Stephen Fearing
Folk & Roots
ActiveAbout
Stephen John Ging Fearing was born January 14, 1963 and is a Canadian roots/folk singer-songwriter. He was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and raised in Dublin, Ireland. His parents divorced when he was six years old and he moved with his mother to Dublin, Ireland, where he lived for the next 11 years. He returned to Canada in 1981 via Minneapolis, Minnesota, and began pursuing a career in music. In 1988 he released Out to Sea, which was co-produced by Steve Darke and Fearing in Vancouver, followed by Blue Line, in 1991, which was produced in London by Clive Gregson. Throughout his career, he was awarded the 2017 Worldwide Album of the Year by Blues & Roots Radio for his album Every Soul's a Sailor and named 2017 Contemporary Singer of the Year at the Canadian Folk Music Awards. Yellowjacket won the 2007 Juno Award for Best Traditional and Roots Album. In 1996 Fearing got together with Colin Linden, and Tom Wilson to record a one-off tribute album to their friend and mentor, the great Canadian songwriter Willie P. Bennett. They picked a band name for the project (a reference to Bennett's 1978 album Blackie and the Rodeo King) and released High or Hurtin': The Songs of Willie P. Bennett. They were all up to their necks in solo careers and had no plans to turn the collaboration into a going concern, but the rest is a wonderfully convoluted story that has stretched into three decades and 11 albums. In 1999, the band recorded Kings of Love, which received a Juno Award for Best Roots & Traditional Album – Group in 2000.