Note: "Rebel Girl" and "Cambie & Cordova" have already been chosen for the song dedication perk.

Hello! I'm Jeff Andrew, a fiddle playing singer-songwriter from the west coast of Canada.

You may have seen me at a bar or a festival or in a dark, pirate ship-like basement somewhere across this giant country, singing weird songs about faeries, rebels, demons and trains.

The Story

I'm about to make an album called Tunnels, Treehouses & Trainsmoke. It'll feature my first set of original fiddle tunes, as well as a Shakespearean murder ballad set in the carnival era, a barcarole about the apocalypse and a song about a girl named Nyki Kish who's serving a life sentence in Canada for a murder she didn't commit.

 

It's also going to have some bizarre string instruments on it (like the Stroh Violin in my profile shot) and we're recording parts of it in an actual tunnel, underneath East Hastings St. in Vancouver. It's an incredible sonic space - think of a giant underground amphitheatre, covered in graffiti and eerie as the West Virginia fog.

 

When it's done, it'll come with some wicked artwork and a hand-drawn songbook by my friend Fraea the Banshee. All the chords and lyrics, written out so you can learn the tunes if you want to. 

 

NOTE: The album itself is a bit of a mongrel. Technically what I'm making is a 7-song EP called Tunnels, which I'm going to combine with an older EP called Treehouses & Trainsmoke and release it as one full album (but priced like an EP). The original T&T also came with its own songbook - you can check it out HERE.

The Pitch

I'm hoping to raise $2000, to pay for the recording, pay the musicians and the graphic artist (Fraea!) and produce the CDs and books. I've put together a tight crew of players for this: drummer/upright bassist Kenan Sungur from High Society, guitarist Ryan Boeur from Fish & Bird and my tireless engineer/producer Corwin Fox, who's made albums for me and just about everyone else in the Canadian indy folk world.

 

Then I'm going to make as many copies of it as I can. I know in the digital era you're not supposed to care about making real artifacts anymore...but damn it, I still do.

 

That's why I need your help. I've made 2 full-length albums and a handful of EPs already, on my own dime. I've played hundreds of shows, toured across Canada half a dozen times, met more amazing people than I can possibly count, been written about and played on the radio here and in Europe and the USA...I've also gone into a pretty penny of debt along the way.

 

That's where you come in, friends. You can help me turn this into a sustainable way to live, instead of a job that costs me money instead of earning it.

 

I've never done this before, but I figure 2 grand is a good place to start. If 200 people bought 1 copy each, we'd be there! If we raise more money than the goal, I'll be able to pay the other creators more and put the rest towards radio mailouts and a promotion campaign.

What do you say? Can you help me out?

 

I don't have a lot of stuff to give away as perks (I don't have a lot of stuff in my life, period), so rather than just donating money, let's call it pre-ordering the album instead. If you think you'd want to buy it when it's done, consider paying for it now so I don't have to go into debt to make it. Then when the happy day comes, you'll have forgotten about spending the money and it'll feel like it's free.

 

I'll send it to you signed and numbered (first 500 copies), with your name in the liner notes as an Individual of Great Worth and Fantastic Substance. Which you are. You, who believes in celebrating the bizarre.

 

Or you can remain anonymous if you want. Just let me know.

 

This way the focus is on the project itself, rather than used guitar strings or me promising to call you on the phone for ten minutes, or something. Plus I'll feel better about cranking these suckers out (on recycled paper, veggie-based inks, etc.) if I know a lot of them already have homes waiting for them.

 

With that said, I do have a few goodies to put on the table:

 

$1 and up - Everyone who chips in anything, even $1, will get two free tracks to download. One is a demo of Desdemona, the aforementioned murder ballad. It's sort of a retelling of the Shakespearean drama, if Othello had been a hobo and Desdemona was a carnie. The other is an a'capella version of Hobo Postcards, the title track from my last album, recorded in the same tunnel I'm going back to for this one. We did this at the end of a long, whiskey-fueled night of recording in there back in 2010, right before the tape ran out. Stomping boots and spooky harmonies...I get shivers listening to it. I've never released it, so you'll be among the first to hear it.

 

$10 and up - You can pre-order as many copies of the album as you want, at $10 apiece. Bulk discounts start at 10 for $75.

 

$50 - The first 5 people to buy 5 or more will also get one of the last remaining copies of Vagabonds & Wastrels, my first album. I put these together by hand, with stickers and cardboard cases. It was really tricky, took a long time and I'm never doing it again. I only have a few left of the original 1000 so I'm not selling them anymore - except for right here. It's already considered a collector's item in certain circles, so if I ever hit it big it may be worth something, someday.

 

$100 - I'll dedicate a song to you on YouTube. Pick one from any of my albums and I'll put a brand-new live performance of it on YouTube, going straight to you. I promise I will never, ever dedicate it to anyone else online. It'll be yours from now until the end of the Internet.

 

$150 - I'll give you a two-hour lesson (in person or by Skype) on fiddle, guitar, singing, songwriting, or anything else you think I'm good at and you want to get better at. I love teaching. Or I can edit your paper, or help you write a short story. Or a bio for your website. Anything with words. I used to be an editor at a newspaper and I did freelance journalism for a while. A lot of people don't know that. But it's true.

 

$300 - a house concert! I'll play a private show just for you. Or you can bring the whole neighbourhood. It can be free, or you can charge whatever you want for tickets and keep all the money. You set it up, I'll come and play. As long as it's in Canada and reasonably close to somewhere I'm already going to be. I can't afford to travel long distances for this, but I do seem to criss-cross the country pretty often. I'm sure we can make it work.  

The Impact

You'll be helping me create a unique, fascinating artifact and keep from further bankrupting myself in the process.

 

I love the idea of people finding their way to music by hand. The joy of finding something rare and awesome that seems to come out of nowhere and ends up changing your life. Things left behind by another traveller at a hostel, a road house, a dark cafe or underneath a train bridge (for real - sometimes there are book exchange spots down there).

 

That's how a lot of my favourite books and music found me. I hope with this project I can be part of that magic stream.

 

Then there's the dream of believing other people are playing my songs at campfires, open mics or maybe even on big stages somewhere in the world...there's a strange kind of glory in that. That's what the songbook's about.

 

It's also about telling the stories of people like Nyki Kish and what happened to her. A lot of old folk songs were like newspaper articles, written by and for people who couldn't read much, in a time before mass media the way we know it today. When something big happened, people wrote songs about it. That's how the stories got around.

 

There's a strange kind of glory in that, too. I know it's gonna take a lot more than folk songs to get her out of prison...but it's something, at least.

Other Ways You Can Help

Spread the word! There's a bunch of buttons at the top for sharing this campaign. The more people talk about it, the more Indiegogo helps promote it to the big wide world. So please, press those buttons!

 

And Share it, Tweet it, Tumble it, Stumble it, all of that...seriously, I need help. I just yesterday learned you can post videos to the Internet from your smartphone. I still have an old-fashioned, flip-style stupidphone. I'm not trying to be an elitist techno-phobe, I'm just way behind when it comes to the digital world.

 

That's all I got! Thanks for everything.