4 To Watch: Jeremy Fisher

Hometown: Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Fun fact: When he was just 10, Fisher's parents took him and his sister out of school for a year to travel across Europe living in a VW bus.
Why he's worth watching: His homemade video for "Cigarette"—with its huge chorus, cheery mandolin and title character fashioned from modeling clay—has become an Internet phenomenon with more than two million viewers.
For fans of: Paul Simon, Tom Petty, Josh Rouse

Most independent musicians look forward to selling enough CDs, concert tickets and T-shirts to finally quit their day jobs. Canadian singer/songwriter Jeremy Fisher decided to skip that step—he just didn’t bother getting one. Instead, in 2002, he hooked up a trailer behind his bicycle, and peddled his way across North America—from Seattle to Halifax, Nova Scotia—passing the hat at free coffeehouse shows and busking in cities and towns in the northern U.S. and southern Canada. He’s since made two more cross-continent jaunts, growing his fanbase stop-by-stop.

So far, things have worked out, so Fisher probably won’t be job-hunting anytime soon. After self-releasing his first record, Back Porch Spirituals, labels starting taking interest, and he signed a publishing deal with Sony/ATV, followed by a record deal with Sony Music Canada. “I think I had three different A&R people, and I made one record with the company, [Let It Shine]. It was just too hard, so I asked if I could get out, and luckily I hadn’t sold a whole lot of records, so they didn’t mind letting me go.”

He then signed with Wind-Up Records for his first U.S. release, Goodbye Blue Monday. Fisher was a strange choice for a label best known for bands like Creed and Evanescence. “I guess they’re trying to branch out,” Fisher says. “It’s exciting to be on a label where they’re not saying, ‘OK, yeah, we’re just gonna do with him what we did with Evanescence,’ which is what it was like being on Sony. They were like, ‘Well, we’ll just plug him into the John Mayer patch, or James Blunt.’”

Fisher has come a long way since that first bike trip. “I think I’m kind of done with the cross-continental thing in North America. I might try [biking across] Europe. But my touring in America will largely be planes and cars.”