Toby's Theme (Cold As Ice) b/w Toby's Race

Kevin MacDonald studied voice and jazz piano at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, then took that training into the Halifax club scene of the early 1980s. He worked with a string of groups around the Maritimes and played keyboards in Steps Around The House, the Halifax new wave band that had made its name playing all-original sets in a market run on cover bands.

His first record came by way of a dog sled race. Toby McTeague, directed by Jean-Claude Lord for Montreal’s Filmline International, starred a teenage Yannick Bisson as a boy who takes over his injured father’s team and races it across northern Canada. Its theme, ‘Cold As Ice’, was written by Kevin Hunter and Peter Pringle, the Halifax-born singer-songwriter whose songs Anne Murray had recorded years earlier. The film opened in March 1986, and that spring Toronto’s Freedom Records issued MacDonald’s recording as ‘Toby’s Theme (Cold As Ice)’, his debut single. Hunter and Claude Demers produced it. The flip side, ‘Toby’s Race’, was an instrumental from the film written by Demers and J. Kaplan and credited to The Music Prose.

The song got a second life a year later. ‘Cold As Ice’ was nominated for Best Original Song at the 1987 Genie Awards, and then the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television mailed out its ballots without it. Filmline producer Pieter Kroonenburg spotted the omission. The Academy sent fresh ballots to all 800 voting members, ruled that only the corrected ones would be counted, and held voting open until March 9. Freedom president Scott Richards answered the headlines by rush-releasing MacDonald’s single back to radio.

-Robert Williston