All in

No one imagined, when it was just an invitation to apply for funding, just how all-consuming the UpNorth Music project would become. 38 full days of recording in eleven communities, more than a hundred individual sessions, at least a thousand hours mixing and producing songs, interviews, broadcast features, podcasts. Designing and rebuilding the production studio, identifying, recruiting and paying artists, finding studio venues, planning a concert tour, mastering a compendium CD set, clearing performance and publication rights--a million details from remote broadcast setup to getting our new logo printed in frosting on a concert reception cake. Enormous big "ups" to production manager Joel Hurd and to project coordinator Jill Breit for all the sweat and blood.

It's all coming to a head tomorrow with the opening concert in the UpNorth Music Series at St. Lawrence University's Gulick Theater, and with the release of the project highlights in the 3-CD set Music Heard UpNorth. I've been working my way through the set with great delight. It sounds like the North Country--talented, inventive, diverse, quirky. The biggest surprise for me was that I thought I knew the musicians of the region, or at least the best of them. But on each CD in the set, there are at least half a dozen artists I had no idea were out there. Fantastic songwriters, monster instrumentalists, voices to make you cry. When NCPR takes on a project, I'm proud to say we go "all in." And the North Country, I'm proud to say, is full of artists who do the same.

If you can't pick up a copy at the concert tomorrow, Music Heard UpNorth will be available within a few days in stores around the region, and online via cdbaby.com. Or you can contact the station to place orders.