Wide Mouth Mason will be part of the Guitar Strings and Kidney Things fundraiser in Hamilton, Ontario on October 21, 2023. Check out the venue, Bridgeworks, for further details!
Tag: widemouthmason
The Vinyl Re-Issue of STEW
Remastered for vinyl by Dany Laj in commemoration of Stew’s 20th anniversary.
Multi-Gold selling and multi-JUNO Award nominated Canadian blues rockers Wide Mouth Mason announce the forthcoming 20th Anniversary reissue of Stew this November 27th, 2020 to be released as a limited edition LP by the band and their management, We Are Busy Bodies. The original album was released by Warner Music Canada and licensed to the band for the anniversary release.
“Stew was intentionally Wide Mouth Mason’s funkiest offspring,” original band member Shaun Verreault, along with Safwan Javed, recalls. “It showcased a specific subset of our musical influences, and was a mashup of musical styles passed through the filter of Wide Mouth Mason.”
“But it was also a case study for Wide Mouth Mason to better understand those musical styles,” Javed adds “We’d been listening to a lot of Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsies, and the like. Meanwhile, our good friend Gordie (Johnson, Big Sugar), who produced it, was hipping us to bands like The Meters and The Gap Band. We dug in and deconstructed the component parts of records that were undeniably funky.”
Inspired by the tunes and arrangements on those records, Wide Mouth Mason honed in on the audio ingredients to utilize. “Drums that were punchy and taut, almost 808-like, the bass ran simultaneously through a bass amp, and a little guitar amp hanging on for dear life,” Verreault muses. “We made falsetto harmonies — almost like horn parts — a recurring theme, and broadened the sonic palette with some keyboard parts by Gordie, and a string section.”
“Though we’d plotted a defined sonic mission statement, there was a lot of room for happy accidents and spontaneous invention,” Javed says. “They were fun, funny, joyful sessions.”
Pre-Order the STEW Vinyl at: We Are Busy Bodies.
Site Update: Discography & Lyrics
Happy New Wide Mouth Mason Album Day! Updated the Discography & Lyrics section of the site to add Wide Mouth Mason’s newest album, I Wanna Go With You, that is released digitally on October 25, 2019. Pre-orders for CDs and the limited pressing of LPs are available through We Are Busy Bodies. Tag your social media posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram with #IWGWYxWMM so we can see what you think of the new album!
Gig Update: November 1 at Edmonton’s Blues on Whyte
As announced recently on social media, Wide Mouth Mason will be part of the 35th Anniversary celebrations at Edmonton’s Blues on Whyte on November 1, 2019. Tickets are now on sale via ShowPass.
Wide Mouth Mason’s New Album digitally released on October 25!
Wide Mouth Mason’s eighth album, I Wanna Go With You, will be released digitally through We Are Busy Bodies on October 25, with vinyl and CD to come soon after. Vinyl is limited to 300 copies and is colour in colour. It comes with a download code. Digital pre-order coming soon.
Listen to Erase Any Trace – https://soundcloud.com/wearebusybodies/erase-any-trace
Pre-Order.
CD: https://we-are-busy-bodies.myshopify.com/products/wide-mouth-mason-i-wanna-go-with-you-cd-pre-order
LP: https://we-are-busy-bodies.myshopify.com/products/wide-mouth-mason-i-wanna-go-with-you-pre-order
I Wanna Go With You Tracklisting
- Bodies In Motion
- Every Red Light
- Some Kind Of Requiem
- Anywhere
- Erase Any Trace
- Only Child
- High Road
- Modern Love
- I Wanna Go With You
- Stay For A Couple More
- Outsourced
- You Get Used To It
News: Changing Wide Mouth Mason mediums
We’re in the process of changing mailing list mediums. For the Wide Mouth Mason website, there is an option to sign up for site updates as we add content. For major announcements, we have set up an mailing list for when new music is in the offing or tour dates (as opposed to one-off gigs) are being scheduled. To ensure you receive news about major Wide Mouth Mason announcements, make sure you sign up here. Our previous ReverbNation-supported mailing list will be phased out in the near future. New music is definitely coming sooner rather than later (and we hope you love the sound of the new album to come!). In the meantime, we’ll see you on the socials: Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
Gig Update: Wide Mouth Mason on Canada Day and then some
If you missed the soldout Parkland Summerfest gig in Calgary on June 22 but are willing to travel to or within Alberta, there are two more dates this summer to catch Wide Mouth Mason live and hear some of the new tracks coming to a new Wide Mouth Mason album near you! Joining the previously announced Rock Festival date this August in Edmonton is a Canada Day performance at Medicine Hat’s Sandfly Festival. Check out the city’s event page for further details!
WMMpress via CBC: Safwan talks about Songwriters, Streaming, and Fair Trade Music
Source: CBC
Songwriters get pitiful amounts as streaming offers tiny royalties
Writers of today’s hits earn as little as $20 for every million streams by online listeners
By Deana Sumanac-Johnson, CBC News
Posted: May 06, 2016 11:00 AM ET Last Updated: May 06, 2016 11:15 AM ET
They’re the brains that create the songs you love, but don’t expect songwriters to be able to make a living by writing hits that get millions of plays on streaming services.
“I’ll get a cheque in the mail for $20 for a million streams, and that just makes absolutely no sense to me,” says Canadian songwriter Luke McMaster, who’s penned hits for the likes of Rihanna and recently had a song he co-wrote get a million streams on Spotify.
McMaster is not alone. Though copyright laws vary from one country to another, the sentiment among songwriters is uniform: a hit song, when streamed, will buy a pizza, but not support a family.
American songwriter Kevin Kadish, who co-wrote the body-positive anthem All About That Bass with Meghan Trainor, complained to the U.S. Congress that he received $5,679 US for a song that had 178 million streams.
Songwriter Michelle Lewis recently revealed that she received a $17 US cheque for co-writing Wings, a hit for the British girl group Little Mix that had three million streams on Spotify.
Because they’re not celebrities in their own right, the songwriters’ problems have received less publicity than, say, Adele or Taylor Swift’s beefs with the streaming services.
“The songwriters have the least sort of leverage to be able to stand up for their rights,” says Toronto-based entertainment lawyer Safwan Javed, who also sits on the board of the Songwriters’ Association of Canada and behind the drum kit of the band Wide Mouth Mason.
“We’re in the Wild, Wild West situation with respect to how music is distributed these days and the role of various players play within that chain.”
Who gets the money?
The “players” he mentions are the streaming services (Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, etc.), music labels and music publishers that typically represent songwriters and collect royalties on their behalf.
Historically, songwriters and music publishers made a small portion of profits anytime a song was sold or played on the radio. But copyright laws written decades ago could not have predicted the birth of streaming, where music is neither sold nor broadcast in a traditional sense.
Still, streaming services make money from advertising and paid-tier subscriptions — so why is so little of it ending up in the songwriters’ pockets?
“Spotify does contribute 70 per cent of our revenues to rights holders, so that’s a really big part of how we’re paying back into the industry, and we paid over $3 billion to the rights holders,” says Nathan Wiszniak, label relations specialist for Spotify Canada.
But just who the “rights holders” are is open to interpretation. Record labels have managed to strike deals with streaming services that enable them to take a slice of the profit anytime an artist’s song is played. But songwriters and music publishers — owners of the rights to the song’s music and lyrics — are not part of those deals.
“They have no system actually in place, for dealing with and assessing who are their stakeholders, who are the rights holders, who are the writers and who are the publishers,” says Javed.
“They haven’t done a very good job at proactively going out there and figuring out who they need to license the works from and pay for those uses.”
Fair trade music
Different people propose different solutions to the problem. In Canada, songwriters’ associations have petitioned the Copyright Board to adopt laws that better protect the rights of music creators. South of the border, songwriters have launched a $150 million US class-action lawsuit against Spotify as a reimbursement for lost royalties.
But Javed believes a quicker and more meaningful solution is in the hands of music lovers.
“I’ve really lost a lot of faith in the governmental sector doing something to fix this.”
Instead, he’s a proponent of Fair Trade Music, a campaign that seeks to certify streaming services, record labels, even album releases, that fairly compensate all music creators.
Fair Trade Music has tens of thousands of signatories around the world, and Javed believes ethical-minded consumers will gravitate towards it the way they do to fair trade coffee.
But for Luke McMaster, there’s no time to wait. A singer in his own right, he’s now touring to promote his new album — an option for him, but not for many other songwriters.
“It is a function of who you are, it’s almost like breathing, so I’m not going to stop writing songs,” he says.
“But for myself and a lot of my peers, it’s making it a lot more difficult. I have friends in the industry, some of the most talented people I have known, that have just given up.”
Wide Mouth Mason island time (Vancouver Island that is)
This August 19, 2016, Wide Mouth Mason will be taking part in the Vancouver Island Exhibition. Visit the VIEX website for further details! Tentative show time is 9pm.
Wide Mouth Mason goes Spanish!
This summer, Wide Mouth Mason will be visiting Spanish, Ontario’s COME ROCK N ROAR SPANISH music festival on Saturday, August 13, 2016. Tickets for this event, that also features a number of Canadian rock bands, are available through Ticket Break.
September in Beautiful British Columbia
Recently confirmed is an upcoming Wide Mouth Mason gig on September 12, 2015 in Port Alberni, British Columbia. Details on the performance will be added to the Tour Dates section of the site as known and confirmed. As always, please check with the venue as to doors and set times!