Catch a rising star at Victoria's McPherson Playhouse - Goldstream News Gazette

There's an anecdote about how, in 1999, a rather inexperienced concert promoter flippantly asked Dixie Chicks' lead vocalist Laura Lynch what had made the group an overnight success.

She looked him up and down and replied, "Overnight success? How about the more than 10 years of playing every little honky-tonk and dive bar across the South? Overnight success? Geeze!"

The promoter slinked away and stopped talking.

It's a story that might just as easily been applied to Victoria's own Brett Smith-Daniels.

On Dec. 5, Smith-Daniels will be releasing an original album with Matt Sorum (from Guns and Roses), and a few days later on Dec. 11, he'll be headlining at the McPherson Playhouse with guest appearances by Dan Konopka of Grammy-winning band OkGO and Instagram superstar Ayla Tesler-Mab.

In the last two years, Smith-Daniels has shown himself to be an astonishing musical talent and has performed more than 240 gigs a year. He's toured with performances in 30 countries including the U.K. (in Buxton, Edinburgh, Gateshead, Holmfirth, Bury St. Edmunds, Frome, Birmingham, and London), Germany (Leverkusen, Efhurt, Worpswede, Köln, Freiburg, Hannover, and Neuruppin), France (Talant, Lille, Cleon, Anglions), Spain (Bilbao, Barcelona), Switzerland (Bern), the U.S.A. (too many venues to list here) and, well, you get the picture.

Smith-Daniels is hot and only getting hotter.

But don't make the mistake of assuming that this was an "overnight success" story. This rising music star has earned every inch of his progress.

When Smith-Daniels (now 29) was only 13, he was leading the (very young) rock band Endurance. At 14, he played Massey Hall, and when he was 15, he was pitching his music on CBC's Dragons' Den.

"I saw this ad for Dragons' Den and thought, 'Why not?'" recalled Smith-Daniels. "I thought it would get us some exposure and I went on there and convinced them to buy into a record label that didn't actually exist. It was either guts or stupidity on our part, but, surpris