Biography

After Tuesday Promo Bio

The question on people’s minds? What – not when – is After Tuesday?
Many would say the answer is ‘Wednesday’. But two talented singer/songwriter/producers from Barrie, Ontario are hard at work to make sure you know the answer is also ’the vocal country duo consisting of Marty Beecroft and Glenn Coulson.’

Beecroft and Coulson first met in high school. These two best friends walked the same hallways, had the same teachers, were on the same school teams, and most importantly were in the same vocal music class. Inspired by their teacher they first performed together as part of an a cappella quartet for a school variety show. From the very beginning vocal harmony for the two was paramount. That has not changed.

By building upon a foundation of vocal harmony, constantly pursuing the perfection of their vocal blend, performing countless shows together since the age of 16, and developing their craft of songwriting over the years working with the best in the business, the country duo After Tuesday has evolved into something that can only be described as the “whole package”.

The guys have naturally evolved the ‘After Tuesday’ sound over the years into something unique and inspiring that can only come from years of singing together. It includes influences from trailblazers of the past while at the same time blazing a path of their own. Their sound has the perfect blend of the sonic textures of country music with the energy of contemporary rhythms. They seamlessly blend humour and humility with maturity and depth of emotion. But the foundation of their sound – and key to their success – has always been their soaring harmonies. “Legendary groups like Crosby, Stills & Nash, The Eagles and Alabama have always influenced us because of the vocal presence that those groups had”, says Coulson. “Sometimes people call us a ‘modern Everly Brothers’”.

In fall of 2006 After Tuesday released their self-titled debut album in Canada distributed by Royalty Records. The group had great success at radio from coast-to-coast and quickly gained a loyal following and a strong reputation for their entertaining, dynamic and vocally brilliant live show. In 2007 they performed with such well-known artists as Emerson Drive, Ron Sexsmith, Deric Ruttan, Lisa Brokop, Shane Yellowbird, Doc Walker, Johnny Reid, The Wilkinson’s, Adam Gregory and Jessie Farrell to name a few, plus made an appearance on Canada’s top national morning show CTV’s Canada AM.

The album was produced by CCMA ‘Producer of the Year’ Joel Feeney and included a depth of material written by After Tuesday as well as some top writers from Canada and Nashville such as Chris DuBois (Brad Paisley, Josh Turner), Cyril Rawson (Reba McEntire), Blair Daly (Big & Rich, Faith Hill, Keith Urban), Bryan Wayne (Chris Cagle) and Joel Feeney (LeeAnn Rimes) among others.

After Tuesday has a wealth of experience to draw upon to guide them on their journey. As half of the pop/vocal quartet V.I.P. (Voices In Public), they had a string of contemporary hit radio successes, videos in heavy rotation, mass national media exposure, and were involved in projects which had sales in excess of 200,000 units. Distributed by EMI in Canada and signed by BEV Musik in Germany, they toured extensively throughout North America and Europe. They won a Genie Award (Canadian Oscar) for ‘Best Original Song’ and won a Canadian Radio Music Award in 1999 for ‘Best New Group’ based on the success of their huge smash single “Just My Luck”. In 2003 Marty and Glenn, along with their V.I.P. bandmates, were cast in the prestigious role as the barbershop quartet in the Disney film remake of the classic musical “The Music Man” starring Matthew Broderick, Kristen Chenoweth and Victor Garber. Recently the guys have been expanding their musical horizons by scoring feature films and producing albums for other artists such as up-and-coming country star Derek James Tilley.

Beecroft and Coulson are currently writing for their sophomore release with their co-writers from Nashville, Vancouver and Toronto. “We are thrilled to start the writing process for this next step in our career,” states Beecroft. “We’ve been writing with some great co-writers like Deric Ruttan, Tebey, Lisa Brokop and Tal Bachman. We’ll build upon the success of our first album, take our trademark sound and raise it to the next level.”

What are you doing After Tuesday?

After Tuesday: Back Home Again

For the Canadian country trio that calls itself After Tuesday, its self-titled debut album is a moment of homecoming and liberation all at once. The past informs the present, and indeed is ever-present in the group members’ harmonic convergence, even as this effort points them to what should be an exceedingly bright future in their new incarnation.

New incarnation? Yes, because After Tuesday has passed this way before, as a quartet of cute, sexy, smartly choreographed 20-somethings called V.I.P (Voices In Public), singing well-crafted pop songs concerning matters of love, loss and yearning viewed through a youthful prism of life experiences. It was the late ‘90s, and V.I.P. rode the crest of the boy band craze to stardom in their native land.

But even then, with their slick veneer, their choreographers, and even someone who was credited with supplying “Image and Staging” services, V.I.P. was more than a prefab money machine. It’s founding members—Marty Beecroft, Glenn Coulson and Joe Heslip—had been singing tight, appealing group harmony together since 1991, after meeting in high school; in 1995 they added a fellow harmony enthusiast in Peter Luciano, and they had something going. They wrote a good deal of their own material, for starters, influenced by the smart songs and intricate arrangements of the likes of Crosby, Stills & Nash and the Eagles. They also had goals beyond their stardust aspirations. All the members went on to earn college degrees—Beecroft holds a degree in Kinesiology from Ontario’s University of Guelph; Coulson studied Communications and Theatre at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, where Heslip studied Classical Music; Luciano matriculated to the esteemed Berklee College of Music in Boston. Then, in 2001, after all the accolades and adulation V.I.P. had rightly earned, the group shut down the whole enterprise.

Beecroft, Coulson and Heslip did some soul searching, and knew that it was time to grow up, so to speak. Their own art told them that. Almost immediately, After Tuesday was born of what was an artistic homecoming on the part of the founding trio.

“Basically, we started growing up a little bit more in our songwriting, and it really lent itself to country as far as storytelling goes,” says Coulson. “And we really wanted to develop our harmony with the projects we were developing. V.I.P. did a tour with Tom Jackson called the Huron Carole Tour, in 2000, and we were the only pop element on that tour. Traditionally it’s mainly country artists. And people were saying to us, ‘Why don’t you guys go country? You’ve got a great sound, wonderful harmonies like Alabama’—and we were singing a cappella songs on the tour. That tour was the trigger for us to think that this country thing is really cool. Live band, really cool musicians, the storytelling and not shying away from harmony, which is what we started out doing, and who we are. When we started in high school we were doing our versions of songs by groups like The Nylons, doing ‘Dream’ and ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight.’ All the shoo-wop songs from Motown, even stuff from Take 6, like ‘Spread Love.’ Those groups were a huge influence on us. And country really embraces harmony; isn’t afraid to sing harmony in the verses and pre-choruses, everywhere if you want to put it there. I guess bands like Crosby, Stills and Nash and the Eagles have always influenced all of us, because of the vocal presence that those groups had.”

“The best word that I can think of regarding the whole V.I.P.-to-After Tuesday transition is evolution,” Beecroft adds. “We never set out to come up with a new entity. It really was gradual things. A bit of frustration with doing the pop stuff. We wanted to add acoustic instrumentation; we wanted to sing more harmony. People would want us to be different things. Over time we got to see that country fit us to a T: it fit our personality, it fit our writing; it fit our musicality. It was a natural progression to go there; we maybe hadn’t been immersed in it through our childhood, but discovered it at a later age and found it was a perfect fit.”

The trio’s decision to explore its affinity for country didn’t fit Luciano musically. It simply wasn’t his thing. “Peter was more the R&B side of what V.I.P. was doing,” Coulson explains. “He went to Berklee College of Music in Boston, and jazz was a huge influence on him, and then Brian McKnight, R&B artists like that were huge influences as well. But the three of us just felt more at home with country, and for Peter it was something that wasn’t really him.”

Funding itself, booking itself, managing itself, the trio re-emerged as After Tuesday (so-called because the band was set to sign with a label, on a Tuesday, and showed up only to find the label was backing out of the deal; everything that’s happened since will ever thus be after Tuesday). “We grew up a lot through that experience,” says Beecroft. “We were naive and young. It taught us if you want something to happen, you have to make it happen.” And as such, the fellows made an unanticipated connection with their past in enlisting as their producer the veteran country writer/instrumentalist/producer Joel Feeney, whose credits include work with LeAnn Rimes. Feeney, though, didn’t know he had loomed so large in After Tuesday’s history. But back in their high school days, Coulson, Beecroft and Heslip won the Canadian National Exhibition Rising Star competition, an event for which Feeney wrote the title song. “We didn’t even know Joel at the time,” Coulson says. “We were 17 years old and singing a Joel Feeney song.”

More than a decade after that auspicious occasion, the trio went into the studio with the same Joel Feeney and cut a remarkable debut album full of taught, piercing harmonies; meaningful songs about the complexities of mature relationships and life choices fraught with serious consequences; and some light-hearted, good-time moments celebrating love in all its dimensions.

After Tuesday features not only the stellar contributions made by Feeney (“he would actually be the fourth member of the group, because he would throw in ideas when we needed them,” says Coulson), but superior musicianship that is both soulful and artful. Recorded at Omni Sound in Nashville and Inception Sound in Toronto, the album’s all-star lineup of musicians includes in-demand virtuosos such as John Jarvis (piano, B3), Glen Duncan (mandolin, fiddle) and Scott Sanders (pedal and lap steel), and Feeney sitting in on keyboards, among other luminaries. Of the dozen songs, After Tuesday is credited as co-writers on four of the best songs on the long player, collaborating with the redoubtable Lisa Brokop on the touching “What If I Am,” and joining forces with Larry Wayne Clark (whose credits include work with Buddy Jewell) on a couple of notable cuts, including the jubilant, country gospel-influenced workout “You Got Me Fallin’,” and the album’s most beautiful and most personal tune, “Crimson Sky (I Have Arrived),” a song reflecting on a life’s journey and evincing a spiritual connection to the land where the members of After Tuesday spent some productive, fulfilling days.

And in coming home to country, After Tuesday makes another connection to its deepest roots by bookending the album with Stephen Stills’s CS&N harmony classic, “Helplessly Hoping,” opening with a full band backing, closing the proceedings with a nod to their youthful selves, singing a cappella as they did when they first convened as high school mates.

“We started out doing a cappella music, and one of the first songs we sang together as a group was ‘Helplessly Hoping,’ Heslip recalls. “I remember we were in my driveway and the three of us heard this song. We didn’t know if it was country-folk or just what it was. It didn’t matter. We just loved the song. We loved the way the harmonies sounded, and we remembered that song. So when we came upon this part of our journey, where we’re now writing country music, we thought about that song again. So it makes sense and it’s somewhat fitting to put it at the beginning and the end of the album, because that’s how we’ve kind of come home.

When all’s said and done, Beecroft, Coulson and Heslip feel a sense of accomplishment, that After Tuesday, album and group, is in the right place at the right time.

“I’ve never felt better,” Beecroft states unequivocally.

Heslip seconds Beecroft’s thought, adding, “Because the album comes from a very real place, and we feel every song was chosen with the utmost scrutiny, and again, because it was so real to us it’s already been successful in my mind.”

“And the one thing for us,” Coulson advises, “is that we put a record together and we’re looking for radio play, and we’re looking for video play and all the rest of it, like every other artist. But when it comes down to it, our live performances are what we do. Those engage a lot of people, people seem to really enjoy those, so we look forward to going out there and singing for everyone we can.”

Welcome home, then.

Making After Tuesday
A Chat With Marty Beecroft, Glenn Coulson, And Joe Heslip

“The songs that were chosen for the record were very carefully chosen to be harmony-centric.” —Glenn Coulson

Where did this album begin?

What was the process that led you to this record?

JOE HESLIP: Initially we were encouraged to get down to Nashville and do a lot of writing, learn the process of how Nashville works and runs. We did that, in close to a dozen trips in two years or so, and did just a ton of writing, and really started to find songs that would rise to the top. You see that and you focus on those. And then we got Joel Feeney as our producer. We realized, with him being a singer himself, that he would be the perfect man to understand our mentality of putting music together from the vocals first. That was exactly the case, as he immediately understood what we were looking to do with the project, that we wanted it to sound acoustic yet contemporary, focusing on the vocals—

GLENN COULSON: The choice of the songs was based on the best songs we could put out and the songs that would fit After Tuesday, with the harmonies now. There were songs that came across our desks that we fell in love with, but for some reason they just didn’t work in a vocal harmony arrangement. It was more geared to a solo artist or something like that. The songs that were chosen for the record were very carefully chosen to be harmony-centric. Also, we love a good hook, a solid melody and then of course the storytelling, and where we are in our lives right now. Our songs were up against every song that Joel would find or management would find or the label would find. So we got four cuts on the record, which we were pretty happy about, considering we had these amazing Nashville songwriters come up with songs you just couldn’t say no to; they touched us in some way or they really worked as far as harmony is concerned.

MARTY BEECROFT: One interesting process we did do while recording the vocals in particular, was that normally—and even us in the past—we would record one part at a time, by themselves, in the studio, so that you don’t have leakage between the parts, so you can isolate them. But on this record, in consultation with Joel, we thought, You know what? There’s a real energy when the three of us sing together at the same time. So on a lot of the parts where there’s harmony, that literally is the three of us in the same room, each with our own mic, but being able to have that eye contact, that unspoken communication that develops over 15 years of singing with each other, for the timing, and the sync with each other. I really think that helped add an extra layer or dimension, if you will, as far as the harmonies go.

JOE: I think an important thing also is the image of the band. We are self-directed; we’re self-managed, we take care of our own thing, we came up with the money ourselves. There hasn’t been some guy pulling the strings. This group is, first, about the harmony, and because there’s three of us, we have three complementary personalities, but we are three different people. So we’ve made this group about three interesting individuals that are unique in their own way but come together and make really interesting music.

There’s depth to these songs, too. Two of the strongest occur back to back. “On the Fence,” which you didn’t write; and “What If I Am,” which you co-wrote with Lisa Brokop. Both songs deal with momentous decisions that occur in the course of a life, one from a child growing up and enduring the pressures of coming of age; and “What If I Am” being sung a single person musing on a relationship and the uncertainty about making the right choice, but trying to believe it’s going to work out. Is this the type of subject matter you would have engaged back in the V.I.P. days?

JOE: Oh, no, no. We were probably too interested back then in the things young men are interested in at the time to really question any decisions to be made in the future. We were too young and carefree at the time even to consider these issues. It’s only after you’ve had some difficult life lessons, choices, successes and then failures, do you then consider the gravity of your actions and choices. So both songs come out of some real life experiences of our own.

GLENN: That’s the “real” of them; these are real snapshots of life, decisions that every person in the world has to make in some degree. “What If I Am,” every person gets to the point where they ask, “Maybe I should, maybe I shouldn’t. Is she gonna call? Should I call her first? I don’t know.” Everyone’s not confident at one time or another in their lives. And even with V.I.P., when we performed with them, our big hit single was about getting shot down by the opposite sex. I think we always had a humble and real approach to our lives, even though we were 22, and as Joe said, thinking about other things that young men think about. Young men think about, Oh, man, I just got shot down. No one has a perfect record or Don Juan attitude, and we wanted to shed some light on the reality of the dating scene. Being from Barrie, Ontario, three guys growing up in the same high school together, we’ve done so many different shows, some at the Roy Thompson Hall level, and others at the M&M Meat Shops barbecues. Reality is something I see every day when I look at Marty and Joe. You can’t get an ego; it’s not a matter of that. That’s one way I think we have kept as we’ve changed musically—the reality of who we are. We mow our mom and dad’s grass still. We’re pretty humble guys when it comes to that.

Again speaking about those two songs, in “On the Fence,” nothing is really resolved.

All the characters are left hanging in the balance, there’s no sweet ending. In “What If I Am,” even though the singer sings, “Maybe I will fly,” it’s not certain that he will. There’s no neat endings to these songs.

GLENN: And people do mention it. Especially “On the Fence.” They’re like, “What happens?” They want the Hollywood ending. But that’s what’s cool about it and why we chose it—it just makes you think. It gets that reaction from people, who go, “I’ve been in situations like that,” or similar situations.

JOE: You choose your own ending.

MARTY BEECROFT: For me, with “What If I Am,” in particular, I certainly do view that, yes, we wrote it as a relationship-type song, but I can almost view it as well as just our process even in making the decisions for this album. Because those are the exact questions that we would always ask ourselves—Is this song gonna work? What if we put all this money into it and nothing happens? You have to remember to try, to do it, in order to get the rewards from it.

“Crimson Sky” is a beautiful song. It’s very much about the land, and you make specific references to your connection to the land, which sounds like a spiritual connection. Where did this song come from?

MARTY: That came from my cottage really. My family has a cottage on the Muskoka Lakes, and so for us, growing up together, that was always a place in the summers where we would have amazing times. And there was always something special about it. We would sing on the dock, on the boat, great memories associated with everything we’d do there. So again, that was something when we thought, What do we want to sing about? What is After Tuesday? We thought, immediately, Oh, my God, we have to write a song about the cottage. The lyrics came from such a real place. And if I remember correctly, once we started the lyrics just poured out. Our co-writer Larry Wayne Clark started playing some chords as we were talking about the imagery, and the song just fell together. And that was a song that we literally wrote the melody from the harmony inwards. We didn’t write a melody first and think, How do we harmonize this? We were literally all singing together.

JOE: And there’ll be more of that in the future. That was a winning combination, the way we came up with a real storyline, harmony first—I can see a lot more of that in the future.

Is “Crimson Sky” the most personal song on the record for your guys?

JOE: I’d say “What If I Am” is for me.

GLENN: As a group entity, I believe “Crimson Sky” is definitely there. Getting away to the cottage, getting up north, spending time and focusing on the group. We weren’t thinking about anything else except singing together and harmonizing.

MARTY: I think for me, especially it being my family’s cottage, where I spent summers growing up, that’s really quite personal for me.

And your other two songs on here, “You Got Me Fallin’” and “Showdown,” are really quite different than what comes before. Little harder edge, different type of vocal arrangements. What’s the genesis of these two songs?

GLENN: For both, they’re uptempo, fun, I think it definitely reflects on the side of us that’s somewhat younger guys that like to have fun and are gonna put some energy into the show. With all due respect to Crosby, Stills & Nash, their records were fairly midtempo to slow temp, and for us, we like to have some fun and keep it uptempo. “Showdown” was a song we wrote on the Huron Carol tour with Gary Fjellgaard, one of Canada’s oldest folk original cowboys. He wrote this song and we put our contemporary spin on it. I remember sending it to Gary and he responded, “Holy jeez, what is this??!” But he thought it was so cool because we almost reinvented the song, with his imagery and his cool ideas, and we just said, Let’s have fun with this one.

Same with “You Got Me Fallin’.” It’s laden with different musical hooks and shows another dimension of the group in the influence of a little gospel, a little bluegrassy, a little edge to the group. As Joe says, we’re three different people, and I think the record as a whole outlines each of our personalities quite well.

JOE: And “You’ve Got Me Fallin’,” literally, we didn’t know what to write about that day, and we were writing it on a fall day. And we looked out of our co-writer’s house and saw this leaf spinning around. One of us said, “Let’s write about that leaf. You know, it’s falling”—you got me falling. That was more of a jam-oriented song.

MARTY: Larry had played us a gospel song just before that, and that influence melded with that, and we just started jamming.

Finally, why did you close and open with “Helplessly Hoping.” Why bookend the album with that song?

JOE: It’s coming back to my previous comment about coming home. We started out doing a cappella music, and one of the first songs we sang together as a group was “Helplessly Hoping.” I remember we were in my driveway and the three of us heard this song. We didn’t know if it was country-folk. It didn’t matter, we just loved the song. We loved the way the harmonies sounded, and we remembered that song. So when we came upon this part of our journey, where we’re now writing country music, we thought about that song again. In a way it refers to how we started this whole journey together. So it makes sense and it’s somewhat fitting to put it at the beginning and the end of the album, because that’s how we’ve kind of come home.

Writer David McGee is the author of B.B. King—There Is Always One More Time ; Steve Earle—Fearless Heart, Outlaw Poet (Backbeat Books) and Go Cat Go! The Lifeand Times of Carl Perkins . McGee is the country music editor for (bn.com) and a frequent contributor to The Absolute Sound and Acoustic Guitar .

www.BopStar-PR.com/McGee