Keeping warm in winter can always be difficult, but for the second year in a row, the Shivering Songs music festival is looking forward to bringing “warm music to a cold Fredericton winter,” as described on their Facebook page.
Shivering Songs is curated by Fredericton band The Olympic Symphonium, who released their third album – The City Won’t Have Time to Fight – during last year’s festival.
“We do so much,” said Kyle Cunjak, a member of the band and a festival organizer. “We’ve stepped things up a lot this year and we got a lot more people involved, which was great because we kind of needed it.”
Cunjak says he and his two bandmates, Nick Cobham and Graeme Walker, work alongside Capital Complex booking agent Zachary Atkinson and festival organizer Brendan MaGee to put Shivering Songs together.
Just before last summer, Cunjak and crew compiled a list of bands they’d like to invite to the festival. Narrowing down the list was just the beginning.
“We’ll have…to contact venues, we’ll have to contact artists that we want, issue contracts out. Some of us help out with sponsorship, some of us help out writing press releases, designing the website, designing posters, designing print material for ads and sending out press releases and stuff like that.”
According to Cunjak, most festivals have an artistic director who does a similar job as the five main organizers of Shivering Songs. Usually artists have to pay a submission fee that he said can cost anywhere between $5 and $100.
“We wanted to switch it up a bit and go into a different sort of style,” Cunjak said. “There are very few festivals that curate their own stuff where it’s all up to a few people.”
One of the main reasons The Olympic Symphonium decided to curate their own festival was to promote music they believed needed a venue to flourish. Cunjak said it’s sometimes difficult for folk and roots acts like his to find venues at festivals where they can play and have a quieter, more respectful audience.
“Our main mandate is to promote music that we think is beautiful music in a quiet setting,” Cunjak said. “These are all bands that thrive in [this] setting and that’s something that is kind of lacking sometimes from certain festivals and venues.”
Cunjak said he and the rest of the festival crew have learned a lot from organizing the festival last year, and so they’ve made adjustments where they felt necessary.
“We did some planning and expanding upon what worked last year and what didn’t, like the Bluegrass Brunch moving to a bigger venue. It warranted that because it sold out.”
Along with the venue change the festival will be adding a second night at the Wilmot Church, expanding upon the songwriters’ and authors’ circle and adding more shows at the Capital Complex and some free programming at the Cedar Tree Cafe.
Even though they’re more prepared than last year, Cunjak said curating and organizing Shivering Songs is still very stressful.
“I find that no matter how much effort you put into something it still comes down to being a lot of work last minute somehow, no matter how much you try to avoid that. There’s a lot of different stuff [to do], but we have more of a handle on it now and it’s only going to get better and better the more we do this. But we’re still learning along the way.”
For more information and a full schedule, check out the festival’s website.
