The Hello Darlins
Lindsay Broughton Bio
Lindsay grew up in the small town of Brooklyn, Ontario, less than an hour’s drive from Toronto. The close-knit community — where her mother and grandmother are also from and Lindsay still lives — had one public school and everybody knew everybody. While the place is rapidly changing, she says, “It’s where I belong; I’m not a city girl.”
Her mother was also a country music singer who played shows with a cover band. In Lindsay’s teens, she went through a phase of singing in a rock band, just so she wasn’t like her mom. She wrote poetry and joined the School Alliance of Student Songwriters (SASS), which performed at other schools and even hooked the teens up with established co-writers, including the legendary Dan Hill.
Lindsay debut album, Take Me There, earned her a prestigious Canadian Country Music Association (CCMA) Awards nomination for Rising Star in 2015. It was mostly culled from songs she’d written between 2008 and 2014. “It’s cool for me to listen back now because you can hear a lot of growth in the record,” she says.
Lindsay Broughton
Holly McNarland Bio
Since moving back to Toronto with her family, the mother of two, who has a JUNO Award, and gold and platinum albums under her belt, has been writing for other artists, as well as composing her own songs.
“I started thinking of just playing,” she says. Through her son’s school, she met other musician parents and began getting encouragement to put together a new band. She booked a show in Toronto, and it sold out. “I hadn’t played in a band in four years. It was a really good feeling to come back to that.”
Holly first burst on the music scene with her 1995 independent EP, Sour Pie, and 1997 major label debut, Stuff, which was certified platinum. She won a Juno for Best New Solo Artist in 1998, and toured all across North America, performing for thousands. Home Is Where My Feet Are came in 2002, followed four years later by the acoustic EP titled The Komrade Sessions, a recording she says she did “Dogma-style and just for me.”
Chin Up Buttercup was released in 2007, featuring stand-out tracks, “Sad Songs, “Dry As A Bone”, and “Every Single Time”.
The title track on Run Body Run was inspired by her daughter, who was 3 years old when Holly wrote the song. “Hearing her tell herself that she can do anything is really inspiring— like she can do anything with words.” “It took me a long time to make this record and I’m really close to the songs- I had five years of songwriting to choose from so I took my time and chose all of my favorites. The songs on this album kind of bridge the gap for me as a songwriter, between the country I grew up singing with my Mom, and the rock my voice leans towards.”
Outside of her pop-rock career, Holly also acknowledged and embraced her Metis roots, performing at some of Canada’s most important Aboriginal events, such as headlining the 2004 National Aboriginal Achievement Awards in Calgary, and being highlighted, alongside Buffy Sainte-Marie, at the 2008 Celebration of Aboriginal Canadian Women.
Now, between parenting, Holly writes whenever the mood strikes, triggered by things around her- people, places, film and other media.
Holly McNarland
Jack Connolly Bio
For Jack Connolly, the song is everything. Free of pretensions or pomp, his Country folk-tinged tunes are all about vivid storytelling, and this talent shines on his last album, Great Big Soul.
The Toronto-based songwriter has been cutting his teeth in the Canadian music scene for more than a decade. Having grown up playing coffee houses on Vancouver Island, he released his debut Indie album, Open Stage, in 2001. His sophomore full-length The Empty Cafe followed in 2004, and its rootsy full-band sound earned Connolly the title of Songwriter of the Year at the Vancouver Island Music Awards. He went on to becomes a folk festival regular and shared stages with the likes of Tom Cochrane, Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, Spirit of the West, 54-40 and many more.
Seeking new experiences, Connolly relocated to Toronto in 2009 and quickly dove headlong into the vibrant local music scene, self-releasing the eight-song acoustic collection Soulcraft in 2010. In addition to regularly performing his own songs around town and on the road, he formed the country covers group the Gas Station Cowboys and immersed himself in the music of acts as far ranging as Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Garth Brooks and Taylor Swift.
“Those songs are written by some of the world’s best craftsmen,” he observes of his covers gig, “so it really helps when trying to get to the point quicker with my own stuff. It makes me more economical.”
He drew on these influences — in addition to old favourites like Bruce Springsteen, Tom Cochrane and Leonard Cohen — when penning the songs that make up his latest full-length, Great Big Soul, due out this year through Country label Curve Music. The album began as a batch of barebones demos recorded in a church basement in downtown Toronto, and Connolly eventually fleshed them out when he entered the Tragically Hip’s Bathouse Recording Studio with producer John MacArthur Ellis (Barney Bentall, Be Good Tanya’s, Ladies of The Canyon). He was joined by a backing band that included, among others, classic Canadian drummer Pat Steward (Bryan Adams, Odds).
Jack Connolly
Driveway Bio
“Some people are trying to call us alt-country, but that’s ‘cause they’re lazy. They hear a pedal steel and automatically assume ‘country’. Alt-country is a buzz word right now and the problem with buzz words is: one, they are hard to shake and two, they fall out of fashion. We’re just a rock band.” says singer/songwriter, Jason Taylor of Driveway’s sound.
Driveway is a group from Toronto made up of ex-MAdE frontman Jason Taylor, ex-MAdE bass player Chris Sytnyk, drummer Robin Mason (Superhalo, Statistics), and Corey Matheson (Haggis) on banjo, pedal steel and guitar. These seasoned musicians have combined their influences that include Whiskeytown, The Jayhawks, Lucinda Williams, Coldplay, The Rolling Stones, Pixies, and Sonic Youth to form this ‘rock band’.
On their debut, self-titled Album, Taylor is the main songwriter; however the band is free to add whatever they feel. “I’ll write a song and hash it out a little bit at home, just to get the overall structure of the song, then I bring it in and everyone puts their own thing on it,” says Taylor, “let the song after it has been ‘sort-of-written’ end up Drivewayified. The guys add all the magic”
Driveway was lucky enough to get U.S. producer Keith Cleversley (The Flaming Lips, Urge Overkill and Spiritualized) to agree to produce some of the songs on the album. Taylor and Sytnyk worked with him when they were in MAdE. Cleversley produced MAdE’s Television Heart album. “Keith has almost no ‘amazing’ gear, but he can pull off amazing recordings despite of this,” explains Taylor, “kind of like the guy who can whittle Michelangelo’s ‘David’ out of a tree stump using only a jack-knife.” The rest of the album was produced and mixed by Toronto’s Lurch. Mason said “the whole recording experience for the making of our record will stay with me for a long time, it was amazing.”
The guys in Driveway all have many years of recording and touring experience. Universal Music Canada and MCA in the U.S. released MAdE’s first album, Bedazzler and Universal Canada distributed their second, Television Heart. The group broke up after the Universal/Polygram merger took place in 1999 and they were dropped from the label. Taylor said, “After that I just wanted to get back to basics, back to my roots and just make music. It’s actually quite liberating to not have to hear music referred to as units, singles, radio adds, and product.”
Driveway was formed in 2002. “I was writing for a couple of years, I remembered Robin from the old days and Chris was the bass player for MAdE, we put this project together and it was just the three of us for a while.” The group put an ad in the back of NOW magazine looking for a guitar player. “We only got one call and that was Corey Matheson,” laughs Taylor. “I remember talking to him on the phone and he said ‘I’m from Nova Scotia, I play pedal steel, lap steel, piano, guitar…’ and I said ‘holy shit dude, I’ll be over there in like five minutes.”
“We have all been in many bands before, some of us have even had a modest amount of success, but no matter what, we are in it for life, and I think to some degree this can be heard in the music,” Taylor said, “There’s something real about the music, there’s something magical when we are on stage together. I think the magic comes from the fact that music ‘is’ us, not just ‘in’ us. We are in it for the simple reason that we have no choice.”
Driveway
Tom Taylor Bio
Tom Taylor, a singer/songwriter based out of Vancouver, BC was first introduced to music when his grade ten English teacher Al Horne played “Mr. Tamborine Man” on his big twelve string acoustic guitar. From that day on, Tom was hooked on acoustic folk/roots music. Soon after came Dylan, then Neil Young, then John Prine and many others who inspired Tom to pick up the acoustic guitar and begin his own songwriting journey.
It was at Hillside Secondary School that Tom also met his future band mates David Hughes, Chad Chilibeck and Dean Waisman. The quartet formed ‘She Stole My Beer’, released two albums and toured extensively. When the band decided to call it quits, Tom decided to pursue songwriting as a solo artist.
He attributes his songwriting style largely to influences the likes of Joe Ely and John Hiatt. “King of July”, Tom’s first solo album, features the guitar playing of Canadian string virtuoso Steve Dawson, renown for his work with Canadian group “Zubot and Dawson” as well as playing with Kelly Joe Phelps. “With his help it went really quickly,” says Taylor. “I’ve crossed paths with him over the years. He’s a fantastic guitar player and I just thought it was the kind of thing I wanted on the record.”
Tom Taylor
Past Artists
Affiliates
The Dead South
Curve Music and Cerberus Management are proud to have have been such an integral part of breaking The Dead South from 2014 until the end of 2019.
Some of the great success the band achieved while with Curve Music included a JUNO, a ROAD GOLD Award and a 200 Million plus viewed Video for “In Hell I’ll Be Good Company” as well as a GOLD CERTIFIED Album in Canada and the U.S. for "Good Company."