The Tenors kick off most personal tour yet on Wednesday night in Thunder Bay

Clifton Murray has music in his blood.

The grandson of George Murray, a renowned Irish tenor on CBC Television’s Cross Canada Hit Parade, for the past six years Clifton Murray has toured the globe with The Tenors, a Canadian sensation that’s taken the world by storm.

Their latest tour, which takes them to 60 cities across North America, kicks off on Wednesday night at the Thunder Bay Community Auditorium.

The operatic pop foursome, also featuring Fraser Walters, Remigio Pereira and Victor Micallef, has been rehearsing the show in Thunder Bay for the past several days, their set being custom-built behind them.

Murray, for one, is excited to unveil it to fans everywhere.

“With the success that we’ve had over the years, we want to keep elevating the show for the audience and the way to do that is to have more production, a better quality sound … and wanting to prepare your show in a place you feel comfortable and you feel supported,” said the British Columbia native, a Vancouver Film School graduate who once worked alongside William Shatner and James Spader on Boston Legal before embarking on full-time musical career.

“Over the years Thunder Bay has been a home state for us, where we feel a part of the community. We have so many friends here now.”
The quartet is touring in support of its latest, and most personal record to date, the recently released Under One Sky.

What makes this album different is that the quartet wrote eight of the songs themselves. Past efforts have seen one or two homegrown songs and Murray said as the musicians evolve, they want to put more of themselves into their performance each night.

Their songs are the easiest, most heartfelt way to do so.

“It’s the greatest achievement for an artist to have the songs that they wrote recorded and put out to the world and then watch the audience sing them back. It’s a magical experience and Universal, our label, has been really happy. In fact, one of the songs we wrote became the title track and the singles that we’re pushing to radio are also songs of our own.”

Murray said they started experimenting with songwriting on their last release, Lead With Your Heart, a test-run for the label to give them blessing to craft more songs on their own.

“As a tenor group, you don’t expect them to be writers as well, but many tenors are musicians and writers. When a tenor group is put together, they’re not usually writing the music. They’re usually recording familiar songs from the past,” Murray said.

And there are plenty of those songs in their repertoire. On Under One Sky they’ve included standards like Besame Mucho, Lean on Me, You are so Beautiful and Eric Clapton’s lament to his late son, Tears in Heaven.

“But we’re more of a band, with the name The Tenors. It’s a bit of misnomer. We’ve all been soloists before this and we’ve all been songwriters. So we just thought the best way to move forward was to be true to ourselves and who we are individually,” he said.

“We’re musicians and we’re songwriters, and for better or for worse we’re going to put our hearts into these songs because we want our true voices to be heard creatively.”

TBCA officials said there are about 40 tickets left for Wednesday night’s performance, which begins at 8 p.m.