Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Kissel bringing some country to playhouse

The boy from Flat Lake has been around the world.
kissel
Brett Kissel

The boy from Flat Lake has been around the world. To get from the family farm all the way to the Grand Ole Opry required a lot of travel for Brett Kissel, but he hiked all the way to the top of the Canadian country music industry and added Nashville as a bonus. He is the repeat winner of the Male Artist of the Year at the Canadian Country Music Awards 2016 and '17, plus 11 other CCMA trophies and a Juno Award (plus two more nominations).

He is the reigning CCMA Interactive Artist of the Year (for the fifth year in a row) and this weekend he shows Prince George why he constantly picks up that particular award. He and his fans have a special relationship, a personal bond that goes beyond usual fandom. It is forged by that word that's propelled his whole career: travel.

He has two shows at the P.G. Playhouse - tonight and Saturday night - at the tail end of his epic We Were That Song national tour. He, his band, his crew and his family (he and wife Cecilia have two daughters, both under the age of three) have been on their musical junket for more than nine months. In fact, their number of performance dates and width of travel must be a record.

"It is!" Kissel told The Citizen at a stop in Kamloops where he had a concert and some family to visit. "We're at 120-some (concert dates on the one tour). From every company we've spoken to - SOCAN, looking at other people's set lists, CARAS who does the Juno Awards, other artists, every agency - this is without question the most extensive tour that has ever happened in Canadian music history: the most dates and the furthest reach. We've been to every province and territory. So we are awfully proud to have that statistic."

He said his gratification and gratitude is dedicated to the band and tour crew who had to buy into the idea of setting a national record of that scope. It asked a lot of those support people, and they answered with a resounding yes.

"Everyone certainly did buy in to this concept of doing a massive tour and us making history together. I'm very thankful. And now that we've been able to implement it, we have had so much fun, my band and my crew and my family. This has been, without question, the most remarkable experience of our careers, of our lives, to do the ultimate Canadian road trip. It has been magical."

The biggest tip of his stetson goes to wife Cecilia who had to juggle the many fiery batons of family and business.

The closing scene in the song's video, he said, never literally happened (Brett weary from long days of touring, shows up at the family house ahead of schedule to surprise Cecilia while she has travelled to his hotel on the road to surprise him with an unscheduled visit) but many smaller incidents of crossed wires established that scene in the video script.

Kissel's gratitude for his bride spilled over onto the pages of his notebooks, as he did what so many songwriters do. He penned an ode to his love. Unlike most composers, though, he put her name right in the title, and unlike an even larger number of scribes, this peppy song has shot into the charts. According to the BDS Radio chart, Cecilia is the week's most added song among the nation's radio stations.

"It's a big, big song for us. We believe it will be a career song for me," said Kissel, who already knows that feeling well from stick-around songs like It All Started With A Song, Raise Your Glass, 3-2-1, I Didn't Fall In Love With Your Hair, the humourous Hockey Please Come Back, and this latest album's title track We Were That Song. All of them are tunes that have outlasted their marketing window and show signs of becoming standards of the Great Canadian Songbook in the fullness of time.

To name your spouse in your song, though, and to feature her in the hit video goes against what a lot of spotlight artists do. Many celebrities guard their privacy like junkyard dogs, but here are the Kissels openly sharing their life behind the scenes. Why?

"A lot of it has to do with the support I get from my wife Cecilia," he said. "She is very much willing to share a lot of aspects about our personal life with our fans, and publicly."

She even has her own fans and on-the-road community, he added. When you meet as many people as they do, inevitably each person on the tour will make friends and acquaintances even if you are years between visits.

Kissel was last in Prince George three years and one week ago.

Tickets are available at Central Interior Tickets while they last.