‘After all these years?’: Song made in ’70s by Albertan duo featured in ‘Heated Rivalry’

A song written by an Alberta performer and her partner in the 70s has been streamed more than 900,000 times after it was featured on 'Heated Rivalry.'

In episode three of the first season of Heated Rivalry, professional hockey player Scott Hunter walks into a smoothie shop, setting off a chain of events that changes the course of his life and that of the main characters of Crave’s hockey romance TV show.

On the other side of the service counter is Kip Grady, the man for whom Hunter later comes out as gay, inspiring hockey stars and rivals Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov to more seriously explore their secret relationship.

After some flirting, Hunter orders a smoothie and Grady gets to work gathering ingredients.

In the background, Carey Parder’s guitar and Rose-Marie Cameron’s voice break the silence, “There was not a cloud when–”

Then the smoothie blender kicks in.

“Oh, gee. They could have put it in a little longer,” Parder joked about the seconds-long feature of their song “Tropicana.”

“It still counts, you know,” Cameron quipped.

The pair of Albertans spoke to CTV News Edmonton on Thursday about their decades of musical collaboration, which started in the 1970s when they met in Calgary’s folk music scene.

“Tropicana” was written in those early years of friendship. Parder one day presented Cameron with the music.

“That song, to me, was perfect for some lyrics,” she recalled. “The guitar is so beautiful. It reminds me of sitting on the beach.”

The duo performed “Tropicana” occasionally when they toured in the following years, but eventually split up to pursue other professional and personal interests. Cameron eventually settled in Bonnyville, Alta., and Parder in Calgary.

In 2006, they included the song on their first album, Moonlight in a Winter Sky, an effort to catalogue their work and make it more widely available.

“We thought getting it through Taxi (Independent A&R) was awesome. And then getting it through a publisher was great. And then you never expected that it would actually go any further. Sometimes you hope, but you don’t know,” Cameron told CTV News Edmonton.

They learned in November – mere weeks ahead of the series release but nearly 20 years after the album was put out – that the team behind Heated Rivalry wanted to use it.

“Wow. After all these years?” Parder remembers thinking. “We just thought this is going to be fun. We’re not going to worry too much about what our expectations were. Of course, in the beginning, we had no idea that it was just going to be nuts.”

They were even more surprised given the premise of the show and its sexual content, but were both pleasantly surprised at its use to set a pivotal moment.

“It makes me feel young, I guess. That our music is still relevant. And it is very uplifting to be on the same page as somebody like Feist and many other artists that are so well known,” Cameron said.

Before the TV show premiered, the song’s streams numbered in the thousands on Spotify. As of Thursday, the number of streams was approaching 918,500.

Parder called watching the show’s global success push a 50-year-old song toward the million mark “quite a ride.”

He and Cameron imparted the same advice to other artists: “Make sure that you’re enjoying what you’re doing, and things can happen. You just never know.”

Cameron added, “Keep a record of everything you do…. Also, don’t ever give up. We’re so lucky at this point in our life to get so many streams on Spotify, but don’t give up on starting slow and getting five streams. I was there not very long ago.”

As for what’s next, the pair are working on an EP, produced by Parder’s HummingBird Studios in Calgary, and publish music on YouTube accompanying Cameron’s visual art. But a feature on season two of Heated Rivalry also doesn’t seem impossible.