His father’s passing inspired Butchy’s Son, the album nominated for a Juno Award for R&B/Soul Recording of the Year. The Canadian music awards ceremony will be held in Calgary on April 3.
“Before I started work on the album, I had all my songs ready to go, and then my dad passed away,” Lehman says. “I took three songs off the original album and I replaced them with three new songs I’d written about the loss of my father.”
Butchy’s Son is the latest note in a musical career that has taken Lehman around the world. While he’s played shows in Toronto, New York City, London and Amsterdam, one of Lehman’s first gigs was on perhaps the largest stage in local music — the Montreal International Jazz Festival.
“That was the big, open air show and there were 150,000 people,” Lehman says. “Definitely going from that to performing at a club in front of 75 people is a bit different.”