When you follow your heart and you let love lead you that light you carry can carry you home.’ Never were truer words written, as those written by local country musician Todd Richard and music producer Jeff Johnson of Bailey Way Entertainment in the song “Follow Your Heart.” The lyrics are part of a song that was created to raise money for the Variety Children’s Charity.
Twenty or more well-known musicians collaborated to see Richard and Johnson’s vision come to fruition. Richard met up with The Observer to speak of Variety’s 51st Annual Show of Hearts Telethon where the song will be featured on Global BC, Sunday Feb. 12. from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Richard and his band will be kicking of the Telethon when the song and video will be showcased.
“We are going to try and get all of Canada to support the song at 99 cents per download with all of the proceeds going to Variety,” said Richard.
Richard and his wife Sylvia were approached by fans who wanted to bring awareness about Variety and who wanted to raise money for the children’s charity.
“They asked if we wanted to be part of it, and we immediately said yes,” said Richard of the project’s roots. “They would come to our shows and they would sell ice cream and popcorn and we made a goal of raising $5000 by the time we got to this year’s telethon.”
The industrious group created a logo, specifically designed for Variety, and that’s when Richard came up with the idea for “Follow Your Heart.”
“I had a song on my last album titled “If I Could Change The World” so I always thought it would be a great to produce that song in a “We Are The World” type fashion, change it, and get all of these artists to sing on it.”
Richard talked to Johnson, who was immediately on board with the idea.
“He said yeah, let’s do it, he said send me the song and let’s see if we can do this — I sent him the song and about a week later he got back to me and he said what if we wrote a song specifically with Variety in mind?”
The two sat down in Vancouver, two weeks later, and the song “Follow Your Heart” was born.
“I don’t think it was even a half hour and the song was written,” said Richard. “You can sit down sometimes and a song will take six hours, but this song, it was like it was meant to be, it was just so cool.”
The duo did a rough recording and sat back and played it and then they pitched it to Variety.
“We brought all our stuff in, pitched it, and they were still a little hesitant and then one guy suggested we play the song for them, so Bailey brings out his acoustic from behind the table and says well why don’t we, so we did it acoustically, and a lady recorded it on her phone and put it on the Variety website.”
By the time the recording was finished there were a few people close to tears and Variety was confident that their members and families were going to relate to the uplifting song.
Variety got on board, but fundraising still had to be done to get the song produced and to film the making of it.
Richard called on some connections, who he refers to as his angels, and within 24 hours he had procured the funding.
The bed tracks (the first part of the song) were laid at Studio Downe Under in Abbotsford and the second part was done in The Armoury Studio in Vancouver with just over 20 artists who were part of the projects, including George Canyon, who recorded his portion of the song from Calgary, while Global BC filmed the making of it.
The song was engineered by Sheldon Zaharko, Jordan Oorebeek and Wes Mack, who make magic in the studio, according to Richard. The song was released worldwide by Royalty Records out of Toronto, after they digitally released it to Itunes. It was released to radio and is being played across Canada while the number of stations it’s being played at is growing with “Follow Your Heart” fever steadily catching on.
“It’s amazing — my hope is that it’s going to be as big as it can be. I hope the entire country is going to download the song, it’s just so powerful and uplifting, and I never would have dreamed it would get this big.”
