Tapping into TV Musicians reaching new fans via the small screen By: Denise Duguay  Posted: 4:00 AM CDT Wednesday, May. 12, 2021

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/05/2021 (1227 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I like music almost as much as TV. The motherlode is when a show makes brilliant use of music.

The gold standard is The Sopranos and its mishmash of Mob-era crooners and then-breaking acts like the U.K.’s Alabama 3, whose nihilistic Woke Up This Morning was the show’s theme song. Grab a tissue and check out Snow Patrol’s weepy Chasing Cars, featured in the even weepier Season 2 finale of Grey’s Anatomy. Brace yourself for how sweet Aretha Franklin’s Say a Little Prayer can feel when played opposite the cauterizing Season 4 première of A Handmaid’s Tale.

May I also suggest every song used in Big Little Lies and anything else Jean-Marc Vallée works on. Or go to tunefind.com, which is stocked with soundtracks upon soundtracks, organized by series, season, episode, all generated by nerds like me who watch TV with their Shazam- or Soundhoud-loaded phones aimed at the speakers because we must know this song!

There is, however, no easy app for musicians wanting to get their songs on your favourite TV shows.

Long before he was an assistant film and TV locations manager trainee in Winnipeg, Amos Nadlersmith went west like thousands of other Canadians to plant trees. There, he met Everett Bumstead.

A few years later, Nadlersmith was performing his own songs first as the Shoal Lake Kid and now as Amos the Kid when Bumstead was looking for music for One Million Trees, his 2020 tree-planting documentary on Season 20 of CBC’s Absolutely Canadian series.

“As soon as I found out he was doing this documentary on something that meant so much to me in my own experience I was like, ‘Oh yeah, absolutely,’” Nadlersmith recalled.

The song, the second of three in the doc, is Mountain View, the title track on his 2020 EP. The song, written about the hills of his home town of Boissevain, “is not about tree planting but it kind of fit the general feel.”

It earned him attention on Spotify, Bandcamp, Instagram and Facebook. “When the documentary came out there were a lot of Shazams and a lot of follows and playlists.”

“When these people are saying they heard about us from the documentary or on CBC Radio or wherever, it blows my mind every single time.”

As Nadlersmith and label House of Wonders prepare for the May 14 release of his second EP, No More New Ideas, he says film and TV syncs, as they’re called in the biz, are not a front-and-centre concern.

“We do a lot of marketing, but more on the music side of things, with blogs and music reviews and radio stations,” he says, “I think if it were to happen again, it would be sort of organic like that again.”

For others, it’s big business.

Winnipeg’s Begonia was touring her 2019 album Fear when the swoony Living at the Ceiling was synced briefly in the Disney+ series Good Trouble — its lonely-hearts episode Palentine’s Day — and more prominently in a moving-in-together scene in CTV Drama’s Queen Sugar.

It’s not what made Begonia a star, says Stu Anderson, her manager at Winnipeg label Birthday Cake, “but it had a significant impact on increased album streaming, social media, and touring attendance. Many new fans were seeking out Begonia after being introduced to her music on Netflix, OWN, etc.”

When music supervisor Kaya Pino was looking for music for the series finale of the Manitoba-shot CBC drama Burden of Truth, she found “the perfect fit.”

“I had been holding onto the song Just Fine since connecting with artist Desirée Dawson at a conference in Vancouver last year. This track went over with some other selections to editor John Nicholls working on this scene,” Pino wrote in an email exchange.

Just Fine was “the stand-out song from the start and made the final cut. She’s an amazing artist.”

B.C.-based Dawson has targeted that platform, attending music industry events and writing and sending songs to people like Pino.

In addition to sales and exposure, she said it affords the kind of good fit that she achieved with Just Fine. Written about facing challenges with self-acceptance and hope, the song found a good home in that final scene, where Kirstin Kreuk’s lawyer character has owned up to past mistakes: “Emotional, hopeful, a big transition.”

Broadening representation on TV is another goal for Dawson, a queer Black artist. Burden of Truth, with its diverse cast and writers, was a good match. Her first music placement was another: The song All In for the long-awaited Season 4 proposal scene between Nicole and Waverly on Crave’s sci-fi western Wynonna Earp.

“I’m not sure if [music supervisor Andrea Higgins] knew that I’m queer and that it was a love song that I wrote for my girlfriend at the time,” Dawson says from Vancouver, “but it was so fitting that my song was about falling in love and you have to be vulnerable and sometimes it’s scary and you just have to dive in and be like, ‘I’m all in!’”

The sync brought her the usual upfront fee as well as new fans and album downloads. It also made her an honorary “Earper,” as the fans are known. “I was just kind of welcomed into this world of Wynonna Earp even though I haven’t actually watched the show.”

She even expects to be featured at the 2021 Earp Curse Con, a virtual event set for May 29 and 30 and one of the show’s many fan events.

“I never knew that a placement could take me to this place,” Dawson said.

— Special to the Winnipeg Free Press

Denise Duguay writes about TV twice a week at d2tv.wordpress.com. Questions, comments to d2tvblog@gmail.com.