Todd Green wears many hats.
By day, he’s a marketing professor at Brock University in St. Catharines. Outside of the university, the St. Davids resident is also the executive director of the Tomorrow’s Voices Foundation, a charitable children’s choir he established in 2017.
With a passion for nurturing young talent, Green founded the organization to provide aspiring singers across Canada with a platform to showcase their voices.
Today, the foundation operates in six cities and three provinces, impacting the lives of hundreds of children.
Now, you can add singer-songwriter to his extensive resume.
He has just released his first single “Five Years Later,” along with an accompanying music video, a song that comes from Green’s experience coping with the loss of a member of his family.
At 46 years old, Green said releasing music wasn’t an immediate process.
“I had it in mind that I wanted to write music and record music,” he said. “I wasn’t sure if I would be into writing lyrics for someone else to sing.”
He had taken an eight-week songwriting course where he was required to write an original song and learn to perform.
“It’s just like, OK, get over yourself and just do it,” Green said. “That’s sort of how we got to this point.”
With the help of the course, he felt he was finally ready.
The act of writing music has made his love of music – Green boasts some 800 albums in his record collection – even greater.
“I think I love music so much that I was almost worried about sort of ruining music for myself by not being good at it — if that makes any sense,” Green said.
Green has found himself inspired by artists from multiple genres — classic rock, indie rock, folk and electronic music.
“The first concert I ever went to was to see Paul McCartney when I was 14,” he said. “And then, I have tickets for bands like Vampire Weekend and Sarah McLaughlin and Feist this summer. (It’s a) really, really wide range but then, I also really love the Chemical Brothers and Prodigy and stuff like that.”
Green has burst out of the gate with an emotionally charged song that handles a tough subject — the loss of a loved one.
“Five Years Later” draws from Green’s feelings about the death of his former stepson.
“The song was part of the process I have been going through since he passed away, and I was finally able to put into words what I have been thinking since I found out he had passed,” Green said.
He has other songs in various stages and plans to put out an EP “of five or six songs,” which he hopes to release by the end of the year.
Green has also been composing instrumental “electronic synth music” over the past few years and is contemplating releasing an EP comprised solely of this genre.
Released under the name TDG (his initials), the instrumentals came about with a lot less stress and anxiety on his part.
“It’s easier to hide behind production,” Green said. “I already have enough for the electronics and stuff. I have a bit of a backlog on that side.”
He hopes a couple of charitable endeavours can benefit from sales of “Five Years Later.”
The track can be streamed on Spotify and is available for download via bandcamp.com.
Proceeds from the single will go to Kids Help Phone and a memorial fund for the music program at the Alberta school where his former stepson was a student.
