Montreal-based pop-rock songsmith Ian Kelly has received much more national media coverage in the past week than at any other time in a career now spanning five albums.

This wasn’t the result of a cleverly strategized publicity campaign, however, but rather the outcome of a potential creative disaster turned compelling human interest story. The drama began last Tuesday evening when a thief broke into Kelly’s SUV and stole a hard drive that contained the only copies of his next album.

A distraught Kelly took to Twitter and Facebook to spread the news. “Please, do not wipe the content of the hard drive you took,” he pleaded in a post. “I know many people have bigger problems but I had six months of work on it... Please contact me and I’ll give you $1,000 to get my hd back.”

The story was picked up by Canadian Press the following day, with a positive result. That evening (Wednesday Jan. 6), Kelly took to Twitter to announce his property had been returned by the father of the thief (the offered reward was refused). In what sounds like a scene from a TV thriller, the father left the disks in a plastic bag in a children's playground for Kelly to find.

The happy ending to the saga means that Kelly’s new album, SuperFolk, will be released on March 4, as scheduled. His fifth album, it is the follow-up to 2013’s well-received All These Lines.

And, yes, Kelly has learnt a valuable lesson, one other artists should follow: make multiple copies of your work.