What’s a nice kid like you. . .?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/03/2002 (8798 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BY now, you probably think you know everything there is about Remy Shand, the Winnipeg musician with a heavily hyped record coming out this month on Motown Records.

You’ve heard how the kid from West Kildonan discovered soul through a crate of records his construction-worker dad salvaged from a defunct Winnipeg disco.

You’ve heard how he recorded an entire album in his parents’ Garden City condo, writing all the songs, playing all the instruments and producing and engineering all the tracks himself.

And you’ve definitely heard how that CD, The Way I Feel, was good enough for the vaunted Motown label to scoop up and release as is, on March 12.

Yep, Remy Shand is the most talked-about new recording artist in Canada this year. But here at home, most people don’t much about the person behind the story, who might just be the most polite and well-adjusted 24-year-old in pop music.

“It’s almost like there’s something sinister or negative about what I’m doing, just because I wasn’t visible while I was working on this project,” Shand says from his adopted home of Toronto. “The reality is, I was working hard.”

Born in Winnipeg, Shand grew up in West Kildonan, picking up his father’s musical instruments by the age of three. By the time he was out of elementary school, he could play keyboards, guitar and drums, and also knew how to use a reel-to-reel tape recorder.

Encouraged by their son’s passion for music, Doug and Lana Shand decided to school Remy at home. Under Lana’s supervision, he studied at home, played music and worked in the family’s north end skateboard shop instead of heading off to a conventional junior high school.

“I’d get up at like 9:30 in the morning, work to 11:30 or noon and when my mom wasn’t looking, I’d put on the headphones,” Shand recalls of his home-schooling experience, which also included the drudgery of formal exams.

“Looking back, I was able to focus on music and find my own identity without getting lost in the social struggle of being a young person.”

By age 13, in the early ’90s, Shand was playing with garage bands such as Mother Junkie Figure and Chelsea Drugstore. Eventually, one of his bandmates — Jaret McNabb, who now plays with indie-rock band The Paperbacks — helped convince him to attend Garden City Collegiate.

He spent Grade 11 at Garden City, playing in the school concert band and studying jazz under Winnipeg saxophone player and music teacher Ken Gold.

“He was always respectful and wanted to learn whatever he could,” says Gold, the only musician who plays on The Way I Feel other than his former pupil. “I had a lot of great students over the years, and he was definitely one of them.”

In the mid-1990s, Shand played in a series of more established Winnipeg indie bands, including Leaderhouse, Load and Furthur. But he quickly found collaborating with other musicians wasn’t for him.

“In bands, you get to the point where a lot of time you end up stepping on someone’s vision. Why create more politics? In my case, I just started doing my own thing.”

For Shand, that meant recreating the Motown vibe. He set up a home studio in his parents’ condo and proceeded to riff on the Curtis Mayfield and Earth, Wind & Fire albums he first heard as a kid.

“You could hear him through the walls,” says Lana Shand, a proud musical mom if there ever was one. “He got creative at night and we were sort of trying to keep things quiet.

“It was OK because he was always a hard-working, motivated person.”

Shand started making demo tapes of his home-studio noodlings and played them for people like his uncle Al Hunnie, a recording engineer who taught him to play bass, former Harlequin guitarist and music impresario Glen Willows and Gold. Eventually, one landed in the hands of ex-Winnipegger Steve Warden, a former radio DJ who now manages recording acts in Toronto.

Within a year, Warden brokered a development deal with Universal Music Canada. Then came the deal with Motown, after label president Kedar Massenburg fell in love with Shand’s sound.

The kicker was Shand’s ability to write, record and produce all by himself, just like recent Grammy winner Alicia Keys.

“For any musician, the only way to get your vision across is by being completely autonomous,” he says. “That way, there’s less struggle along the way.”

The only thing Motown did to The Way I Feel without Shand’s direct input was master the record outside of Winnipeg. The album was in the can by the summer, when Shand married his Winnipeg girlfriend, Maiko Watson of pop band Sugar Jones.

Watson, who thanked Shand in the liner notes of Sugar Jones’ debut album, was busy touring with the group through the summer and fall of 2001. She and Shand quietly married in July.

“It’s wicked. I had never been with a musician before. To me, that was always the missing ingredient, in the interest of finding the perfect balance in life,” he says of his marriage to the fellow Winnipeg pop star.

Watson forms part of his six-piece touring band, along with a third Winnipegger, guitarist Neal Chippendale, who previously played with Shand in the Grateful Dead-influenced Furthur.

On tour through the U.S. last month, the three encountered a mixture of curiosity and ignorance about their home town. It’s not like neo-soul acts from Canada sign to Motown every day.

At one point, an interviewer with U.S. TV music channel VH-1 asked Shand what it was like to grow up on a farm. Other people have asked him when he plans to move to America.

“They’re like, ‘What planet are you from?’ People think Winnipeg is farmland. I tell them they ought to come up here and check it out.”

In retrospect, Remy Shand isn’t the first kid from West Kildonan to make his mark on the music business. The ‘burb can also lay claim to Randy Bachman of The Guess Who and Priority Records founder Bryan Turner, the man who signed seminal gangsta rappers NWA.

And in today’s increasingly decentralized urban music world, where successful rap acts can come from Atlanta (OutKast), St. Louis (Nelly) or Toronto (Choclair) instead of only New York or L.A., it doesn’t matter so much that Remy Shand is a white kid from Winnipeg.

“Motown is building up a healthy roster of artists with their own different sound,” he explains, practically oozing confidence. “The dry spell is over. Motown is now synonymous with neo-soul, which is cool.”

The Way I Feel is in record stores on March 12.

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bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca