One of Canada's most promising new voices in country music finally gets to sing a whole set of music to Prince George.
Andrew Hyatt has been here before. He was a feature performer on the Dallas Smith tour that came to CN Centre one year ago, but he didn't get to step out for more than a brief mid-show interlude. Now he's here opening for Tim Hicks and he gets to let loose a whole flurry of his work.
His latest sounds are off the fresh new EP he called Cain, which will fit with the EP he has coming only a few weeks away called Abel.
Add to that the hit singles off his critically acclaimed debut album Iron & Ashes that came out in 2017. He has a body of work and it's building.
Canada is just getting to know this down to earth country rocker. He was raised on a farm in the Sudbury area, worked a spell as an ironworker at the town's nickel mine, but ever since he could forge a career goal in his young mind, this is what he's wanted to do.
"There was a moment in Grade 5 or 6," he told The Citizen. "My sister had a boyfriend who was playing guitar and singing, and I was just like 'that's what I want to do,' and I went and got a guitar. I couldn't play it worth crap. I wasn't good enough to learn other people's music so I started writing my own. That kind of triggered it."
The mine is as big in Sudbury as the mill is in Prince George. If you can get on there, it's a tempting job to keep despite the routine and repetition of those sorts of professions.
He was a farm kid, so the hard work didn't scare him, but he just couldn't shake all the melodies in his head.
"It paid amazingly," he admitted.
"I was 21 years old, making upwards of $70,000 a year, working like a dog and hating every minute of my life. It definitely took a leap of faith, followed by five or six years of struggle, but it's started to pay off. I'm happy I made the transition."
The transition looked something like a diamond on a ring - shining, shining. It sounded something like On Me, the breezy single that branded him on the charts for the first time, making it into the Canadian Top 10 country songs. He got Love Drunk for awhile. He was definitely Livin' The Dream. (Both were singles that made good noise at the start of his ascent.)
In recent months, the Cain project has taken hold on national airwaves. My Kind Of Crazy is going loco on social media, Habit is unshakable, Some Dust Don't Settle Down is stirring, and Time For Lovin' You is clocking in right now too.
It's all building energy for the new mini-package coming out in December. The two, as the biblical Cain and Abel reference suggests, are companion pieces Hyatt thinks will be interesting to the audience. Abel is, he hinted "all stuff that I wrote. It's all from the heart and it's a little bit darker than the Cain stuff. It's a nice contrast record." Darker material, he added, "is where I live best."
Whether it's dark, mid-tempo, fun, or whatever the mood, it always opens a little window into a writer's personal life when an original work is unveiled.
"I do have that moment where I think 'do I really want the rest of the world to hear this?' but then I also feel like those are the songs that pay dividends, the songs people connect with," Hyatt said. "When you're really brutally honest about real-life scenarios, that's what brings people into the music."
He needed a writing break for awhile, after a few years of near constant writing, recording, touring and all the other toil of being your own small business operator, when you are also the product itself. It's tiring, but it's also exhausting, and there is a difference. Tired just needs some sleep and some nutrition and you're back to rights. Exhausted can pull your spirit into places hard to come back from.
Hyatt said one of the lessons he's learned from the other professions he's had leading up to country music is the importance of being deliberate about true life-balance and authenticity in how you spend your time and who you spend it with.
But, he added, you do yourself no good, and cheat your spirit, if you don't work hard at what you do.
"That's something the mine taught me. With the ironworkers, you'd do 20-hour days. I'd do shutdowns where we'd put in 80 hours in four days. You just learn to deal with it. You take micro-naps. I've been a bartender, I went to school to be a cop, I was a pastor at one point in time, I've done everything I thought I would enjoy and out of all of it this is what I love most, and I wouldn't trade it for the world."
You can see Hyatt's hard work firsthand when he joins Tebey and Tim Hicks on the Get Loud tour at CN Centre on Thursday night.
Tickets are on sale at the CN Centre box office or on the Ticketsnorth website.
