From left to right: Chloe Beauchamp-Bisson, Madison Olds and Abby Wale of the country trio Bees and the Bare Bones won a trip to Nashville for recording studio time.

(ASHLEY LEGASSIC / iNFOnews.ca)

'THIS IS THE CHANCE OF A LIFETIME.'

KAMLOOPS - A Kamloops country trio is about to cross the border to make their mark in Nashville.

Two months ago, Madison Olds stumbled across a contest online for aspiring country artists and bands.

She asked her friend Chloe Beauchamp-Brisson if she thought the song they wrote together, Mad Love, could be changed to a more country tune. Beauchamp-Brisson thought it could work, but both girls decided a third voice was needed. Beauchamp-Brisson thought her friend Abby Wale would be the perfect fit.

“It was more folk, but as soon we added Abby into it all of a sudden it was like, this is country,” Olds says.

Wale says the first practice they had together ended up being a turning point in their music careers.

“They had written a song together called Mad Love. I went over (to practice) and we didn’t work on anything else,” Wale says. “We just played that song five times maybe. The next day we recorded it and sent it in to the competition.”

After that day, the girls were known as Bees and the Bare Bones, the name coming from Olds’s family’s love of bees and a play on Beauchamp-Brisson.

“We like to joke that the 'and the' in the title is for Abby,” Beauchamp-Brisson laughs.

The group ended up winning the national Chevy Tailgate contest with the song Mad Love. The competition offers one musician or band the opportunity to get some studio time in Tennessee.

Olds, Wale and Beauchamp-Brisson were sitting at Frick and Frack Taphouse Sunday night, Sept. 11 with dozens of friends and family members waiting to hear the results of the contest.

Olds checked her phone and saw someone had sent her a message telling her to check Twitter.

“I go onto Twitter then all of a sudden I’m like staring at my phone… and I’m like 'We won. We Won. We won,'" Olds laughs.

The girls say everyone in the restaurant started screaming and whistling, celebrating the brand new country group who formed specifically for this contest.

Considering everything unfolded so quickly, the group says their biggest focus right now is re-evaluating their priorities.

“I enrolled to go to TRU before we were ever even a trio, so now it’s been hard to find a balance in everything,” Wale says. “But this is priority.”

“We all want to focus on this to make this top priority,” Beauchamp-Brisson adds. “This is the chance of a lifetime. This is crazy. We want to make the most of the entire experience we don’t want to be like ‘Oh I don’t want to go for two weeks because I have an exam.’ You’re never too old for school.”

The next stop for the group is Nashville to record an extended playlist of four or five original songs, but that’s just the first step for this country band.

“After Nashville, maybe it’s just me that’s pushing this, but I really want to go on tour. We’ve tossed out the idea of partnering with another band to go across Canada. Because I think now we need the experience as a trio because we’re so new. We need memories and stories,” Olds says.

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