The Beginning
How it all started with Canadian Invasion
Begun in 2019, Canadian Invasion is the culmination of over 20 years of award-winning education and production work of Damian Spaulding.
The complete story as transcribed from:
Over the years I have worked behind the scenes as an advisor and facilitator of many large projects in central Ontario and abroad, ranging from building the project to purchase Central High School and convert it to a kindergarten to grade 12 School of the Arts, to managing concerts and many behind the scenes details and projects in our region.
Back through 2017 to 2019 I was consulting with a number of international talents to bring major headliners to our region through a series of concerts. Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen, Shania Twain, John Legend were acts we were negotiating with at the time. We would have loved to have brought Bruno Mars up here, but right after winning what he did in the Grammys the price became too high.
Through this process, I became close friends with a major producer and composer out of California that was acting as a booking agent for such concerts, Zeus Settles.
Zeus and I took our consulting relationship to the next level by tooling the process of generating a new online music streaming platform (which will remain un-mentioned at the moment as it is still under development). While doing so, I recorded a few students of my school: Spaulding School of Music and shared their talents with Zeus.
At first he wasn’t quick to pick up, however after a few more brief conversations, he quickly began to see the talent as I saw it. From there we started the process of bringing the talent to Andrew Lane & Disney & Universal Studios.
As you’d expect, doing movements at this level is easier said than done. It is rare to have a producer at that level move for one individual artist. This is where the story gets even more interesting.
At that time, a second artist from Toronto came to my studio and wanted to build a track. I remember this was just before the “Glow” Christmas concert series in Barrie Ontario. Her track was pretty “hot” as they often say in the industry, and had the working bones of something phenomenal. I took this second track to Zeus and pitched a concept that I knew would lead to something very large and at that time, wasn’t sure if I wanted to pick up.
I told Zeus: What the industry needs is something like a “Canadian Invasion” much like the British Invasion of the 1970s but brought to current day with headlining artists that would tour independently as well as a group. Much like a fab five of The Jackson 5. Upon hearing that concept, Zeus communicated that “Dame” (as he often calls me), if you can pull that together he’s pretty sure it’s something Drew would fall in love with. And that I did, and history was soon to be made.
