Great Canadian Song Quest is a Canadian songwriting contest, presented by CBC Music. The competition has been presented in three editions to date, in 2009, 2010 and 2013.
2009 edition
For the inaugural installation of Great Canadian Song Quest 13 Canadian musical artists, one from each province and territory, were asked to write a song about a location in their home province which was selected by a listener vote.
The resulting songs subsequently aired in a special presentation on the network, and were released to iTunes as a compilation album.<ref name=second>"CBC Radio 2 Ropes in Hannah Georgas, Two Hours Traffic and More for Great Canadian Song Quest". Exclaim!, September 15, 2010.</ref>
The competition was announced on September 7, 2009, and officially launched on September 28. Promoted primarily by Tom Allen's Radio 2 Morning and Rich Terfry's Radio 2 Drive, the first phase of the contest asked listeners to nominate a location in their province on the network's website. Listeners could then use various online tools, including Twitter, Facebook, online photo and video galleries and Blogger or WordPress blogs, to create a promotional campaign for their nominee.
In the second phase, listeners were provided with a shortlist of songwriters from each province, and were asked to vote on which artist would be chosen to write a song about their province's winning location.
The winning artists and locations were announced on October 26. The songs premiered on a network broadcast, and were released in album form on CBC Records and iTunes, on November 23.
All of the artists except Wainwright also performed their songs in a live concert at Toronto's Glenn Gould Studio theatre on December 15; Wainwright was unable to attend because she had recently given birth to her first child. The concert was aired on Radio 2's Canada Live in January 2010.
Chantal Kreviazuk's song, "In Waskada Somewhere", faced some controversy when she revealed in an interview with the Winnipeg Free Press that as she was unfamiliar with the town, she simply substituted the town's name into the lyrics of a song she had already written before the contest began. Martha Wainwright's contribution, "Four Black Sheep in the Night", also faced some early criticism for seemingly lacking an obvious connection to the location she had been given to write about, the Black Sheep Inn in Wakefield.
Track listing
Hey Rosetta!, "Old Crow Black Night Stand Still" (Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland and Labrador) Joel Plaskett, "On the Rail" (Cabot Trail, Nova Scotia) Catherine MacLellan, "Singing Sands" (Singing Sands Beach, Prince Edward Island) David Myles, "Don't Drive Through" (Hopewell Rocks, New Brunswick) Martha Wainwright, "Four Black Sheep in the Night" (Black Sheep Inn in Wakefield, Quebec) Hawksley Workman, "Where They Left it Wild" (Algonquin Park, Ontario) Chantal Kreviazuk, "In Waskada Somewhere" (Waskada, Manitoba) The Deep Dark Woods, "Charlie's (Is Coming Down)" (Good Time Charlie's in Regina, Saskatchewan) Jay Sparrow, "The Ballad of Mary White" (Badlands, Alberta) Oh Susanna, "Tough City" (Tofino, British Columbia) Lucie Idlout, "Road to Nowhere" (Road to Nowhere in Iqaluit, Nunavut) Dana Sipos, "Time Before Bones" (pingos of Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories) Kim Barlow, "Dawson City Loves You Back" (Dawson City, Yukon)2010 edition
A second edition of the competition was announced in September 2010. In response to some criticism that the 2009 contest resulted in an almost entirely folk rock-based album which seemingly overlooked other genres of music, artists for 2010 were preselected in advance to ensure a more diverse roster, although the song topics were still chosen by listener vote.
The theme of the 2010 compilation is roads. Nominations were open until September 21; following that, a voting period from September 22 to October 1 selected the winning road from each province, with the resulting songs scheduled for release as an album on October 22.
Notably, two of Canada's three territories ended up with unconventional choices. In Nunavut, which has comparatively few conventional roads to choose from, the winning road was the very same topic, Iqaluit's "Road to Nowhere", that had been the subject of Lucie Idlout's song in the 2009 competition, while in the Northwest Territories, the winning "road" was a river.