He’s coming home and he’s bringing his new music.
Two-time Juno Award winning artist and songwriter Greg Sebell is dropping a new CD and taking it on tour.
Songs For Flight Delays is the closest the indie pop artist Sebell has come to producing an autobiographical account of what his life has been like in the past few years.
The talented artist went to Los Angeles in 2016 and spent about six months travelling between there, Toronto, Vancouver and Nashville, with brief periods in Salmon Arm.
He engaged in several songwriting sessions a week, working with a wide range of professionals from up-and-coming producers to Grammy-winning producers who have worked with the likes of Rihanna and Kanye.
“It was a chance for me to explore sound and my sound and what I wanted to say,” says Sebell, whose hectic life included hotels and short stays with friends. “Life was pretty fragmented and actually felt like a flight delay – it’s a complicated life.”
A pop album with a few surprises, Songs For Flight Delays focuses on the process of trying to figure things out while living a nomadic life and chance encounters with many people.
The album features the recently released FOMY (Fear of Missing You) along with six other new songs.
“I’ve been sitting on these songs for a season and I can’t wait for people to hear them and hear what I’ve been doing and the thought processes to get here,” says Sebell. “From a purely musical perspective, a lot of these songs were literally me walking into a studio for the first time, meeting someone new and trying to find common ground.”
He says much of the album was very instinctual, based on the notion of making a song that matters, tells his story and is musically interesting and captivating.
“There is something very powerful about going with your talent and trusting your gift and instincts,” he says, noting there is a strong digital influence in his new music.
“It’s not the most organic music I’ve made but it was actually really fun to have no rules, no wrong decisions.”
Just as the album offers some surprises for his fans, Sebell says he was surprised by the reaction to one of the songs, which he thought would go no further than the television program.
“Darkside was more like a project that played on MTV,” he says, pointing out he thought it would be a one-off for a TV show or movie. “I wrote it in maybe two hours, produced it then and there and it turned out to be a fan favourite.”
Sebell has been nominated for two Canadian Indie Awards (Pop Artist of the Year, Pop Song of the Year) and his popular track, See Through the Heart was featured in its entirety on CTV’s “Saving Hope.”
More recently his song, Till the Sun Burns Out can be heard in Rogers Canada’s ad for the Texture Magazine App.
A Canadian Billboard top-10 summer anthem, the song broke Top 40 radio in just over a week and a half.
Sebell followed that success with, Promiseland, which debuted on Spotify’s Canadian Viral chart at #1, and later a remix of the same song by Vancouver’s STINT (Gallant, Banks, Demi Lovato), which reached #3 on the HypeMachine global remix chart.
This is the artist’s first tour in seven years.
“This is a fun, energetic, pretty stripped down band… more like performance art,” he says. “It’s less of a concert and more of a musical experience.”
Related link: Sun shines on Sebell
The tour launches on Feb. 2 in Toronto, where the show is already sold out, and makes stops in Ottawa, New York, Nashville, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Edmonton, Calgary, Salmon Arm, Kelowna and Vancouver.
Sebell is excited to be performing at Soho House in Lower Eastside during New York Fashion Week.
Popular with “A-listers,” Soho House is part of a worldwide chain providing a home from home for people working in the creative industries.
“On every tour there’s a few cities you can’t wait for and Salmon Arm is one of those. It started in SAS with music teacher Brian Pratt-Johnson, who was so supportive and allowed me to experiment,” says Sebell. “People who have walked through the journey have been with me from the beginning.”
Sebell performs two shows at the Salmon Arm Secondary Theatre on Sunday, Feb. 18. Doors open at 4 p.m. for the matinee and at 7:30 for the evening show.
On tour with Sebell and opening the show is up-and-coming Montreal pop artist Sara Diamond.
Sebell says he came across her work on Spotify when he was looking for an opening act and fell in love with her music, which is a mix of R&B, soul and pop with some hip hop.
Tickets are available at Acorn Music, Drivers Car and Truck Sales and online at www.sebellmusic.com/tour.
