OPEN HEARTS OPEN MINDS was recorded during the pandemic and involved collaboration with musicians across North America. While attending music conference Indie 101, singer Mackenzie Kristjon was recording the album Open Hearts Open Minds. The album already featured collaborations with Dan Konopka (OK Go) in California and Leon Harrison (The Lazys,
OPEN HEARTS OPEN MINDS was recorded during the pandemic and involved collaboration with musicians across North America. While attending music conference Indie 101, singer Mackenzie Kristjon was recording the album Open Hearts Open Minds. The album already featured collaborations with Dan Konopka (OK Go) in California and Leon Harrison (The Lazys, Bandwagon Workshops) from Australia, and so Kristjon thought it might be fun to make it open to anyone who wanted something to do while in lockdown, a last-minute decision while attending Indie 101, one of four online music conferences put on by Indie Week.
“I felt there might be some benefit to the universe to have all of these people singing the phrase Open Hearts Open Minds in various places while alone in lockdown, like it might bring people together in a small but positive way. And hopefully it provided a worthy distraction from the nightly COVID news report.”
For the title track Open Hearts Open Minds, Kristjon involved singers from Vancouver to Cape Breton in Canada and from San Francisco to Philadelphia in the USA. Around 40 people reached out and around half actually submitted vocals.
Lyrically, the song was originally inspired by a parental rights’ organization who were looking for an anthem. They supplied hundreds of pages of documents of the most heart-wrenching stories of parental alienation. However, Mackenzie Kristjon decided to take it in a more universal direction about rising beyond challenges and opening hearts and minds to our shared humanity in all its various struggles. On the day the lead vocals were recorded, Kristjon even crowdsourced lines for the second verse on Facebook, which came from old friend Craig Norris, singer for Guelph-based The Kramdens and morning show host for the CBC in Kitchener-Waterloo.
“I sing about having a friend in an old steeltown, which is a nod to Hamilton, where I’ve lived for the past few years, which is also why I included a Hamilton streetscape on the single cover. Although Hamilton is very quickly gentrifying, it still has working class roots and the people are very salt of the earth.”