Anniversary Cheers: Six Shooter Records celebrates 25 years and re-releases Amelia Curran’s “Hunter Hunter”

This occasional Feature today explores the ground-breaking Toronto-based record label Six Shooter Records and its latest re-release under its Silver Series banner.

Today we celebrate 25 years of one of the most authentic, independent and ground-breaking roots music record labels, Toronto-based Six Shooter Records. And we explore the re-release of the album that in effect established the bona fides of the label, Amelia Curran’s “Hunter Hunter”. Six Shooter was the brainchild of  Alberta-based Shauna de Cartier, then an early thirties corporate marketing executive with an MBA and a fast-track career that she gave up to start a record label. The business effectively started when de Cartier met with Luke Doucet, one of Canada’s most renowned roots artists, at a concert where he was fronting his band Veal.  De Cartier signed him up and then decided to relocate to Toronto and start a record label, where Doucet re-signed with Six Shooter, named, said de Cartier, “to invoke the maverick spirit of the west and our core characteristics of independence and determination”.

It was a brave move, especially as the company was initially run on something of a shoestring (well, de Cartier’s credit card to be exact):  “We were so indie, so DIY, so punk rock, even though the music we made wasn’t very punk rock”, she says. The driving force of music-lover de Cartier was to seek out singer-songwriters of the highest calibre, and especially ones who can deliver a great live performance. “Without that,” de Cartier believes, “an artist isn’t going to go very far“. Live music has always been “one of the main criteria in considering an artist for the label“, and it happens to be good for business. With her marketing experience and with British ex-pat Helen Britton as her business partner throughout, de Cartier established two sides to the company, using an artist-based business model to support and help develop artists under management, while enlisting a roster of recording artists to the label who largely fly under the musical banner known as Americana (or perhaps Canadiana, since for many years the artists who were signed to the label were all Canadian). But the preference was always for a holistic approach in which the artist is represented managerially by the record company that puts out their records. Such was her commitment to the quality of the music that gold records and Juno awards were not the motivation and indeed it was, in the early days, a question of the all-encompassing management side of the business that subsidised the costs of running the label (with success over time, both sides of the business now stand on their own financially). Britton is President of the management side, while de Cartier is President of Records. The company has always been run predominantly by female staff. However, de Cartier said in an interview with the writer “it was not the intention to be exclusively run by women”  but “it has helped to create a welcoming culture which has enabled us to attract the best of all genders” She also feels it has enabled them to spot opportunities that other labels might have missed due to an unconscious bias within the industry. And the company has become one of the most respected roots record labels, evidenced in part by the 38 Juno awards that their artists have won and the success of music festivals that they have organised over the last 10 or 15 years.

The original motto, the wonderfully pithy  “life’s too short to listen to shitty music“, gained a lot of traction and it still appears on the back of many T-shirts. As time passed and the label established itself, a new, and the current, motto is ‘I can live forever’, the lyrics from a song by one of the label’s artists. “Our new motto speaks to the power of art to outlive us all“.

There is also a very strong commitment (reinforced in a mission statement on their website) to the recognition of the inhumane treatment handed out to the indigenous peoples of Canada in times past. As de Cartier told me “it’s common practice for organisations to include land acknowledgments on their websites and at live events or public gatherings”. It comes as no surprise to find that Six Shooter signed one of the most influential artists in Canadian music history – Tanya Tagaq, an indigenous inuk throat singer who has developed a local and international reputation (and not just for her singing): “signing her changed the course of the company, as she changed the course of the Canadian music industry” says de Cartier.

The afore-mentioned Doucet and his wife Melissa McLelland, who also perform as Whitehorse, were early signatures, as were Jenn Grant, Martin Tielli, NQ Arbuckle and bands The Rheostatics and Elliott Brood; but the artist who probably made people sit up and take notice of the label (and the artist herself) was Amelia Curran, whose 2009 Juno award-winning album is being re-released as part of the label’s Silver Series;  de Cartier explains: “”Hunter Hunter” is such an important album for the label and for Amelia. It introduced her to the rest of the country and world. Her previous (self-released) album “War Brides” was re-released in 2008 to cap off a real hot streak of success and singer-songwriter album releases. Then, when “Hunter Hunter” came in 2009 (and won Six Shooter’s first JUNO Award in 2010) it really galvanised our reputation as a home for the country’s best songwriters”.  Curran herself was delighted with the Six Shooter signing, describing it in an interview in 2009 as “a promotion” from the days of self-releasing her first three albums – even her parents were delighted – but the best part was that “brilliant” Six Shooter realised that Curran had by then been in the business for 10 years, so she “did not need training“; so “I have a really overwhelming sense of gratitude for Six Shooter“.

Since those early days, the label has greatly expanded its roster and now includes the likes of AUK favourites The Deep Dark Woods, The Dead South, William Prince, Trampled by Turtles and Sam Outlaw. The two last-mentioned are among a number of artists who have broken the Six Shooter mould, being artists from the USA.  At first, US artists were usually signed as license deals, often covering just the Canadian market only, but Sam Outlaw was a notable exception, now being part of the holistic management approach that Six Shooter operates.

Has the last 25 years been enjoyable or stressful? “It’s never just one or the other. There’s usually some element of stress involved in taking big swings and constantly striving to reach one’s goals, and that’s not a bad thing”  Not a bad thing indeed, for de Cartier was invited to the board of the Americana Music Association in Nashville in 2013, as well as being chair of the Canadian equivalent in 2015-6.

And so to Amelia Curran, a multi-award winner (17 times) and 30 time nominee and regarded as one of the most poetic and cerebral of songwriters.

Although Six Shooter had re-released Curran’s “War Brides” soon after she signed for the label, “Hunter Hunter” was the first album of hers that the label was fully invested in. In typical re-release world, the album has been remastered to give it a more expansive and spacious sound, and it is the first time that the album will be available on vinyl. Curran has a warm, mellow, slightly dusky voice and writes truly literate songs about love and loss, seeking and longing, using metaphysical imagery and metaphors that allow listeners to interpret the songs as they see fit. They are seemingly circumstances that Curran herself has lived through, given that she writes in the first person almost exclusively. When not writing songs or performing, she writes poetry and plays, and is an advocate for mental health awareness, one of the beneficial consequences of her own challenges with mental illness.

Her fine acoustic guitar playing is embellished modestly throughout with accordion, banjo, piano (Andrew Dale, of local group and backing singers, The Once), brilliant dobro (Sandy Morris) and occasionally with mild drums and distant horns. While the album is mostly slow, with a succession of quite gorgeous ballads, she occasionally goes all Cabaret-style, and nails that accordingly (‘The Company Store’ or ‘The Dozens’). The track which is delivered in a somewhat different style than the majority of the album (almost as a spoken poem) is ‘The Mistress’, perhaps her most well-known song. Part-obsession, part confession it describes the experience of the ‘other woman’ from that perspective: “and I dont need to take a breather / I’m on the outside looking out / yeah, I don’t need to see your papers /  cuz I know what you’re about / you had me by the bible and you had me by the belt / and you had me from the instant my cold love began to melt”.

Curran seems to turn out earworm melodies at will, as the first three tracks on the album attest. ‘Bye Bye Montreal’ is a farewell song without describing what the farewell specifically relates to (the city, a relationship? – there is grief in any event).  ‘All hands on a grain of sand’ has dobro playing beautifully in the background and if the chorus of ‘Ah Me’ doesn’t make you smile (and sing along), well…….  Dobro and gentle percussion drive this song. Then comes ‘The Mistress’, followed by ‘Mad World Outlive Me’  with sombre horns in the background of a particularly poignant song: “Outlive me, outlive me / I love you too much / Rubies and emeralds and Sapphires and such / Outlive me, outlive me / I love you too much / Coal into diamonds / Ashes and dust”.

The more upbeat ‘The Company Store’ is delivered in night-club mode, all hoarse and throaty, while ‘Julia‘ is another beautifully literate song about a past lover. ‘Tiny Glass Houses‘ has a lovely piano underpinning the acoustic guitar in a truly poetic song about memory and the reversal of time: “Drink til your sleeping / I love you that way / Like we are all babies; / All our beds are unmade / No memory has molded / Enough to forget / And our tiny glass houses / Are not built for us yet”.  Drink and bars seem to appear regularly in Curran songs , perhaps not surprising when she admits to finding writing a more creative experience when she is alone and has a drink to hand.

There are three more tracks that complete this outstanding album –’Love’s Lost Regard’ is a slow ballad underpinned by Geoff Panting’s mournful accordion, about the deterioration in the protagonist’s relationship: “When you abandon all manner of me / The concrete and angels’ ashes / With nothing to serve but your own memory”.

This is followed by the outstanding, gently rolling ‘Wrecking Ball‘ (not the Neil Young song, nor one of the 25+ songs with the same title) that explores the self-sabotage that we all experience and how we combat it:  “Jump the line and turn the key / Lose your guard, believe in me / I can love you best of all / I am the wrecking ball”  with its final couplet “You turn the page to reconcile / You see, I’ve loved you all the while” while ‘Last Call’ is a barroom-based ballad that ends with what might be a short-lived relationship kiss-off: “Time is an invalid inside us all / Leave all the lights on, we’ll waltz out the door / I never loved you, I’m sure”.  It is a very fine album indeed.

Curran has gone on to release a number of highly-acclaimed albums, all with Six Shooter Records. Six Shooter Records has gone on to widen the scope of their ‘roots’ music – Tanya Tagaq is one such, but the search continues for new fine songwriters and performers such as The Wet Secrets (a dance rock group), whose “I Can Live Forever” delivers the label’s motto.

Other albums have been, or will be, re-released during this anniversary year, but this is the album that really galvanised the reputation of the label, not to mention that of Amelia Curran. We should be grateful for both.