TORONTO -- Toronto percussive rock band I Mother Earth received all sorts of audition demos from contenders hoping to fill the position vacated by frontman Edwin. There was the girl who sang a Moist song a cappella, a guy who roared into a video camera, "If you pick me, I'm going to be the best man for the job, 'YEAHHHH!' then there was the guy whose tape was passed on by a third party. The singer in question was Newfoundland native Brian Byrne from a metal band called Klaven.

If it was left to the merits of the tape alone, the scruffy bleach blonde whose white tank top reveals arms covered in tattoos, would never be sitting at the Cambridge Suites hotel next to I Mother Earth guitarist and producer (with Paul Northfield) Jag Tanna doing interviews behind the band's third album, Blue Green Orange (due July 13).

But there was something about Byrne's voice, raw and gritty, that would prove capable of emoting in a variety of ways on his debut recording with I Mother Earth, from sexy ease on "All Awake" to insistent dementia on the first single, "Summertime In The Void". "That's why we picked him because he had tone in every one of those ranges. He had a character and that's tough to find," explains Tanna, who's sporting micro-Medusa spiked blue dreads and a green elastic wound around his goatee.

Tanna laughs when asked if he enjoyed Klaven's music. "No, not at all," he says honestly, "but I saw a video tape of (Brian). It was like a metal band with somebody else singing, somebody who didn't fit in, and that's what made him stick out."

Once, I Mother Earth -- Tanna, his brother Christian Tanna (drums) and Bruce Gordon (bass) -- heard Byrne's tape, it still had touring commitments with Edwin for Edgefest '97. All the while, Tanna continued talking with Byrne on the phone, getting to know him, before even hearing him sing live. He was certain the Klaven tape did not do him justice.

"By the time we got off the road, I already knew this guy. I kept telling the guys, 'I like this guy. He should be in the band,'" Tanna recounts. "But we still had to hear the final thing -- singing (laughs). We don't need a drinking buddy. We need someone who can sing. But he turned out to be both. By the time, we got back, he just stood in front of us and sang and he sounded way different than the tape."

The band kept its decision quiet for some time, announcing it had found a singer on its web site Nov. 13 , but not disclosing his name. It was actually David Usher who let it slip at a Moist gig at Massey Hall Nov. 21, when he called him out onstage and introduced him as the new I Mother Earth singer.

"We've never gone around and spouted off about things that don't concern anybody," says Tanna. "It was no big secret, otherwise we wouldn't have done a tour. We were going through our learning process with Brian. What if it had gone bad or he just didn't want to do it anymore, then we would have looked like idiots."

For the better part of 1998, right up until Byrne unveiled his youthful energy and unglossy delivery live at a few warm-up club shows then at the Summersault festival, the band all worked on the new material at Tanna's home studio. "We were supposed to start at 10 a.m. every morning and for three months, he kept showing up at eight with coffee," Tanna chuckles. "I found it really refreshing because I'd get up and start working right away before the (Chris and Bruce) showed up."

While the first collaboration, "Butterfly Tree", didn't make Blue Green Orange,, the next two co-writes, "All Awake" and "Autumn On Drugs", did. "He wasn't officially in the band when we wrote these songs," says Tanna. "We were just calling out ideas and seeing how he'd interpret them.

"We just have a certain way of putting music together that I think is very different than a lot of bands. We demand a certain amount of effort and we have a really high standard for everybody in the band, not just Brian. The same standard fits for Chris and Bruce and myself. It's a whole new thing for him, recording, writing, like that, so by the time we had actually got to recording, we had been around each other for so long, there was no question."

As for Byrne, he was quite willing to meet the demands. "I didn't argue that because there's two really great albums as their proof," he says referring to I Mother Earth's 1993 debut, Dig, and 1996 follow-up, Scenery And Fish.