Claresholm country musician and three time CCMA award winner Shane Chisholm is excited to return to Lethbridge for two shows this week— opening for Canadian country star Aaron Pritchett on July 6 and on July 5 at the ATP Dragon Boat Races.
“I’m lucky they asked me to do that,” said Chisholm, who made his name as a bass player for hire for the likes of Aaron Pritchett , Julian Austin, George Canyon, Duane Steele and Beverly Mahood to name a few,  but has since gone out on his own, blending elements of country with rockabilly, rock, roots and showmanship into his own  unique style.

 He plays for a half hour opening or Aaron Pritchett, but is planning a 90 minute show for the Dragon Boat Festival, where he will be ending  the night, July 5 at 8:30 p.m.

 He has played Average Joes several times. He makes an impression not only with his own brand of country music, rockabilly and blues music, but because he plays a hand made stand up bass he build out of the gas tank of an old van.
 He also performs a variety of  fire related stunts using a grinder to send up showers of sparks on his tank.
“ I always want to take it to the next level,” he said.

 He has been working on some new music. He released CD “Hitchhiking Buddha” in 2009 and “No One Came” in 2011.
“ I have a bunch of honky tonk and rockabilly songs I plan to release as a new project,” he said.

He is excited about playing southern Alberta again. He has been concentrating  on managing the business aspect of his career, now it is under control, he can get back to playing.

“ It will be nice  to not care about the business aspect of it and get back to playing and performing. That’s the fun part,” he said.

“ I don’t play southern Alberta a lot, so it will be nice to have the opportunity to perform for new fans,” he said.

 He is excited to not only open for Aaron Pritchett, but also have his own show at the Dragon Boat Races. After playing Lethbridge he will have his own show at Nashville North at the Calgary Stampede.
“ I will have my own band including another stand up bass player,” he said adding they have devised  some  eye-catching duelling  stand up bass tricks including a complicated one called the puppet show, which involves  fire and  them playing each others basses. Not to mention the show will include fire eaters.

“It’s really going to be a lot of fun,” he said adding he is always trying to push the live performance into uncharted realms.
 He  has fun  building stand up basses out of extraordinary objects.

“ I build a lot of basses. I used to be covered to be covered with wood shavings, now it’s metal shavings,” he said adding he even built a stand up bass which looked like the Stanley Cup, which didn’t go over well.

“I talked to the NHL about it, but they said the Stanley Cup was their intellectual property and sent me a letter saying to stop, but it wasn’t official, so I went ahead and finished it anyway,” he said adding he played it in Calgary a couple of times where it didn’t go over as well as he expected.

“It played great,” he said.
His next project is building a stand up bass with beer kegs as the body.