Northern Dial Artist Profile

soulDecision

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Vancouver trio soulDecision formed in the 1990s around singer-songwriter Trevor Guthrie, David Bowman and Ken Lewko, developing a polished blend of pop, R&B and dance music at the height of the teen-pop boom. The group was often marketed alongside boy bands, but Guthrie's writing and the band's preference for blue-eyed soul and club production gave the project a somewhat different musical centre. Their 2000 debut No One Does It Better was produced with Charles Fisher and opened with "Ooh It's Kinda Crazy," a sleek pop-R&B single that established the group's Canadian audience.

The major breakthrough was "Faded," which reached No. 1 in Canada and crossed to U.S. radio, while No One Does It Better debuted in the Canadian Top 10. Songs such as "Gravity" and the title track extended the album's run, and soulDecision became one of the relatively few Canadian pop groups of the era to achieve meaningful U.S. exposure in a market dominated by much larger American and British teen-pop machines. The band later released Shady Satin Drug before disbanding in the mid-2000s, after which Guthrie continued as a solo singer and songwriter.

soulDecision matters as part of the pre-streaming Canadian pop infrastructure that existed just before a new generation of Canadian artists began breaking globally with far greater frequency. Their success demonstrated that a Vancouver act working in contemporary R&B and dance-pop could compete inside the turn-of-the-millennium mainstream rather than only on domestic radio. "Faded" remains the defining hit, but the group's strongest material also documents a Canadian attempt to bring songwriter-driven R&B sophistication into the boy-band era.