Fresh At Twenty

Fresh At Twenty
Tags: Kaitlin Fontana

Fresh at Twenty: An Oral History of Mint Records is first and foremost the story of an independent record label and the people who helped build it. But it's also the story of a time in popular music and a place in that time namely Vancouver through the 1990s and 2000s. Mint not only shaped the sound of Vancouver at the end of the 20th century, but helped usher in an golden age of Canadian popular music that still thrives today (and the likes of which the country hadn't seen for a long time before that perhaps even since the Band's rise to success in the 1960s). These days, Canada is considered a boomtown when it comes to producing the best music, and Mint Records definitely played an as-yet-unheralded role in making Canadian particularly Western Canadian bands and musicians both accessible to tastemakers across the world and ready to take on the world's stage. Here now, in all of their own words (and a few of mine), is the story of Mint Records. It's a story that could have only happened when it did, to the people it did, where it did. While we were still out looking for our punk past and wrestling the gravitational pull of grunge, a little revolution was taking place. How Vancouver of us not to notice not to celebrate what was, and is, happening right under our noses. Better late than never. Punk is gone. Grunge is dead. Long live Mint Records.