bigcheese.ca

In the spring of 2004, Nova Scotia singer-songwriter Christine Crawford heard from an inside source that the Trailer Park Boys were brewing up a feature film. She rented the first two seasons of the series and watched them in one afternoon. By the end of the day she had the first draft of a song that opened on a Sunnyvale smile.

She took it to producer Tim Feswick. Feswick had started out recording bands in his Dartmouth basement, with Sons of Maxwell among his first clients, and by 2004 he was running Feswick Productions in Shelburne, a studio where the Crash Test Dummies had recorded. Set on capturing Sunnyvale and the people who live there, Crawford and Feswick worked on the song for a solid week. They built it around a bass line, rewrote the lyrics over and over, and recorded Crawford singing in the voice of a trailer park girl. The song was 'Plutonium Love', and it still needed a rapper.

On a moment's notice they called in MADMAN, a hardcore Trailer Park Boys fan whom the album booklet describes as a former member of the Halifax hip-hop group Universal Soul. He came to the studio for a single day, arrived with his own revisions to the lyric, and delivered his part in a voice that could have belonged to one of the boys.

A copy went off to Trailer Park Boys Productions. Crawford and Feswick had aimed to make the song as cheesy as possible, so they sent it in under the name bigcheese.ca. Series creator and director Mike Clattenburg and the cast loved it and bought 'Plutonium Love' for their Christmas special, Dear Santa Claus, Go Fuck Yourself, which aired on Showcase on December 12, 2004. Clattenburg liked the song enough to ask to hear more from the band.

There was no band and no second song. Crawford and Feswick went back into the studio and kept recording through the summer and fall. Their working joke for the album title was You Can't Do That in a Recording Studio!!!, and they set out to prove it wrong. The finished CD carries a Latin choir, a Gaelic dance mix, opera, coughing, laughter and gunshots alongside its pop and hip-hop songs, with titles like 'Motor Mouth', 'Boatman' and 'Snow Angels', a one-minute 'No Brainer', a nine-second 'Needle And The Damage', and a dance mix of 'Plutonium Love'.

Plutonium Love was self-released in 2005 as BC001. Every song was credited jointly to Crawford and Feswick and published through Tim Feswick Publishing. The booklet signed off with the single on the air, on sale over the internet, and the DJs standing by for the dance mix.

Crawford kept performing on the South Shore, playing the Osprey Arts Centre in Shelburne in 2004 and 2005, and by 2009 her newer songs were getting airplay on stations in Bridgewater and Yarmouth. Feswick moved his studio to the Broad River in Liverpool in 2005 and went on to produce records across the East Coast. Years later Crawford was back in the studio with him, singing additional vocals on Gravel and Quills by the Halifax band Buzzee Brown.

-Robert Williston