MP3 Lucky Day - FOLK: Folk Blues

A flippin' songwriting genius from Winnipeg, Canada.

14 MP3 Songs
FOLK: Folk Blues, FOLK: Modern Folk



Details:
At 30 years old, the Pinawa, Manitoba-based singer/songwriter is a wealth of musical knowledge and experience. Frechette has written about 1400 songs. 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 clearly discovering the top of his game.

While in his teens he was signed to a major publishing contract. He has busked for a living on street corners and in subways all over North America and Europe. He's toured with a cowboy band, played funk music at Mission and Fifth Avenue in San Francisco, played blues and ragtime guitar in Stuttgart, played solo at several major folk festivals and is the man who penned the first hit for modern bluegrass stars The Duhks.

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 while growing up in Pinawa, Manitoba, he was fascinated by Winnipeg all-oldies station CKY-58 and began writing songs when at 15 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 funk to old tyme country to jazz and back again.

At just 17, Frechette found himself signed to EMI Music Publishing, living in Toronto and being told 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. All the while, he kept writing songs, meeting other songwriters and learning the lore of his chosen craft.

By 1998, 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 in 2001, 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 Johnny Cash LPs.

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

- John Kendle