SC Writers

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Dan Frechette Concert - 8pm at Pistol River Friendship Hall, tickets $15, Purchase advanced tickets online at http://pistolriver.com, or by phone at (541) 247-2828, or locally at Gold Beach Books.

This Winnipeg-based singer/songwriter is a wealth of musical knowledge and experience. Frechette has written more 1,300 songs. He has been signed to a major songwriting contract. He has busked for a living on street corners and in subways all over North America and Europe. He’s played solo at the Suwannee Spring Fest, Winnipeg Folk Festival and is the man who penned the first hit for The Duhks.

Manitoba singer/songwriter Dan Frechette, blessed with an enormous talent a facility for adapting elemental folk forms - bluegrass, Celtic airs, country, ragtime, country blues - to his purpose, the likes of which I haven’t heard since Dylan’s first recordings… Lucky Day is already a classic, an album that will surely find an exalted place in the canon.”

Now, with his first full-length solo recording, Lucky Day, Dan Frechette brings his knowledge and songwriting chops to bear on an album that brims with his unabashed enthusiasm and crackles with the sound of a writer clearing discovering the top of his game.

Critics have uniformly praised Frechette’s debut. Veteran Toronto Star pundit Greg Quill was so moved that he wrote the following:

“Manitoba singer/songwriter Dan Frechette, blessed with an enormous talent a facility for adapting elemental folk forms - bluegrass, Celtic airs, country, ragtime, country blues - to his purpose, the likes of which I haven’t heard since Dylan’s first recordings… Lucky Day is already a classic, an album that will surely find an exalted place in the canon.”

Frechette’s fascination with music began early and is the driving force in his life. He grew up in Pinawa, Manitoba, listening to Winnipeg all-oldies station KY 58 and was trying to mimic writing Beatles songs when he discovered Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen and thus began a lifelong study of singer/songwriters that has led him through every possible musical genre, from bluegrass to punk to old time country to jazz and back again.

At just 17, Frechette found himself signed to EMI Music Publishing, living in Toronto and trying to write hits. Frustrated by being encouraged to create chart-toppers for boy bands, Frechette returned home and embarked on a troubadour’s odyssey that saw him and his guitar living in impromptu co-ops, flopping in parks and hostels, and playing tunes to make enough for food and shelter. Al l the while, he kept writing songs, meeting other songwriters and learning the lore of his chosen craft.

By 2001, Dan was back home in Winnipeg. He played with several bands over the next year or so, but when the most promising project, an amalgam called Motel 75, imploded, Frechette knew what he had to do. His vision for his songs became his focus, and Lucky Day is the result.

Lucky Day is the ebullient expression of all of Dan Frechette’s multi-faceted musical influences - a distillation of all he has learned since he was a little kid in the early ’80s, listening to his uncle’s scratchy Johnny Horton and Chubby Checker LPs.

You could call it the culmination of a journey. But Dan Frechette’s trip has only just begun.

~ The Walnut Street Music Company