Twilight Hotel

Indie Entrepreneurs

While the much-anticipated death of the album as a physical piece of merchandise has corporate record labels running scared, indie bands have simply shrugged and kept doing what they’ve always done — finding innovative, creative ways to keep making a living from the music they love.

Take Twilight Hotel, for example. The folk duo, comprised of musical partners Brandy Zdan and Dave Quanbury, are among the latest of bands to come up with unique new ways to coax fans to shell out money for a CD.

Twilight Hotel is offering fans both a chance to pre-order their latest album and receive it before the official release date and also to nab some various perks, such as a personalized postcard or a one-of-a-kind painting. Amazingly, in fact — for an admittedly higher fee, those perks go right up to having the duo record “three cover songs of your choice just for you,” or even play a house concert for you and all your friends at some point in 2010. Cool — and who says indie musicians can’t be smart businesspeople?

Nominated for a Juno in 2009, the band performs haunting folk music of a style far more interesting than most in this oft-bland genre. Like a rickety, abandoned prairie farmhouse, Twilight Hotel is a shamble of near-broken down nostalgia that’s all the more beautiful because of its fragility. Appropriately conceived at the Winnipeg Folk Festival in 2002 after a chance meeting, the duo now commute to work from their new home in Austin, Texas.

The music business empire may be collapsing, but as long as bands such as Twilight Hotel are playing refreshingly original music while simultaneously giving the industry the middle finger, the music itself is clearly doing just fine.

-planet S magazine
Saskatoon, SK