How cool is this?

Two of my dearest friends are Paul Mills and his beloved wife and partner, Bev Mills. Paul is legendary for his work with CBC in Canada, as well as being one of Canada's finest music Producers at his Millstream Studios. His client list is a virtual Who's Who of North American folk music. He also produced most of Stan Rogers legendary works, and is an astounding musician and performer. It is a point of pride for me that he also produced The Cannonsburg Sessions for my own Conklin Ceili Band. But he isn't done yet. Please read the letter below that Bev sent out about his latest, and very exciting project involving The Bare Naked Ladies, a kids choir and a Canadian Astronaut on the International Space Station. Incredible!

"Hello everyone:

Please excuse the mass mailing but I wanted to let you know about a very exciting project Paul is producing. Some of you may know bits and pieces about this already. This is to let you know it is going to be all over the news tomorrow.

I just got home from a CBC studio where a recording was done of Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield (from the International Space Station) and Ed Robertson and the Bare Naked Ladies + a phenomenal high school choir. Chris was in space and everyone else was in the studio – and Paul is the producer!! The song was co-written by Chris and Ed in the summer – it is a duet between the two of them with the rest of the Bare Naked Ladies as the band and the choir singing backup.

The background to this is that Paul approached Chris a while back about Chris doing a cd while he is on the space station – he will be there for 6 months (Commander for 3 of those months) and of course has some time off – Chris (a very good musician and songwriter) said yes and Paul approached CBC to see if they wanted to be involved – they said yes and commissioned the co-write with Ed (Chris's choice) and then the song was hooked up with the Coalition for Music Education which every year arranges for one special song to be arranged for schools to perform all across the country on the first Monday in May. So this year the song will be Is Someone Singing, the song which was recorded today by CBC.

As producer, Paul is a background guy and likely won't be in the publicity – but he started the whole thing and will be producing the first cd ever recorded from space.

The story will be on CBC television on The National this Thursday night and all over CBC radio during the day.

Paul is very excited and loving every minute of this project. And I am very proud of him.

For more information on Chris, follow this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=N6-jTGsvjk8

For more information on the project and Coalition for Music Education, go to this link: http://musicmakesus.ca/musicmonday/

Cheers and best wishes for the new year.

Bev