artist The Tom Fun Orchestra

A lot of band bios will begin with the line “with humble beginnings”.  This band bio begins with the line “with outrageously immodest and ambitious beginnings”. 

With outrageously immodest and ambitious beginnings, The Tom Fun Orchestra sauntered into the Atlantic Canadian music scene the way an Italian funeral saunters through a mountain village.  That is, with many loud instruments, casks of wine and complete irreverence for everything happening around them.  Thus it went for the next five years. 

The bio continues with an appreciation for what the band has done and become in those five years.  A year into the band’s life, they travelled the country with eighteen of their friends in a school bus.  It suited the band’s affinity for spectacle, noise, and gas fumes.  Such was that affinity that the band went on playing a well worn ribbon, as they say from St. John’s to Victoria and further to old world haunts like The United Kingdom and Ireland.  Much to the band’s delight, these tours increased in size and ambition as growing audiences applauded their approval.

The bio is richer to point out that many of these aforementioned details revolve around a very good musical recording that the band produced in 2008 with the help of American musician, Gordon Gano called You Will Land With a Thud.  That record received an East Coast Music Award as the Galaxy Rising Star Recording of the Year 2009, it inspired three wildly successful music videos domestically and internationally(ECMA 2010 Video of the Year, 2009 UK Music Video Awards nomination for Best Animation), and garnered support for their 2008 Music Nova Scotia accolade for “Entertainer of the Year”.

As it should—though it has no business doing so—the bio now looks into the future.  The Tom Fun Orchestra has once again entered the recording studio to begin making their long anticipated sophomore recording scheduled for release in February of 2011.  Expect them to give performances at a variety of popular music festivals and venues from right to left Canadian coasts this summer with a whole new recording’s worth of new and excellent songs.