Album Notes

Prairie Rain is a 2007 Nominee for the Canadian Folk Music Awards in the category, Best Instrumentalist, Solo.

"Delicate, tasteful beauty infuses both the performance and composition of these varied folk pieces. Prairie Rain is eminently worth listening to." (Cam Bastedo)

Brian Thomas is a Celtic-folk songwriter from Surrey, British Columbia. Across cultures and generations, music has been a vehicle for storytelling, and Brian’s songs have sought to re-capture that tradition. His peaceful, melodic music frames touchingly human stories and lyrics packed with imagery. Brian blends the unique sound of the hammered dulcimer with finger-style guitar, piano, bodhran, recorders, violins, and other percussion to create a refreshingly original musical sound.

Brian had no formal music training as a child, and only began making music when he first picked up a guitar at the age of 17. In the years since, he has learned to play several other instruments, written almost a hundred original songs, and released three full-length CDs.

His most recent songs are found on his third CD release, Prairie Rain. Though still a collection of stories, these are told with few words spoken. All but one of its songs are instrumental. Brian says, “One of the greatest challenges as a musician is to be able to convey emotions and pictures in music, and doing that with instrumental songs is even more difficult. How do you make a piano sound like a baby waking up, or a guitar sound like a hawk flying, or a dulcimer sound like a rainstorm? That’s what I was trying to achieve in this project – a collection of musical pictures of the emotions and stories I lived through over the last few years of my life. Different people may hear a different story if there’s no words, but I hope everyone that listens hears something meaningful to them.”

The inspiration for many of the songs came from a journey Brian took with his wife to Scotland and Ireland in the summer of 2006, including a five-day stay on the profoundly spiritual island of Iona. Others were written for weddings, both his own and those of friends.

Brian is happily married, and has a baby daughter. Brian studied music and composition at Trinity Western University. Brian also teaches guitar and piano, and hopes one day to compose and conduct a choral symphony.