The Great Money Caper Press Release for the Winnipeg Fringe!

The Great Caper is a one-man show that tells the story of how songwriter/storyteller Corin Raymond paid for the making of an entire double album with Canadian Tire money. To pull it off he collected a total of $7,333.75, which took 15 months to put together. Thousands of Canadians got involved. The final stash consisted of more than 39,000 separate bills and weighed over 80 pounds. And it all began with a song which Raymond co-wrote with Winnipeg songwriter Rob Vaarmeyer…

The show is the story of how this gleeful Winnipeg collaboration (a ‘trailer park love song’ called “Don’t Spend It Honey”) exploded into one of the most beautiful - and most Canadian - crowd-funding efforts ever enjoyed by a songwriter. The ‘Tire Caper’ unfolded throughout 2012, the same year Corin brought his first one-man show Bookworm (4.5 stars Edmonton Journal, 4.5 stars Victoria Times-Colonist, Pick of the Fringe, Vancouver) to Winnipeg, where - as happened everywhere - people handed him Tire money every time he performed. It was while performing that year at the Trout Forest Music Festival that Winnipeg fans and friends put the Caper over the $5,000 mark.

The ‘Caper’ received an incredible amount of press. CTV, CBC, and Global Television all covered the story multiple times, as did The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, and plenty more. Highlights include the front page of The Wall Street Journal and a shoutout on This Hour Has 22 Minutes. Yet no one was able to convey the full beauty of what was taking place. The Great Canadian Tire Money Caper relays the whole hilarious and inspiring story in one place for the first time.

The double album Raymond financed with the Tire money, called Paper Nickels, is for the most part a collection of songs by Canadian peers and colleagues, which Raymond collected over ten years of touring in (the best Canadian songs you haven't heard yet!), a of which are Winnipeg material. Raymond covers Winnipeg’s Scott Nolan, Andrew Neville, and Rob Vaarmeyer on the project, and the package accompanying the 2 CDs (a little 144-page hardcover book, or “coffee table CD”) includes the chords to the songs as well as the stories of where Raymond found them, and of course, a summary of the Caper itself. Many of the stories included in the album package revolve around Winnipegers, and the booklet ends with a beautiful liner note from John Scoles, “President and Head Janitor” of The Times Change(d) High and Lonesome Club.

Since the Caper’s culmination in 2013, when Raymond paid the $7,333.75 bill to The Rogue Music Lab, the Toronto studio whose business policy it is to accept Tire money at par (though it was the Winnipeg co-write and not this policy of The Rogue's which set the Caper in motion), people have continued to give Corin their small paper change. Everywhere he goes. Everywhere. Raymond has used this overflow of Sandy McTire money to pay the songwriting royalties he owes to the many songwriters he covers on Paper Nickels. He will be paying out $332 in royalties to Andrew Neville when he returns to Winnipeg for the Fringe this year. If he’s lucky, he’ll be able to pay Scott Nolan as well.

So far he’s handed over $1,400.00 in Tire money royalties. This means that more than $8,700.00 in Tire money has been spent on this project - and in order to accrue this money from purchases made at Canadian Tire, you'd have to spend well over a million in cash. By these lights, and dead to rights, Corin Raymond made the first-ever million Canadian folk record. With nickels made of paper. A lot of which came from friends and fans in Winnipeg, MB.

Media Contact

Corin Raymond [email protected] 647 471 764

Corin Raymond Bio

Winnipeg born, Raymond began his childhood in Northern (Red Lake) where he received fuel for later writing from his father, who raised him after his mother died. Raymond’s dad was a high school history teacher, a librarian, and a bookseller. As Raymond recalled on Shelagh Rogers’ program The Next Chapter (June 18th 2012), “My father gave me words, almost by osmosis. I didn’t even know that was happening. I just fell in love - and maybe it’s like when you introduce your friend to someone and they end up marrying them, and you know, you kind of take a bit of credit, you say, ‘Oh yes, well, I introduced them.’ That’s how it is with me and words and my dad. He introduced us, and we got married.”

This love came in handy when Raymond became a full-time songwriter, first in the two- man band The Undesirables (with guitarist Sean Cotton), and later as a solo artist. Raymond has released six albums to date (three with The Undesirables and three solo). He is currently at work on his fourth solo album, titled Hobo Jungle Fever Dreams (which features co-writes with two different Winnipegers).

Corin Raymond has performed his songs across Canada, from coast to coast, at least twenty times. He tours in the US, Australia, in England, and Europe. Corin has played roughly 50 festivals (including multiple return engagements), and has performed a weekly residency in Toronto, at The Cameron House with his band The Sundowners, for exactly ten years (more than 300 shows).

The past several years, as well as performing music, Raymond has toured his one-man show Bookworm to great acclaim. This summer he’s touring The Great Canadian Tire Money Caper. Winnipeg is only his ninth Fringe. Raymond has turned to storytelling at Fringe festivals only for the financial security it provides - and having been evicted from his home of eleven years only weeks before kicking off this tour, the peace of mind provided by the Fringe life is more valued than ever before. Life is fast and freaky! Stay tuned!