Smokeshow

Before he was Frazer Mac, Fraser McGregor was the smallest player on the Screech Owls. Born in Toronto on August 3, 1988, he worked in Canadian film and television from early childhood, with his first screen credit in J.F.K.: Reckless Youth (1993). Over the next decade he shared sets with Burt Reynolds, Patrick Dempsey, Jason Priestley and Elizabeth Perkins, and from 2001 to 2002 he played Simon Milliken, the tiny, nervous, hardest-working member of the hockey team, in 26 episodes of YTV's Screech Owls, adapted from Roy MacGregor's mystery novels. Further roles followed in Time of the Wolf (2002), the TV movie Gilda Radner: It's Always Something (2002) and I Do, They Don't (2005).

Music ran alongside the acting. He studied voice with Elaine Overholt, the Toronto coach whose clients included Queen Latifah, Richard Gere, John Travolta and Renee Zellweger, and at sixteen he made the top 100 of Canadian Idol. He went on to the Popular Music Studies program at Western University in London, Ontario, graduating in 2010. While still a student he fronted PULSE, a Pink Floyd tribute band that sold out the Sound Academy in Toronto and Alumni Hall at Western, and he wrote and sang 'Let's Walk For The Cure', the theme song for Ovarian Cancer Canada's national fundraising walk.

Western rewired how he thought about songs. He had grown up believing a song had to come from an honest place. By graduation he was certain that hits share an anatomy: verse, pre-chorus, a big chorus that arrives within the first 30 to 45 seconds, a second hook and a bridge. As he explained it to Western's news service, you don't need to fall in love to write a love song, or have a wild night out to write a dance song. His one rule of thumb for pop was "keep it simple."

Smokeshow, recorded in 2011, put that method to work. Mac wrote all eleven songs and published them through his own company, Smokeshow Music Publishing Inc. The producer was Paul J Zaza, the veteran Toronto film composer behind the scores for Porky's and A Christmas Story, working under his Zaza Sound Production banner. Sessions ran at Canterbury Music in Toronto, where Mårten Tromm programmed, engineered and mixed most of the record, with Daniel Crystal and Sam Ibbett handling the rest. Andrew Heppner co-mixed 'For You', Zaza himself played piano on the closer 'Scuffmarkz', and Phil Demetro mastered the album at Lacquer Channel. Mac shares the programming and vocal arrangement credits on several tracks and sings all of his own backing vocals.

However deliberately he built Smokeshow to a pop formula, fame is the subject it keeps returning to. The title song is a debut announcement from a newcomer who wants to be in magazines, rolls through rooftop parties in Bugattis behind jet-black Lennon glasses, and signs off with TMZ photographers snapping away and fans asking for his autograph. In 'Goodbye', the album's ballad, a couple who never fought splits because his big dreams are in Los Angeles, and he admits he has become obsessed with fame. 'Addicted' closes on Hollywood love, 'Plastic' opens on being idolized or despised, and in 'Walk Of Shame' he trails a hungover party girl in sunglasses whom strangers mistake for Kesha. The booklet photographs finish the picture: fedora, aviators and a leather vest over a David Bowie T-shirt.

The club songs are funny. In 'Blackout' he wakes up beside a stranger after too much Jack, his pants inside out on the floor, and keeps circling back to the one thing he really needs to know: did the DJ play his track? 'Dance Until We Die' stretches a pickup line across a whole song, complete with a condo around the block and a promise to be her Ray-Ban man. 'Green Light' is a cheater's anthem, sung by a man who feels trapped in his relationship, gives himself permission and refuses to apologize. 'Eat Me Alive' struts back into the singles scene with puns on his own name and a Beatles joke about having the swagger of a Starr.

Smoke drifts through the whole record, from the title to the man in 'Green Light' who wants to be lit up and blown out like smoke, to 'Addicted', where love is a nicotine craving and he is the one who can't quit. 'Plastic' falls for a programmed, carbon-copy partner who speaks electronic, then decides he is better off alone. The album ends in its bleakest place. 'Scuffmarkz', with Zaza on piano, is sung to a partner lost to alcohol, cocaine, heroin and crystal, who sits and smokes while he works two jobs and they both go broke. Three songs earlier, in 'For You', those same two jobs were a love pledge, alongside opening her car door, paying the bills and walking on the street side of the sidewalk. By the last track that devotion has become an exit, and he walks out determined to be more than the scuff marks on her wooden floor.

The songs went straight out into competition. 'Green Light' won the Pop grand prize in the 2011 John Lennon Songwriting Contest, bringing more than $7,000 in studio equipment. In 2012 'Goodbye' and 'Walk Of Shame' took two of the top three nomination spots in the same contest, and 'Walk Of Shame' won the new Electronic / Dance / Ambient category of the UK Songwriting Contest while placing as a Pop finalist. Judge Kipper Eldridge, Sting's producer, called it a hit. That January, radio producer Bobby Gale heard 'Blackout' at the Songwriters Association of Canada's Songposium seminar and offered to take it to radio. Working with Gale, Mac had 'Walk Of Shame' and 'Addicted' on the Canadian Hot AC charts in 2012, and in October he was named Best Electronic Artist at the Toronto Independent Music Awards by a final jury that included Bif Naked and Jully Black.

Those wins moved him behind the scenes. Mac founded The Market Kids, a Toronto songwriting and production collective, and began working in writing camps for labels, publishers and artists in Canada, the United States, the UK, Switzerland, Spain and the Netherlands. 'Airplane Mode', a Market Kids co-write, reached the semi-finals of the 2016 International Songwriting Competition in both the Unpublished and Pop/Top 40 categories.

At the 2018 SUISA songwriting camp in Switzerland he sat down with Swiss singer Luca Hänni, North Vancouver-born writer Laurell Barker and producer Jon Hällgren, and they had the bones of 'She Got Me' within a day. Finished with Lukas Hällgren and Jenson Vaughan, it was Switzerland's entry at the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest in Tel Aviv, where it finished fourth with 364 points, one of the country's best results in decades. At home it went to number one for three weeks, Hänni's biggest hit, and earned a Swiss Music Awards nomination for Best Hit. The same team followed it with 'Bella Bella', and both songs anchor Hänni's 2020 album 110 Karat.

Eurovision kept calling. Mac co-wrote 'Empires' for Alicja Szemplińska, chosen to represent Poland in 2020 before the pandemic cancelled the contest, and 'Hero' for Raylee in Norway's Melodi Grand Prix 2021. His credits have since reached K-pop with 'Rolla Skates' for Jo Yuri and dance music with 'All In' for YouNotUs and Laurell in 2024. He now counts more than fifty songwriting credits, and the Smokeshow Music Publishing name printed on his 2011 CD still appears in the publishing lines.

-Robert Williston