One Hundred Dollars Write Country Music About Cities

It's not everyday you come across a country song that follows the life of a slum owner on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, but then Toronto's One Hundred Dollars isn't your typical alt-country band.

Making the trek out west this week in honour of 'My Father's House' -- the Deranged Records installment in the outfit's ongoing 'Regional Seven-Inch Series,' a collection of vinyl singles thematically linked to the location of the label releasing each record -- One Hundred Dollars will get an up-close look at the city that stands as the backdrop to their latest sonic offering.

"It seemed like Vancouver was an apt place to position the story because of the whole Robert Pickton thing," says frontwoman and lyricist Simone Fornow, referring to the convicted serial killer and pig farmer believed to have murdered as many as 49 local women.

Inspired by her own personal involvement in 'No More Silence' -- a coalition created to call attention to Indigenous women across Canada who have been murdered or gone missing -- Fornow tosses aside country's typical "he done me wrong" woes in favour of more intense subject matter on the new seven-inch.

"The story is told from the perspective of a woman who inherits a slum from her father and [becomes] its superintendent and then a tenant that she befriends goes missing," says Fornow of the song featured on the record's A side.

"I also drew inspiration from an Aboriginal author named Lee Maracle who wrote a poem about a woman called Helen Betty Osborne who was murdered [in 1971] and the police never investigated it 'til years later. I realized through her writing that here had been this entire school of Aboriginal writers in Canada who had written poems for Helen Betty Osborne but there weren't many white writers who had written about it."

Given Fornow's desire to use One Hundred Dollars as a platform to address pressing social issues, it shouldn't be a surprise that the folky collective has a close relationship with F---ed Up, another Toronto band praised for its work to raise the profile of some of Canada's more marginalized citizens. (Like their upcoming, star-studded charity cover song 'Do They Know It's Christmas').

According to Fornow, it was actually this friendship that helped to set the 'Regional Seven-Inch Series' in motion. "F---ed Up commissioned us to do a cover of 'Blaze of Glory' off 'Hidden World' in 2007 and Deranged heard it and asked us if they could release it. We weren't really that interested, but we came up with this idea of doing original seven-inches and asked if Deranged would be interested in participating in that," explains Fornow.

The series' first seven-inch, '14th Floor,' was released by Block Recording Club earlier this year and is about a cancer hospital in Toronto where guitarist/songwriter Ian Russell received leukemia treatment in 2007 (and where he co-wrote much of last year's debut album 'Forest of Tears'). Future singles will revolve around subjects like work shortages in St. John's, Newfoundland and the oil economy in Fort McMurray, Alberta.