La vida local

http://www.eyeweekly.com/streetspirit/article/48012
BY Sarah Liss  
December 17, 2008 21:12
Whether or not this is accurate, when I gaze back at 2008 from where I’m perched at the ass-end of the year, it feels like I saw far fewer local
acts live over the last 12 months than I have in years. I don’t
necessarily think that a dearth of decent concerts is to blame for this
ebb; if anything, there were tons of new T.O. weeklies (No Shame, Two Way Monologues, etc.) that piqued my interest. But I definitely reached some sort of tipping point in terms of my tolerance for poorly-managed or mediocre events — often if there were substantial doubts in my mind as to whether a band whose recorded output I loved might measure up in the prospective live setting, I’d opt for listening to my stereo while cocooning.
....


1. One Hundred Dollars with Rick White and Doug Paisley at the Horseshoe, July 25
The
official T.O. launch for their full-length debut, Forest Of Tears (Blue
Fog), was the show that convinced me that One Hundred Dollars is the
best — or at least, my favourite — band in this city. An epic show
(they played a staggering two sets in addition to the performances by
the lovely Doug Paisley and CanRock hero/Forest Of Tears producer Rick
White) on a steamy summer night, the One Hundred Dollars CD release reminded me why I love live music. Though they managed to sell out the Horseshoe, core members Simone Schmidt and Ian Russell and their bandmates seemed as relaxed as they’d be if they were playing a front-porch hoedown. The night was all whiskey, love, slow-dancing (!), dead-on covers (few can pull off Dolly Parton, but Schmidt managed to own “Jolene”) and beautiful, aching country tunes that sounded like they’d sprouted up from the floorboards of a rickety old barn.
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EYE MAGAZINE: Our Favorite Albums of the Year

http://www.eyeweekly.com/features/article/48355

ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS
Forest Of Tears (Blue Fog)
Describing
battles against cancer, heartbreak and the TTC at rush hour, Toronto’s
One Hundred Dollars portray authentic alt-country through tear-stained
transfers. With pedal steel and sighing organs, singer Simone Schmidt’s
broken croon tells stories with the humanity of a Raymond Carver tale.
A dissatisfied lover counts ceiling tiles during “Careless Love,” as an
early morning commute becomes working class poetry on “No Great Leap.”
With a cover of Fucked Up’s “Blaze Of Glory” commissioned by the band,
One Hundred Dollars transform the hardcore anthem into a wistful lament
on “small town hucksters and big city thieves.” “Hell’s a place for our
love,” Schmidt concludes. Like, Parkdale? CHANDLER LEVACK
____________
____________

EYE MAGAZINE: Best Live Show of the Year

http://www.eyeweekly.com/music/streetspirit/article/48012

"1. One Hundred Dollars with Rick White and Doug Paisley at the Horseshoe, July 25
The
official T.O. launch for their full-length debut, Forest Of Tears (Blue
Fog), was the show that convinced me that One Hundred Dollars is the
best — or at least, my favourite — band in this city. An epic show
(they played a staggering two sets in addition to the performances by
the lovely Doug Paisley and CanRock hero/Forest Of Tears producer Rick
White) on a steamy summer night, the One Hundred Dollars CD release
reminded me why I love live music. Though they managed to sell out the
Horseshoe, core members Simone Schmidt and Ian Russell and their
bandmates seemed as relaxed as they’d be if they were playing a
front-porch hoedown. The night was all whiskey, love, slow-dancing (!),
dead-on covers (few can pull off Dolly Parton, but Schmidt managed to
own “Jolene”) and beautiful, aching country tunes that sounded like
they’d sprouted up from the floorboards of a rickety old barn."
- Sarah Liss
____________
____________

NOW MAGAZINE BEST FOLK/ROOTS ACT 2008

http://www.nowtoronto.com/guides/readerspoll/2008/story.cfm?content=165736

$100

When
leukemia struck Ian Russell in the summer of 2007, the guitarist for
country rockers $100 and his bandmate Simone Schmidt used the downtime
to write – and then record in 13 hours – their ass-kicking debut,
Forest Of Trees. He’s since kicked cancer’s ass, too, allowing the
six-piece to do what they do best: play live.
____________
____________

NOW MAGAZINE : TOP T.O. Disc 2008

#2 $100

Forest Of Tears (Blue Fog)

Western-tinged six-piece chock-full of dusty authenticity harking back to the time before there was anything “nu” about country.

http://www.nowtoronto.com/music/story.cfm?content=166559

Hi,

We don't do this much- it's a personal appeal.  We manage ourselves and somehow got into SXSW this year.  If you know any good parties to play there, let us know who to contact or get us on the bill.

Thanks, $100

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/media/story/2008/12/29/f-2008-top-100-part-2.html

One Hundred Dollars. With sharply observed narratives about the minute heartbreaks and casual cruelties that make up day-to-day life for the underdogs, Toronto-based ensemble One Hundred Dollars are quietly proving that some of Canada’s finest country music comes out of urban nooks and crannies. The prolific group followed up their fine full-length debut album, Forest of Tears, with an even more ambitious project: a series of seven-inch recordings that explore issues in underrepresented communities across our nation.

http://dustedmagazine.com/features/799

17. One Hundred Dollars - Forest of Tears (Blue Fog)

If there’s one scene deserving of more national (uh, make that American) attention, it’s Toronto’s rock scene. There are a number of exciting bands channeling folk and country in new, sometimes psychedelic ways: Nordic Nomadic, Wyrd Visions, Castlemusic and the band of the hour, One Hundred Dollars. Simone Schmidt, just 24, has a voice like one of those “vintage” designer t-shirts – you know it’s not nearly as old as it looks, but damn if it doesn’t feel like the real thing. Forest of Tears‘ songs are similarly worn yet modern. Pedal steel and acoustic guitar cobble together tales of sexual frustration (“Careless Love”), lesbian love (“Hell’s a Place”) and domestic abuse (“No Great Leap,” which sends shivers up my spine every time Schmidt mumbles, “It’s quick and clean, and trains can’t swerve”). The depth and detail of songwriting suggests that One Hundred Dollars have the talent to grow as old as they sound.

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/music/story/2008/12/12/f-one-hundred-dollars.html


The members of Toronto-based country act One Hundred Dollars
aren’t ones to pussyfoot around. In concert, singer Simone Schmidt
prefaces the band’s hard-knocks tunes with statements that can be
jarring to an unsuspecting listener. “This one’s about having sex when
you don’t want to,” she might murmur before launching into the jaunty,
bittersweet Careless Love; she might preface the rambling No Great Leap by noting the disheartening number of women who are survivors of sexual abuse.

It’s no surprise then that when Schmidt and bandmate Ian Russell set about creating a series of seven-inch vinyl recordings inspired by different parts of Canada, One Hundred Dollars focused on stories that might seem at odds with rosier perceptions of our national identity. Schmidt and Russell claim they were initially inspired by Gordon Lightfoot's Canadian Railroad Trilogy, the iconic CBC-commissioned tune from the 1960s that recounts the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, that “iron road runnin’ from the sea to the sea.”

The band’s Regional Seven Inch series will involve putting out a collection of two-song singles on different labels across Canada, with each record addressing issues relevant to the region in which it is released. The first seven-incher, which came out last week on Toronto’s Blocks Recording Club, features the mournful 14th Floor, which was inspired by one of the cancer wards at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto. The B-side is called Migrant Workers, an unflinching narrative about the folks who travel from their home countries to harvest tomatoes in Leamington, Ont.

“The conflict in Canada is always posed as, ‘We have no national identity,’” says Schmidt during a recent interview in Toronto. “People have been hooked on that for about 40 years. [But] we have to realize we do have a national identity that we don’t necessarily want to embrace. There’s a range of things that come up when you love a place, just like when you love a person. It’s like writing a love song – you have to be critical and embrace the things you don’t love in the hopes of changing them.”

The tune Black Gold, one side of their Alberta seven-inch, was sparked by the singer-songwriter's conversations with a group of Somali friends and co-workers. Through these women, Schmidt learned of their sons’ and husbands’ experiences in Fort McMurray, where workers in the tarsands sleep in their cars because the demand for labour far exceeds the city’s accommodations.

“There’s so much money and everyone has three Hummers, but nobody has anywhere to live,” Schmidt sighs. “They do really hard labour, but are living really hard lives that don’t allow for any cultural sensitivity, which makes for a very violent disruption in people’s lives.”

In crafting lyrics, Schmidt is wary of falling prey to the sentimentality of writers like the Romantic poets. “You have to figure out how to avoid making weird emotional porn,” she says. “It’s important to us not to be exploitative and not to just write bummer jams.” Though the members of One Hundred Dollars come from a place of
relative privilege, their specificity and critical thought prevents them from sounding maudlin or mining other folks’ traumas in creepy or condescending ways.

Russell and Schmidt started One Hundred Dollars about two years ago. The band was sparked by their shared love of singing Tammy Wynette and George Jones duets. In 2007, the pair corralled some friends to record the Hold It Together EP, a humble collection of tracks that stemmed from Russell’s experiences with leukemia.

But One Hundred Dollars really came into their own with their full-length debut, Forest of Tears. Released last summer, the album pays respect to the legacy of the
greats they’ve studied so diligently – everyone from Jones and Wynette to Dolly Parton and Merle Haggard. It’s an enthralling mix of tenderly strummed acoustic guitar, gently brushed drums and Stew Crookes’s shivery pedal steel. It’s all anchored by Schmidt’s weathered barn-board drawl, which belies the fact that she grew up in downtown Toronto, and is still shy of 25.

One Hundred Dollars describe the music they create as new new country – the opposite of the slick dreck that dominates modern country radio. “Country music has been not country for so long,” Russell insists. “It’s like, city views of the
country.” The stereotypical signifiers of rural life – fields, work, cattle – are being written about by outsiders, he says. One of the best things about One Hundred Dollars’ Regional Seven Inch series – and arguably one of their core strengths as a band – is that while their releases educate listeners about underrepresented issues, the work never feels too earnest, or founded on platitudes.

Schmidt says that the act of reflection is part of why she was compelled to release these recordings on vinyl. It’s not just that vinyl makes for a more tactile experience of playing recorded music than clicking through MP3s. As Schmidt explains it, “The act of having to get up and turn over the A-side and B-side of records appeals to me as part of the mechanics of listening.”

There’s a lot of power in the thought of a listener meditating on, say, Schmidt singing about an abducted sex worker in Vancouver (a song she’s working on for their upcoming west coast seven-inch), or the effects that Migrant Workers might have on someone who’s never considered that their ketchup comes courtesy of the invisible presence of immigrant labourers. One Hundred Dollars' investment in sharing these stories seems particularly interesting in light of Prime Minister
Stephen Harper’s insistence back in the fall that artists are elitists with little or no connection to average working Joes.

While she cringes at Harper’s comments about creative types, Schmidt
is fascinated by the undertones of cutbacks to arts funding. “We’re not talking about that much money, which means there’s a motivation that’s not fiscal,” she muses. “Harper’s creating a class consciousness in people that’s hateful. It’s not in a single power’s interest to have more than one story about what it has power over, and
a government that wants a particular type of power is not going to be happy about having anyone other than itself creating those stories. It’s not about average Joes; it’s really about trying to homogenize the national mythology.”

14^th Floor, the first release in One Hundred Dollars’
Regional Seven Inch series, is out now on Blocks Recording Club. Check
out the band’s MySpace page for details about future releases.

Sarah Liss writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/551957
One Hundred Dollars: Show us the money
Ben Rayner

Unlike, say, Jessica Simpson, Toronto's One Hundred Dollars plays country music that's raw, real and grounded in informed portraits of down-and-out humanity instead of pandering hillbilly stereotypes.

Naturally, then, emerging grassroots acclaim for the sextet's lingering, literate debut, Forest of Tears, has been fostered by the support of such homegrown indie-rock pillars as F---ed Up auteur Rick White.

Who are these people? One Hundred Dollars was born less than two years ago when untested singer/lyricist Simone Schmidt serenaded Ian Russell – formerly of Jon Rae and the River – with an original composition over the phone. They started writing songs together and doing shows as a duo and then as a trio with ace pedal-steel player Stew Crookes and quietly issued an EP titled Hold It Together last year. Drummer Dave Clarke and Russell's fellow River cast-offs Paul Mortimer (bass) and Jonathan Adjemian (organ) were hastily recruited to round out the band last winter after White was sweet-talked into manning the boards for the single, 13-hour session at an old schoolhouse near Orangeville that birthed Forest of Tears.

"We gave ourselves two days and we were done in a day," says Russell. "We had time for a great steak dinner. It was awesome. Everything about that day felt like magic."

Oh, yeah. That stuff. Russell was really sick with leukemia for a while there, and you can definitely hear some haggard frustration at the whole situation in "Nothing's Alright." He's doing okay now, though, and understandably waves the subject off as "so boring." If there was any positive side to his illness, though, it was that it provided him with endless housebound hours in which he and Schmidt could hone their chops.

"I didn't have any focus before. I never set out to be a singer," says Schmidt, who gave up other passions, such as doing outreach work for the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, to keep watch over Russell while he recuperated. "That became my focus. My only creative outlet was songwriting."

Why are people all atwitter about the band? Because Forest of Tears heralds the arrival of Schmidt as a preternaturally gifted singer and lyricist, and of Russell as perhaps the only extant songwriting foil with the talent to make her dense, poetic diction sound effortlessly musical.

Somehow the two make it work, and as time goes on the rest of the talented players in One Hundred Dollars are bringing their own ideas to the table. Rest assured the music will lose none of its socially conscious bite. "We want to be super-critical," says Schmidt. "We don't want to ignore where we are."

---

Just the facts
WHO: One Hundred Dollars, with Richard Laviolette & the Oil Spills and the Pining

 

WHERE: Silver Dollar, 486 Spadina Ave. at College

WHEN: Friday, 9 p.m.

TICKETS: $8 at Rotate This and Soundscapes, $10 at the door

http://www.exclaim.ca/articles/frontfive.aspx?csid1=128


Seven-Inch

$100 Canadian



By Vish Khanna




Hot on the worn heels of their beautiful album Forest of Tears,
Toronto’s One Hundred Dollars present an ambitious seven-inch series,
connecting them to communities across Canada. The hard-working country
ensemble led by Simone Schmidt and Ian Russell has overcome adversity,
namely Russell’s near-life-threatening bout with leukemia. Inspired by
his rejuvenated health, the band is taking on notable new challenges,
like the initiation of a regional seven-inch series of newly-composed
songs about Canada, released individually by labels like Vancouver’s
Deranged Records, Calgary’s Saved by Vinyl, Toronto’s Blocks Recording
Club, and Sackville’s Sappy Records among others.


“We’d been approached by Deranged Records to do a seven-inch about a
year-and-a-half ago and we got stoked about the idea of vinyl,” Schmidt
explains. “The seven-inch record, as a medium, forces listeners to be
deliberate — to get up and flip the record. So we’re getting all
McLuhan on people and hoping the medium will affect people’s pace, and
call them to reflect on the songs.”
As for those songs, $100 will write A-sides ostensibly about the
regions of each respective label, illuminating commonalities of living
in Canada. Part I, for instance, is “14th Floor” about the cancer wing
of Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, while Blocks artist Owen
Pallett plays fiddle on the B-side, “Migrant Workers,” inspired by
seasonal labourers in Leamington, Ontario.


“‘14th Floor’ deals with what might be considered the overarching
themes of the series — sickness and love in many forms and many places,
in our relationship with Canada,” Russell says. “We love where we live
and the people around us, but we’re not happy in this relationship.
Country music is mostly songs about love and heartbreak and thoughtful
love entails critique and entails work, not blind allegiance or
patriotism.”

http://dustedmagazine.com/reviews/4681

"Life might seem good on the northern rim of Lake
Ontario – the Loonie is strong, Cito Gaston is back in the dugout – but
Toronto’s One Hundred Dollars are here to remind us that, at close
enough range, things are shitty everywhere. For starters, the six-piece
country outfit cites leukemia as its honorary seventh member; lead
guitarist and co-songwriter Ian Russell was diagnosed while the group
was prepping its first EP for release – the poignantly titled Hold It Together.
Yet even without that weighty bit of back-story, the 12 songs on the
band’s full-length debut are deeply expressive of frustration, ache and
loss.

Singer Simone Schmidt – who’s got a raw,
world-weary drawl akin to Freakwater’s Catherine Irwin – brings the
listener unabashedly close in the first few seconds of the leadoff
track, “Careless Love.” It’s been 10 years and a handful of failed
follow-ups since critics first swooned over the opener to Lucinda
Williams’ Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,
yet this track feels like a worthy passing of the torch. Schmidt’s song
– a weary lament about a sloppy lover – has the same profane, arresting
quality as Williams’ masturbation fantasy, only it works to opposite
effect; “I lie on my back and moan at the ceiling” has been supplanted by “I
never come but it don’t matter / I could be any other girl / My head
planted on that pillow my eyes fixed up above / Is this what they meant
when they sang Careless Love?” If I can still hear the former at
the grocery store 10 years later, the latter feels deserving of more
than a sliver of the same attention.

From here, Schmidt and Co. roll through a cycle
of hardscrabble ballads about killers waylaid by inclement weather
(“Snow and Rain”), lesbian lovers on the run from bigoted eyes (“Hell’s
a Place”), and long shifts in a northeastern Ontario gold mine
(“Fourteen Hour Day”). I’m not sure whether Russell or Schmidt do the
bulk of the writing, but the results are uniformly impressive – these
are songs that avoid sweeping generalities, training their gaze on
small details like a hitchhiker’s thumbs in Quesnel and sooty boot
stains on a flight of porch stairs in Timmins.

Veteran producer Rick White (Eric’s Trip,
Elevator) knows enough to keep the no-frills backing of acoustic
guitar, bass, organ and drums low in the mix, but he’s pretty generous
about Stew Crookes’ pedal steel, which offers Schmidt a worthy foil. It
dips and swoons through the waltz-time “Nothing’s Alright” and blankets
her vulnerable vocals in “No Great Leap” (“If being poor’s my life’s crime / My body’s prison’s eastern standard time”).
Instrumentally, things get gnarled towards the record’s end – the
droning, low-hanging psychedelic haze of “Tirade of a Shitty Mom” and
the naked slide notes of “Snow and Rain.” Yet, One Hundred Dollars is a
band that sounds best putting their downbeat, idiosyncratic stamp on
traditional roots forms. Forest of Tears is unrepentantly bleak, but some bummers are better than others and this one’s among the best of the year."

- Nathan Hogan, Dusted Magazine

http://www.paperthinwalls.com/singlefile/item?id=1828

Gulag of Fucked Up guest edited this feature on paperthinwalls.com .  Here's his take on no great leap.

Country music by and for the urban denizen—that's one of the epigraphs that have been pinned on $100. The subway metaphor works beautifully in this song, even weaving melodically into the music, the soulful strains of Simone's voice, the steel pedal guitar shrieking through the tunnel. The train takes the singer to the same place every day, but she's going nowhere. "In the end, it's no great leap" to end it all, or to continue her life. Both are dead ends. But the music still carries you along with this thumping country rhythm and the song dissolves into the momentum of a morning commute. The song's about a girl who's sexually abused by her step-dad and is forced to leave home and take the first job she can get, but it's also a testament to survival—I've always felt in this strange way that the subway pits us all together like that—hurtling underground towards our fate, we all have to climb up those stairs at some point and face the light. - GULAG