Amy Lee Radigan takes us From Gotham to Gallifrey
When Amy Lee Radigan put a video for her “Nerdy Girls Need Love Too” song online, she had no idea it would explode the way it did.
“I never expected the YouTube video to get more than 500 hits, which would mean all my Facebook friends had seen it,” says Lee Radigan, who performed at this year’s M Awards ceremony.
The video got well over 500 hits; as of press time, it was sitting at over 186,000, thanks, in part, to British sci fi/fantasy writer Neil Gaiman posting a link to the song on his Twitter feed.
“That was pretty much the highlight of my entire life. He’s been my favourite author for a really long time, ever since I read American Gods when I was 14,” Lee Radigan says. “I didn’t even know that he re-Tweeted it. I found out from somebody who posted a comment. All of a sudden there was a flood of comments that were like, ‘I’m so happy Neil Gaiman sent me here.’”
The overwhelming response to the video — “Nerdy Girls” got mentions on the Huffington Post, Think Geek and Geekologie — prompted her to think about putting together a record. Lee Radigan, who moved to Toronto from Victoria last year, had a handful of quirky songs she’d written for fun, so she set to work on writing a few more to fill out an album. The result is From Gotham to Gallifrey, her debut collection dealing with “a huge variety of nerdy topics,” whether it be Star Trek, comic book shops, Batman or Battlestar Galactica. A tricky task, given nerds’ penchant for pointing out continuity errors.
“It’s odd to write songs about things that you know you have to get right,” says Lee Radigan. “Emotional songs can just kind of flow and it doesn’t matter if they make sense, but it was a very interesting process to try and write songs that people would actually want to listen to while getting the facts right.”
Lee Radigan’s hope is to tour to comic conventions to perform her work (“It would be awesome to be able to play my music at comic conventions, to the people that I really wrote it for,” she says), but says the whole internet stardom thing has thrown her for a bit of a loop; after all, she started out more as an actress than a singer-songwriter.
“I picked up the guitar because I enjoyed singing when I was younger. It was an easy way to accompany myself and it was much more portable than a piano,” she says. “Maybe I can find a way to combine the two. I can write a nerd musical rock opera.”
Sounds good to us.
Catch Amy Lee Radigan’s CD release show at 8 p.m. Thursday, April 7 at the Victoria Event Centre (1415 Broad). Tickets are $10 at the downtown Curious Comics or amyleeradigan.com.