OVER A BEER WITH
-jAMES SEABROOK-
This month we are not in a local watering hole. The location for our story is a recording studio in west Edmonton, home of James Seabrook. Well, not really home but he spends so much time in the studio, he may as well live there. It is a non-descript building, condo style, where you might find a small law office, architect or maybe a home design studio. In this case, it’s Two Bodies of Water Productions (TBoW). James Seabrook, owner, engineer, manager is sipping on a large triple triple. It is early in the morning and though a cold beverage is always good, I have followed along with my daily double double.
Growing up Seabrook wanted to be a musician. It’s not an uncommon dream for teenagers. Realism hit and he was pretty good, he decided he was never going to be the rock star he wanted to be. Music was still going to be his calling. The question was where was he going to fit. He started looking to audio engineering schools but costs of the courses eventually sent him to NAIT where he got his start working on recording equipment. His first job out of school happened in Cold Lake as an “assistant”, essentially a gopher, at a show with the bands Toronto and the Headpins. His desire to learn and be in the music business was obvious by his work ethic. He did the job required, until the job was done. Down the road, the owner of the company was expanding and moved to Vancouver, leaving Seabrook in charge. At age 21, he was a little overwhelmed. He didn’t have to do sales, but the rest was up to him. Planning, loading, driving because no one else had a license, set up, work the show, tear down and like shampoo, repeat. The stress, turned to anger and a realization that no one around him understood what he was going through. No one knew his business and friends and family had the typical 9 to 5 job. He needed a mentor, someone he could talk to and that became his old boss. A quirk of fate and discussion had Seabrook in the studio with his boss, recording country artists Jason McCoy and Rick Tippe. It was then that he knew fate was leading him to become an audio engineer. As cool as the live shows were, the direction was determined. His last show with that company was in with Captain Tractor in Beaumont, Alberta.
The fix was in and Seabrook opened his first studio. It was located on the second floor of a building that housed a welding shop. It did take a number of months before the situation was unworkable. It wasn’t a top notch studio but it was running all hours of the day. It seemed that they were constantly being asked to leave the building so that the welders could get their daily work x-rayed. The studio closed. It was Seabrook’s first real failure. If he couldn’t keep a small business afloat, how was he going to do what he really wanted. He worked at HMV, picked orders in a warehouse, tried paramedic work and got kicked out of nursing school after eighteen months. Failure number two and the mind starts playing tricks on you and Seabrook just doesn’t have a direction. In steps fate, again. Someone he hadn’t spoken to in some time, called him out of the blue to see if he was still doing “that audio stuff”. An interview at a radio station turned into a job with Chorus. This brought him back to his passion. Thirty years old and he was reigniting, not only his passion, but his old connections too. He was responsible for the standardization of the audio from all the stations and producers, so that the quality was all the same. Fast forward to 2009 and the station went though a round of layoffs and as the saying goes, “last hired……”, well, you know.