How will empathetic people survive the troubles of this time? How do we rescue our overburdened spirits from overlapping disasters such as rising fascism and climate collapse? And from where can we summon the power to heal ourselves, our communities, and the planet?

These are the animating questions behind singer, songwriter, and storyteller Shannon Curtis’s upcoming album Good to Me—Curtis’s 10th studio album in as many years. 

Confronted in late 2021 with near-paralyzing anxiety brought about by the increasingly fraught state of the world, Curtis aimed her angst at her journal. Using tools she acquired in 12-step recovery, she set out on a quest for self-healing, with the intention of nurturing her personal sense of peace and agency in a world on fire.

The journal entries became 80s-inspired synthpop songs, influenced in equal measure by the textural angularity of Kate Bush, the Blade Runner-esque futurism of Vangelis, the stripped-back propulsion of Yazoo, and the hopeful joy of OMD. 

The result is a song journey that took Curtis through a practice of identifying failed coping mechanisms (“From the Inside Out”), coming to terms with radical acceptance (“Be With What Is”), learning to trust her inner truth (“The Silent Sea”), and reconnecting to her serenity and power (“I Am”)—even as the world continued to burn. 

The extended Good to Me album project aims to illuminate a path for others to undertake this same journey for themselves—complete with a companion book and scripted podcast coming in 2023.

Although Curtis has been making music for 25 years—first as the frontwoman for a Christian-lite rock band in her twenties while a pastor’s wife, then as a chanteuse divorcée composing broken-hearted love songs after leaving both her marriage and her religion—she found her stride when she stopped trying to “make it” and instead leaned into the community of people that had formed around her music over the years.

Curtis subsequently spent close to a decade performing intimate house concerts all over the United States, each one hosted by a member of her community of supporters. The book she published in 2014 to help other artists do the same debuted at #1 on Amazon’s Music Business Best Sellers list. 

Curtis’s community had shaped her approach to live performance in unexpected ways; as she realized during her house concert tours the power her music had to help people find deeper connection with themselves and one another, it began to shape her writing as well.

Her first widely visible success with this new mode of writing as intentional act of service came with 2015’s viral crowdsourced video “I Know I Know,” which featured clips of fans sharing their experiences with mental health and other personal struggles. The wider exposure from “I Know I Know” led to Curtis’s appearance on a TED stage, which helped give birth to her signature live performance style: a marriage of songs, theatrical storytelling, and score, bringing audiences along on a narrative journey of self-discovery.

The pandemic gave Curtis renewed resolve to use her music as a way to engage her community in connection and healing; it also gave her more time at home to explore and hone a new musical direction, a process which saw her teaching herself synthesizer and drum-machine programming and taking on most of her own production. 

The first fruit of this experimentation was her 2021 album 2020101, for which Curtis did extensive story-collecting research in her online community regarding their experiences of pandemic life in 2020. 

Curtis’s new sound generated some new results: the songs “One Thread” and “Breaking Ground” from 2020101 were regional commercial AAA radio hits. This trend has continued with the title song from Good to Me, which has so far spent three months in the listener top 5 on KBGE in coastal Oregon.

Working with her husband, producer/mixer Jamie Hill (Jens Lekman, Chris Bathgate), Curtis used the pandemic-induced touring pause to reimagine once more her approach to live performance. With the release of Good to Me, the pair will be moving out of living rooms and backyards and into theaters and alternative performance spaces as a two-person synth-pop band, complemented by a dramatic storytelling-and-multimedia experience. 

Good to Me is out December 2, 2022 on Curtis and Hill’s longstanding DIY label Saint Cloud Records, which the couple runs from their home in Tacoma, Washington.

***NEW  MUSIC COMING OUT IN 2026 ***

From the studios of Montreal’s Trebas Institute to an up-and-comer in the ever-growing Halifax music scene, Phyl La Ferriere and his band Landing Sound – formerly The Wax – have accomplished a lot in a short amount of time. 

It was an internship in Halifax, after two years at Trebas, with popular rocktronica group The Jimmy Swift Band that gave La Ferriere, from Quebec City, a first-hand look of the thriving community that is East Coast music. In awe of the talent and enthusiasm for his passion in the Maritime’s largest city, La Ferriere made Halifax his permanent home and focused on starting his band. 

After meeting Adam McLellan – AKA Snug, a talented synth player and electronic producer – and a pile of hard work, the two completed an EP in two weeks and started playing live shows, a lot. 

The hard work soon paid off: not long after La Ferriere was awarded Nova Scotia’s Emerging Artist Recording Grant. Along with a few musicians that he and McLellan (Synth, SNUG) had met along the way -- Jeff Mayhew (drums), James Spray (Keys / co-songwriter) and James Arsenault (Bass, TWRP) – the group booked time in the Old Confidence Lodge in Riverport, N.S., and with help from sound technician Colin Crowell, produced The Wax’s first record, “Waiting Room.” 

After polishing the band’s lineup, La Ferriere and the crew toured ruthlessly from April 2012 to April 2013, playing no less than 67 shows all over Eastern Canada. 

With two years of non-stop focus on The Wax in his wake, La Ferriere took a break from the recording, promoting and touring to spend some much-needed time with his family and write new songs, playing only a few shows here and there, mostly in his home province. 

Now back in the swing of things, La Ferriere is working on a set of brand new songs that feature former members of The Wax along with some new additions. Under the name Landing Sound, the rock alternative group is on pace to release its newest work in the summer of 2019. 

There have been a few highlights along the way: 

January 2015: Featured in movie "Hard Drive" produced by William D. MacGillivray (http://harddrivethemovie.com/blog) 

May 2013: WON GOLD in the Coast's Best of Music readers' survey in the best artist to be blown away by category 

Oct. 2012: Reached the semifinals at the Indie Week Music Festival in Toronto and had songs in rotation of 11 different college radio stations across Canada 

Sept. 2012: Featured in “Under the Radar,” (a U.S./international magazine) for October Edition 



"THE MEMBERS OF HALIFAX band the Wax are working hard to become rock stars with their electronically-infused tunes, but they might become film stars along the way, too."
-Stephen Cook, Chronical Herald

"People took notice, with the group featured in Under the Radar and performing as semi-finalists at Toronto's Indie Week."
-Matthew Ritchie, The COAST

"Phyl La Ferriere’s eerily haunting vocals complimented the fast fingers of keyboardist James Spray to create a sound reflecting a more aggressive Radiohead. The boys of The Wax loved to dance and the close-knit audience seemed to thrive off of La Ferriere’s energy" 
- Cory Beetham, GUFF magazine 

"Saw these guys live and picked up the album. 
they've got a fantastic, full sound. The album is a good showcase of the WAX's abilities as the band cruises through some really great up-tempo tracks and some mellow cuts toward the album's end. The band has mastered catchy riffs and the vocalist displays a wide range from high-pitched wails to softer moments. Highlights on the album are "Rift" and "Eon Highway", two great electronic tracks that raise the blood pressure and are certainly danceable. "Militant" and "N.Y.K." are a bit slower, but extremely catchy. This is a great release debut release for the group and hopeful" - Warwick (iTunes)

"HEROES BACK IN TOWN"
-"Opening for The Town Heroes was The Wax, a band who wears the likes of The Smiths and Placebo on their sleeves and who’s different-yet-familiar sound managed to get the ever-growing crowd tapping along. Playing to a rather intimate audience, Phyl La Ferriere’s eerily haunting vocals complimented the fast fingers of keyboardist James Spray to create a sound reflecting a more aggressive Radiohead. The boys of The Wax loved to dance and the close-knit audience seemed to thrive off of La Ferriere’s energy. Chants and clap along were well received by everyone who made it to the Seahorse early enough to see the show kick off."

by Corey Beetham - Guff Magazine

"Stacks of WAX"
The Wax release a new album of electronic-rock on the city, Friday at the Marquee
by Matthew Ritchie

For recording artist Phyl La Ferriere, Quebec City may be a great place live, but it's not the ideal city to make it as a musician.

"I wouldn't say it's the right place to start a band, La Ferriere says.

So he left home and enrolled at Montreal's Trebas Institute to study audio engineering. But upon graduation, it was time to find an internship. That's when Craig Mercer of the Jimmy Swift Band invited the young engineer to Halifax to help record their new album.

But once La Ferriere landed on the east coast, he soon discovered it was the ideal music scene to settle down and start fresh.

&quot;I just realized there were so many good musicians in Halifax,&quot; he says. &quot;I thought it would be the perfect place to start a project.&quot;

After receiving an emerging artist grant from Tourism Nova Scotia in March 2011, he met classically trained synth-keyboardist Adam McLellan. Together, the two would form The Wax, an electronic-rock hybrid that blends La Ferriere&#39;s love of down-tempo electronica with Peter Gabriel and Metric.

The duo hit the studio last summer to record its debut album, Waiting Room, at Riverport&#39;s historic Confidence Lodge recording studio. Recorded by Colin Crowell (JSB, Rich Aucoin), La Ferriere took a hands-off approach to the engineering of the album so he could focus on songwriting and arrangement. &quot;I hate doing two things at the same time,&quot; he says, laughing.

After laying down the vocals at home in Halifax, the band spent a year mixing and mastering. In that time, the group recruited St. FX jazz-grads Doug Scurfield and Greg Melchin to round out the live band and provide the chops necessary to recreate La Ferriere and Spray&#39;s time signature-shifting vignettes.

People took notice, with the group featured in Under the Radar and performing as semi-finalists at Toronto Indie Week.

With a solidified line-up, La Ferriere says he and McLellan are ready to think about the next album and hope to expand their sonic palette. - The Coast

"Wax works hard on new projects"
THE MEMBERS OF HALIFAX band the Wax are working hard to become rock stars with their electronically-infused tunes, but they might become film stars along the way, too.

On Saturday night, the Wax launches its new CD Waiting Room at the Seahorse Tavern, but it’s got another shot at notoriety in the works with a nightclub scene in the upcoming William MacGillivray film Hard Drive, where their performance provided more than just background music.

“It was a blast, there was actually a staged fight that broke out during our set, so that made it memorable,” says Wax keyboardist and vocalist James Spray.

“That was so weird, because we had to pretend playing along to our recording that was playing in the monitors, and it was so different for us,” adds guitarist and singer Phyl La Ferriere.

“We had to become actors, basically, and we couldn’t look each other in the eyes or we’d just start laughing.”

Going by the amount of footage captured by the award-winning director of Life Classes and Ron Hynes: The Man of a Thousand Songs, it seems like the Wax gets its fair share of screen time in Hard Drive, a title that also reflects the band’s determination to succeed.

“I think they liked our energy, that’s what Phyl brings to the stage and we all feed off of it, right away,” says Spray. “We get our drive from this guy being at the helm. I don’t know what happens when he gets on stage; it’s like he just drank a pot of coffee or something.”

You can feel that energy on Saturday at the Seahorse with the Wax and their guests the Dead Tenors, Runaway Dawson, Sonny Newman and a post-band DJ set by Wax collaborator Adam McLellan, a.k.a. Snug. Originally from Quebec, La Ferriere credits Nova Scotia’s Jimmy Swift Band with drawing him to the East Coast, curious about the kind of scene that could spawn such a unique hybrid of rock and electronic sounds.

He began recruiting band members online, and the lineup evolved between the recording of Waiting Room at Riverport’s Old Confidence Lodge studio and its current roster.

“When I got this guy, that’s when everything changed,” says La Ferriere, pointing at his classically-trained pal Spray. “Suddenly I had a partner who could help take us as far as we could go.”

So far, the steps are going well. Besides filming Hard Drive last fall, the Wax also made the Indie Week Canada showcase competition semifinals in Toronto — necessitating a drive back there from Montreal after thinking they hadn’t made it in — and received some positive feedback from international delegates at East Coast Music Week interested in helping the band take its music further.

“I always point to Metric. If a band like that can make it in Canada, the Wax is sort of like that,” says La Ferriere. “I’m not a girl singer. I guess maybe that could help, but that’s the best example we can shoot for, and it’s cool that they’ve made it that big for a band from here (Canada).” -by Stephen Cook - The Chronicle Herald

"Phyl La Ferriere waxes lyrical"
The Wax is aiming to bring the best of rock and electronic together, creating a sound that's intense, with lots of different sounds.
It may be an unlikely marriage, but The Wax pull it off.

"It can be hard to manage; it seems like rock people like rock, and electronic people like electronic - they don't like each other that much," said frontman Phyl La Ferriere, laughing. "But we're trying to bring the two worlds together." The Quebec City native formed The Wax a few years back when an internship through his audio engineering course sent him to work with Halifax indie/jam/electonrica/rockers The Jimmy Swift Band.

After living in the city for a bit, La Ferriere knew he was in fertile ground to launch his own project.

"In Quebec and Montreal, you ask everyone and they all play hockey, not one person doesn't play hockey, otherwise it's almost weird. Well, here in Halifax, everyone plays music. It's just in the culture," he said when we reached the band late last week.

The Wax are preparing to release their first full-length album, Waiting Room, in August or early September. Produced by Colin Crowell (Rich Aucoin, Jimmy Swift Band), the album displays the group's knack for blending elements of electronica, rock and pop. La Ferriere says he likes the way the record turned out, but can see the band's sound shifting further toward the synthesizer.

"I like having vocals, and I like original ideas, but sometimes we find it hard to find original ideas with just an acoustic guitar. So that's where you have the electronic and synth, you have no limits for sound," he said.

And like any other pulse-driven music, it's best live. "It's not the kind of music you can ignore, not like background or bar music to just drink beer to. It's pretty intense with lots of different sounds."

----

Fredericton Check out Halifax-based The Wax when they play The Capital, 362 Queen St. in support of Fredericton's The Westerburg Suicides and Coral Bear on Thursday, June 14. The show starts at 10:30 p.m. and is free until 11 p.m., then you're looking at $15. - Here (Jon Macneill)

Mixing all the appealing sounds of Celtic groove, Americana folk, and stripped back-soul, Ewan Macintyre and his band take the listener through dazzling folk roots stories—filled with pizzicato cello and fiddle strings, warm and wavy guitar hooks, and of course, Macintyre’s raw, but soothing voice.

Jesse Potter is following