Gillian Snider & Leslie STANWYCK

Gillian Snider & Leslie Stanwyck

BIO

Both Gillian and Leslie come from well known Canadian musician parents that worked for the CBC for several decades.  Growing up in the suburbs of Toronto,  their homes were far from typical suburbia.  Watching their parents making a great living playing music, they both grew up in recording studios and on television sets and they both saw well known musicians rehearsing and jamming in their homes all the time.  Growing up surrounded by musicians and studying music themselves at the Royal Conservatory in downtown Toronto, both Leslie and Gillian breathed, ate and lived music. Yet it wasn’t until they had both made lives for themselves years later in Saskatoon - some 3,000 kilometres away from their hometown - that these two women met. 

Gillian Snider is among some of the most talented musicians in Saskatoon.  She plays frequently and has toured across Canada several times, playing and recording with numerous bands.  She’s joined Mary Margaret O’Hara, and Eliana Cuevas on the stage and has also had the honour of performing the music of Joni Mitchell for the iconic woman herself.  She now fronts her own project of original music, The Whiskey Jerks.

Leslie Stanwyck joined the well-known internationally acclaimed band The Pursuit of Happiness and put out the platinum selling albums Love Junk and One-Sided Story.  Leslie has toured the world with Duran Duran, The Eurythmics, The Goo Goo Dolls, to name a few.  She then put together another renowned band with her husband Johnny Sinclair called Universal Honey and has had songs in regular rotation on the radio and dozens of placements in television and movie soundtracks.  Now in Saskatoon she fronts her original band Tucker Lane.

In 2016, after meeting at the suggestion of Leslie’s husband, they instantly became friends.  As they got to know one another, sharing stories of their past and present, the conversation naturally moved toward songwriting.  They agreed to get together and write.  After one session the album was born!

The album Parallels offers 12 original songs that will warm your heart. Recorded during visits with laughter and jamming (much like what Gillian and Leslie experienced as children in their musical family homes) Parallels will take you through a neo-folk, psychedelic blues musical journey.  Their influences are vast, from the jazz, classical, blues and country they grew up with to the rock of the 70’s, mixed in with a little punk and 90’s alternative.  This collaboration brings together Gillian’s clever, cocky and often dark lyrics with Leslie’s gift of sweet melody and a hook that will stay in your head - which is befitting of an album that is the result of the long parallel journey that these two talented women took to finally meet.

Parallels’ first release, Smiling In the Cold, is out now.  The album is due to be released in September 2019.

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