Halifax songwriting duo gets a boost from Hot Frosty
Storm Recorder's 'If I Could Touch The Sky' appears in Netflix's hit Christmas movie
Jesse LeGallais was pleased when the song If I Could Touch The Sky was chosen to appear in a Christmas movie.
As half of the Halifax songwriting duo Storm Recorder — the other half is Palmer Jamieson — it felt like a modest success.
But the movie ended up being Netflix's hit Christmas movie Hot Frosty — a story about a grieving widow who brings a handsome snowman to life.
The movie, starring Lacey Chabert (Mean Girls) and Canadian Dustin Wallace Milligan (Schitt's Creek) could mean a new phase for Storm Recorder and Jesse LeGallais's music career.
Legallais was interviewed by Portia Clark for Information Morning Halifax last week.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you get started writing music?
When I was a teenager, like 13 or 14, my parents listened to a lot of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals. That's all. They weren't really a musical family. We had a couple little keyboards lying around. My little sister and I just started playing the melodies from Phantom of the Opera and Cats. And I guess it spoke to me. From there, a friend of mine introduced me to some more rock-based [music] and kind of blew my mind.
You've done commercial songwriting, too. When did that start?
Back in the late aughts, I was doing band stuff, touring and living in Montreal. The band was signed to a publishing company. And what a publishing company does is it gets music synchronized with film or TV. So it will place songs [on shows like] The OC and Grey's Anatomy. That kind of started a new wave of using popular music to put in soundtracks of TV and film.
This company, started in Montreal — very small, very local — has grown internationally. But it had a new idea which was to just work with specific artists and try to get really good quality stuff so that people were hearing good things.
We were lucky enough to get picked up by them. After my bands ended and I had kids and we moved [to Halifax], I just maintained I would get songs in shows. And so we had a good working relationship and they kept me, a very small fry, around because they have really big artists now ... but I'm lucky enough to have carved a small niche in there.
Can you earn modest income from that?
I work a part-time job driving a delivery van. But ... I'm looking possibly this year to be transitioning entirely into music.
I gather there's a connection between this song and the Paris Olympics. And so how did writing this song, perhaps to go in the Olympic theme change into something for Netflix?
It's a strange world. You never know when you make something where it's going to end up. It was an idea I had just in my basement and I kind of liked it and I recorded it. And then a friend of mine was pitching to a Buddhist film and they decided not to use it.
And then the company we work with called Third Side Music said, "Well, we're pitching for the Olympics. Do you have anything inspirational?" And I said, "We have things that are kind of inspirational." So we gussied it up and they needed lyrics and vocals. I wrote lyrics and I wrote a melody and realized I'm not going to be the one to sing an Olympic song. So we got Kim Harris, who is a wonderful local singer and can belt like Adele. And she came in and just banged it out with us. We were just kind of on the couch yelling at her to 'Try this, do this more gospel,' and she was just doing it.
And we pitched it for the Olympics and didn't hear anything back ... And then about a month later, we heard a Christmas movie was interested and we thought, "Yeah, that's great. I'd love to get it out there.' I thought it was going to be a Hallmark Christmas movie, you know?
And then [Hot Frosty] came out last month, I guess, and it turned out that it's doing quite well.
The movie is called Hot Frosty. It's about this naive version of a hunky man who is Frosty and it's trending on Netflix. How does that translate for listens?
Quite well. People will all of a sudden start streaming the song. You'll get people who will buy it and then you'll get — because it goes in six cycles across [the world as the movie is released in different parts of the world] — so you get these kind of waves of people listening to it and it keeps coming back. And so that ends up being streaming revenue, which is very small. But if enough people do it, it translates into revenue, which is nice.
When does the song come into Hot Frosty?
The third act, when Frosty and the lead actress get together and have their big dance at a prom. It's the song that's playing as they're dancing.
What's it like watching that and listening to your song?
When these things happen, very often your song will be in a movie and it will be very quietly in the background. [In Hot Frosty] it takes over the scene and it becomes the soundtrack itself, which again is a surprise.
What could this mean for your career, do you think?
Well, you never know with these things, but it comes at a time where Palmer Jamieson, who is my partner in Storm Recorder, we've made a new project where we're a band, but we're also going to be doing songwriting for people and hopefully production for people and working in film and also just releasing traditional albums, kind of a different concept.
And we're just starting. And so this coming at the forefront, it's kind of fun because it's a different way to introduce us. Not at all the way I ever would have [imagined] in my too-cool-for-school youth.
With files from Information Morning Halifax
