Fanshawe College is marking the one-year anniversary of the first coronavirus pandemic lockdown with a music playlist highlighting the talents of its students and alumni in the industry.
The “Quaran-tunes” playlist, available on Spotify, includes over 50 songs from 28 artists, who are all either students or recent alumni of the college’s music industry arts (MIA) program or audio post-production (APR) program.
“Musicians don’t stop making music and they don’t stop writing. They don’t stop anything, really. They just figure out another way around it. And that was kind of a tribute to that,” Dan Brodbeck, Grammy-nominated and JUNO-winning MIA program coordinator, told Global News.
“It’s amazing music, great songs — it doesn’t sound like student work, let’s just put it that way. I’m just so proud of them for doing it.”
Among the 28 artists are City Limits, Half Moon Run, Katherine Fischer, Lost in Japan, Texas King, and Sarina Haggarty.
Haggarty has two songs on the playlist: ‘Not Over You Yet’ and ‘Easy Tiger.’ Two Fanshawe College professors were involved in mixing, engineering, producing and mastering ‘Easy Tiger.’
Brodbeck himself mixed and mastered ‘Not Over You Yet,’ which was engineered and produced by MIA graduate Alex Emrich, who Haggarty met around the time she graduated.
“It was cool doing that one because we did everything off of Zoom. So it still worked out and I was happy to release that one,” she says.
She adds that whether you’re a songwriter, musician, or a fan, music can be a soothing distraction.
“It’s not a pandemic for three minutes while you’re enjoying a song that you hear for the first time or that you listen to on repeat.”
The college says the playlist was developed to create something students, staff, and the community could enjoy; to mark the anniversary of the first lockdown in a “positive manner;” and to support MIA and APR students and alumni “whose musical endeavours were turned upside-down by the pandemic.”
“Everybody knows that a lot of entertainment stuff was hit pretty hard. The biggest being live entertainment,” Brodbeck told Global News.
“I mean, these are some people’s careers that are front of house sound people, light people, road managers, tour managers. That’s their livelihood, they’ve been doing it for in some cases 30-plus years and then literally just stopped.”
He added that the 2021 Share the Land charity concert, which is celebrating its 10th year, will be held as a virtual event on April 24.
“All the money is going towards Revive Live in London. That money will go to local music venues so that’s going to be a pretty amazing thing because they were hit very, very hard,” he said.
The event is named after a song by The Guess Who produced by the late Jack Richardson, a former Fanshawe College professor, and is meant as a tribute to Richardson.
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