After some setbacks, the outlook is much brighter for amiable Canadian songster Corin Raymond.
Corin Raymond was having no luck at all. In 2008, the Canadian singer travelled to England for his grandmother's funeral. He was refused entry and banned from the country for a decade by British Immigration. The problem stemmed from an earlier incident, when he had run into trouble for performing at pubs without a work visa.
U.S. Immigration had no love for Raymond either. On his way to the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas, airport border guards in Toronto turned the troubadour away. He was making the flight not to play at the festival, but to work as a volunteer. The immigration official saw Raymond's guitar, figured him for a performer and wouldn't let him pass. Trip cancelled; no refund for the plane ticket.
But now, for Raymond, an amiable songster with a watermelon-sized heart, the outlook is brighter. This year, he has released a pair of albums and toured Canada and Australia. Finally, he has made it to the small time.
"The music industry has changed so much in recent years," Raymond said over a beer recently at Toronto's Cameron House. "The small time has always had an amateurish connotation. Those days are gone."
Raymond is currently wrapping up a national tour with Sean Cotton (his duo-mate in the Undesirables) that ends with a show at Toronto's Hugh's Room Friday. The folk-rock twosome's new album is Travelling Show . Earlier this year, Raymond released his solo record There Will Always Be a Small Time , the album and statement. The title song, a manifesto set to a Kristofferson rhythm, revels in a footloose lifestyle that allows him and others like him to thrive on what has become an open frontier - "I pay my bills and drink for free/ I'm sellin' records on my own/ the music's gone back home again," he sings, grinningly.
What Raymond is singing about is the loss of the music industry's middle man. He's thinking about house concerts, where common folk open their homes to music-loving audiences.
"There's an audience out there that wants to listen to the music undisturbed," says Raymond, whose Undesirables play a house show in North Vancouver. "They want to commune with it, absorb it into their own lives, take it home and feed their souls with it."
The small time isn't about small money. "It's not a purgatory, where I'm passing the hat forever," the Winnipeg-born songwriter explains. "The small time to me is a place in which I can make a very good living."
How much are we talking about? "Eighty thousand dollars a year isn't out of the question," he figures.
Raymond's albums cost roughly $30,000 to make. Fans help out, paying for the CDs in advance. What they get in return is a sense of power and a connection that iTunes and major labels can't match.
"It's taking music back into our own hands," Raymond reasons, "for both the artists and our audience. These are magic times."
Corin Raymond's Undesirables play the Old Crow House Concert Thursday in North Vancouver and Hugh's Room in Toronto Friday.
Brad Wheeler