Colleen hixenbaugh biography

2010 Canadian film

Love Shines is a documentary film about Canadian songwriter Ron Sexsmith by filmmaker Douglas Arrowsmith. The film is produced by Paperny Entertainment and commissioned by The Movie Network and Movie Central with funding from Astral Media's Harold Greenberg Fund and the Rogers Documentary Fund.

It was nominated for three Canadian Screen Awards in 2013 for Best Performing Arts Program or Series or Arts Documentary Program or Series, Best Direction in a Performing Arts Program or Series, and Best Picture Editing in a Documentary Program or Series.

Synopsis

Love Shines follows Ron Sexsmith as he attempts to turn his niche following into mainstream success by recording his album Long Player Late Bloomer with legendary producer Bob Rock.

Release dates

Love Shines had its world premiere as a "special presentation" at the 2010 Vancouver International Film Festival and won audience awards at SXSW 2011 and the 2011 Maui Film Festival. It also screened at the 2011 Hot Docs Festival in Toronto. It debuted on television on BBC Four in March 2011 and on HBO Canada in May 2011.

Subjects interviewed

• Ron Sexsmith – singer, songwriter
• Steve Earle – singer, songwriter and producer
• Elvis Costello – singer, songwriter
• Leslie Feist – singer, songwriter
• Tony Ferguson – vice president of Interscope Records
• Daniel Lanois – producer (U2, Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris)
• Bob Rock – producer (Metallica, Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe)
• Rob Bowman – Grammy Award–winning professor, author and critic
• Kiefer Sutherland – actor, co–owner of Ironworks Studios
• Michael Dixon – Ron Sexsmith's manager
• Colleen Hixenbaugh – Ron Sexsmith's wife
• Christopher Sexsmith – Ron Sexsmith's son
• Dorothy Grodesky – Ron Sexsmith's mother

See also

References

External links

“How can we know the dancer from the dance?” asks W.B. Yeats in his famous poem Among School Children. That same subtle question also seems applicable to any examination of a film like Love Shines, Douglas Arrowsmith’s documentary about Canadian singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith.

For if you step back far enough from the detailing and psychological nuances of this meticulously crafted and highly absorbing film and try simply to place it within its genre, you can see how Love Shines could be taken for just another music bio-documentary, a well-wrought study of the trajectory of a musician’s progress from the beginning of his career up to the present: humble origins flowering inexorably into some rock-apotheosis of the moment.

But that isn’t what has happened to Ron Sexsmith (not so far anyhow) and so that isn’t what happens in Arrowsmith’s tender, affecting film either.

“Love Shines had to be a subtle essay over a long period of time,” Arrowsmith told me during a recent chat about the film. The long period of time began in 2003, when Arrowsmith, who is nothing if not tenacious, shot his first footage of Sexsmith, poignantly poking around his childhood home on Galbraith Street in St. Catharine’s Ontario (“…that’s my old room right up there, for what it’s worth….”), remembering the box of 45rpm records that appears to be the only legacy he has from his largely absent, truck-driver dad, reminiscing about being inattentive at school and knocking up his girlfriend, marrying her (at age 19), and trying hard to be a better father than the one he had. All of which tends to paint Sexsmith as a rather boringly ordinary, limited kid—a sweet, self-effacing loser with a guitar.

But all through the film you keep hearing his songs (Secret Heart, No Help at All, etc.), and hearken to the witnesses to Sexsmith’s surprisingly underappreciated abilities as a haunting melodist and searching lyricist (“…In every nowhere town the

Canadian musician (born 1964)

Musical artist

Ronald Eldon Sexsmith (born January 8, 1964) is a Canadian singer-songwriter from St. Catharines, Ontario. He was the songwriter of the year at the 2005 Juno Awards. He began releasing recordings of his own material in 1985 at age 21, and has since recorded seventeen albums. He was the subject of a 2010 documentary called Love Shines.

Early life

Sexsmith grew up in St. Catharines and started his own band when he was 14 years old.

Career

Sexsmith was seventeen when he started playing at a bar, the Lion's Tavern, in his hometown. He gained a reputation as "The One-Man Jukebox" for his aptitude in playing requests. However, he gradually began to include original songs and more obscure music, which his audience did not favour. He decided to start writing songs after the birth of his first child in 1985. That same year, still living in St. Catharines, he collaborated on recording and releasing a cassette, Out of the Duff, with a singer-songwriter friend named Claudio. Side one of the cassette contained five songs written and performed by Sexsmith; side two featured Claudio.

A year later, Sexsmith and his family moved to Toronto, living in an apartment in the Beaches neighbourhood. Sexsmith recorded and released the full-length cassette There's a Way, which was produced by Kurt Swinghammer. Meanwhile, he worked as a courier and befriended Bob Wiseman, whom he met at an open stage. They became friends, and Wiseman agreed to produce and arrange Sexsmith's next release in between his tours with the band B

There are about as many ways to write a song as there are songs, but surely a popular approach is the Good First Line. As in many forms of writing, the Good First Line often arrives unexpectedly, and the recipient is obliged to work with it, somehow. This is what Ron Sexsmith was saying about the appearance of a G.F.L. that ended up beginning a song on “Long Player—Late Bloomer,” his twelfth album, released in 2011. The line is this: “In every nowhere town / there are somewhere dreams.” Sexsmith told me about its origin: “I remember I was on a ferry.” It was 2008, and he was somewhere in the waters of Scandinavia. “I was touring a dead album at the time,” he recalled. As he spoke, he was walking down Maiden Lane to South Street Seaport, where he sat on a bench, looking out on the sunny spring harbor. “It was a day like this!”

An upbeat downbeat guy, Sexsmith is tall and lanky and, at fifty-one, maybe too worried about getting old. “This is about as good as I’m going to look,” he said onstage, later that night. “I’m going to disintegrate from here, and I’m going to look like a drowned rat.” On the bench, he was silly and limber from some early-morning in-room yoga. “It helps with the stiffness,” he said, though he noted that, with age, touring had changed slightly. “It’s kind of bittersweet now,” he said. “I’ve been touring with most of these same guys for years and years. I’ve been playing with my drummer, Don Kerr, since 1987, and it’s fun and it’s all very gallows humor, but then you’re suddenly thinking that you’re going to wake up one day and one of you is going to be gone.”

A dead album, as Sexsmith describes it, is an album that comes out but that nobody notices, like a tree falling in a people-less forest. “You see your friends and they say, ‘Hey, when’s your new CD coming out?’ And you say, ‘It’s out.’ ” Sexsmith’s new album, “Carousel One,” named for the baggage carousel at LAX where luggage from Toronto lands, was not only not dead yet, that sunny mor