Jim Guthrie

Jim Guthrie has enjoyed two parallel careers, first as a singer and songwriter in the indie rock community, and later as a composer of scores for video games and movies. Guthrie was born in 1973 in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. In his teens, he developed an interest in music, and in addition to playing in bands with his friends, he got a four-track recording rig and began making his own amateur recordings. In 1995, Guthrie released his first album, the cassette-only Home Is Where the Rock Is. In the next three years, Guthrie released three more cassettes (Victim of Lo-Fi, Documenting Perks, Pt. 1, and Some Things You Should Know About Sound and Hearing). In 1999, material from the four tapes was compiled into an album titled A Thousand Songs, which became the debut release for the influential Canadian indie label Three Gut Records. 1999 also saw Guthrie form the band the Royal City All Stars with friend and fellow Guelph musician Aaron Riches. By the time they released their debut album in 2000, At Rush Hour the Cars, their name had been shortened to Royal City, and they would collaborate with pre-fame Leslie Feist and Sufjan Stevens and release two more albums before the group split up in 2004. (Stevens would release a compilation of Royal City material on his Asthmatic Kitty label in 2009.) Guthrie continued to record and release solo material during his tenure with Royal City, and in 2003 he released the album Now More Than Ever. It was a major critical success, earning a Juno Award nomination and certifying his status as one of the most acclaimed artists on the Canadian indie music scene. In 2006, Guthrie participated in the recording of Return to the Sea, the debut album by Islands, a group formed by Nicholas Thorburn and Jamie Thompson of the Unicorns. Guthrie's time in the band was short-lived, but later Guthrie and Thorburn collaborated in the Neil Young-influenced project Human Highway, releasing the album Moody Motorcycle in 2008. By this time, Guthrie had started taking on projects as a composer for hire, beginning with scores for the documentaries Life Is a Fairy Tale (2006) and The Bodybuilder and I (2007). He soon branched out into commercials and television projects, and enjoyed a major career breakthrough with his music for the 2011 video game Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery. The Sword and Sworcery score would later see release on CD and vinyl, and helped earn him a commission to write music for the documentary Indie Game: The Movie. In 2013, Guthrie released his first proper solo album since Now More Than Ever, Takes Time, another critical success which earned him a Polaris Prize nomination. In 2014, Guthrie released another collaborative project, One of These Days I'll Get It Right, an album of experimental hip-hop-influenced tracks recorded with Solid Mas. The following year, author Andrew Hood published Jim Guthrie: Who Needs What, a biography of the musician. 2017 saw the release of Planet Coaster, the soundtrack to a video game Guthrie scored in collaboration with J.J. Ipsen. ~ Mark Deming