we have video action.

done

i now have the ability to shoot video and immediately put it up here for all to see. unfortunately, i didn’t downgrade the file to any sensible size, so it took about ten years for one minute of footage to upload. this is just a piece of a song i still need to record, for no particular reason. this camera doesn’t seem to like bright sunlight filtering in through the blinds and so things have a somewhat washed-out look, but the sound quality is surprisingly tasty. i wish i had it to record the show at the fm lounge. alas.

more exciting video will follow at some point in the near future. maybe i’ll finally make good on my threat to record documentary footage of recording sessions or some such thing.

roger ebert calls michael bay “pathetic”.

this is a prototype for a chandler console that will almost definitely never be made commercially available. drool

this is kate beckinsale, who will also never be available. tears.

now that we’ve secreted two different bodily fluids in one fell swoop, there’s a new song up at spyspace. i don’t know how long it’ll be up there, but it’s there now. should give you a bit of an idea of what to expect on the next album. very synth-y…but at the same time i think it’s heading in a more organic direction than something like GROWING SIDEWAYS. i mean, there’s acoustic piano and electric guitar in there, and it’s a lot less skeletal than most synth excursions of the past, though still pretty stripped-down. i like how when the rhythm drops out at near the end it briefly sounds like sad “game over” music from an old sega genesis game or something. ah, sweet youth. maybe it’s time to pull the old sega box out again for some nostalgic fun. “streets of rage” has some seriously catchy music. but “strider” will always take the cake for me…i’d play that game just to hear the soundtrack, even if i hated everything else about it. i know kate agrees with me. she can come over and play “strider” anytime she wants.

mic preamp madness.

in 2006 i went crazy.

it’s true.

in the interest of making a very long story somewhat digestible, i guess it all started to get heavy when i decided to buy a manley voxbox sight unseen and sound unheard. this was shortly after i had gone off on a rant in a book i wrote for the lesbian who was in love with me at one time (true story…though she never gave me her montreal address so i could send her the book, and it’s still wasting space in my sock drawer as i type this) about how absurd it was to spend a ridiculous amount of money on one microphone and/or a single mic preamp. but, see, this was a channel STRIP, with compression and eq thrown in to sweeten the deal. it felt like it was time to step up from the dbx silver series preamps i had been using for the past few years. they had served me well, but i felt a seismic shift in musical direction approaching, and i considered that a good excuse to spend a painful amount of money on a neumann U87 and the voxbox. maybe i really would get what i paid for. i think for just that one channel of pre/eq/compression and the one mic the price came out to eight or nine grand. that’s a lot of dough. but i was convinced this would be my magic bullet, and the voxbox would surely make my voice and arp omni-2 synth sound so gooey and magical that i would defecate in my pants with joy.

it didn’t quite work out that way.

i think it was christmas eve of 2005 that the voxbox arrived, which seemed encouraging, but as soon as i fired it up there was this strange, loud hissing/humming noise that was ever-present. i tried bypassing different stages, taking the eq and compressor out of the signal path, messing with gain staging, but nothing did the trick. i couldn’t record anything useful with that amount of noise. i went about recording THE BITTER SIDE OF SWEET and putting the NOSTALGIA-TRIGGERING MECHANISM ep together with my existing equipment to bide my time until this was all taken care of, while stockpiling songs and ideas. i sent the voxbox back to have the tubes changed, and was told that no one at the factory could hear any ugly noise anywhere. when it came back to me, the noise was still there. the U87 came along and sounded downright boring through my dbx preamps. the cheap-ass rode NT1 i had been using exclusively as a vocal mic since 2003 put it to shame. i was flabbergasted. the U87 got sent back, minus the absurdly steep re-stocking fee. eventually i gave up on the voxbox and it went on its merry way as well. here i have to commend gerry at sonotechnique in toronto for making the experience a lot less frustrating than it might have been. even though none of the people working there could find anything wrong with the voxbox, he took it back anyway because i wasn’t happy with it and let me use the money toward something else. months later, i was able to take the credit i still had left over (that voxbox was one expensive hiss box) and use it to buy a chandler mic preamp instead. we only ever communicated through emails, and yet the longest it ever took for gerry to ship anything to me was a day or two. the treatment i got from him put most music-related businesses i dealt with in windsor—and in person—to shame.

on it went. i ambled around on a quest to retool the “studio” and accelerate my breath. or revitalize my soul. or something. then in the summer of 2006 i discovered gearslutz and read all about the great river MP-2NV. i got weak in the knees thinking about what the “neve sound” could do for me, though i’d never worked with anything near that quality/price point before. i just knew it was sexy. you’ve got your neve campbell, you’ve got your campbell’s soup, and then you’ve got your neve preamps. jeff martin (idaho guy, not tea party guy) swears by them, and that’s good enough for me. i promptly ordered two of the stereo great river preamps from mercenary audio, hooked them up, and then said “holy fucking shit” about twenty three times. maybe twenty four. these weren’t like the dbx pres i’d grown accustomed to working with…these preamps let me know very quickly that some of my microphones were not so sexy. the emperor truly had no clothes, and man, he looked pretty scary naked. most of the rode mics i liked so much through the dbx pres went from “present” to “horrifyingly fizzy” in an instant. they would never be of any serious use to me again. only the K2 survived with some amount of usefulness intact, but even so i haven’t been moved to use it once in the past three years, since my other mics seem to cover all the bases i need. on the other hand, the neumann KM184s that hadn’t done much to excite me before suddenly opened up and revealed that they were all i would ever want to record acoustic guitars with. an SM57 became a lot more interesting. my digital piano and synths grew balls i never knew they could have. i went about building up a more respectable collection of microphones, the rode mics went back into their pouches with their heads hung low, and the rest is ricearoni. i think it’s fairly obvious if you compare something like BRAND NEW SHINY LIE to the last few cds i’ve made on a decent stereo that things have improved a bit sonically thanks to better outboard equipment and better ears. but then the sound of things has always been changing for those same reasons, almost album-to-album, and you can hear it happening even as far back as the papa ghostface days of old. the whole thing is a never-ending learning process, and i’ll continue to get better (or worse) at what i do as i make new mistakes, try new things and get drunk with bono in dublin.

all of this is meant to lead up to something. not a revelation exactly, but something that’s been festering in my brain for a little while now. the way i went crazy three summers ago was in how i went about buying expensive mic preamps blindly, convinced they were my gateway to a better sound. they did turn out to be just that in large part (with some help from good microphones), and the great river pres have always made me happy no matter what i’ve thrown at them, while the chandler germanium has become my default bass di choice and makes a single SM57 in front of a guitar amp sound better than it has any right to. i don’t know if the great rivers really sound like a neve 1073 without the “mush”…i just know that they’ve made what i do a whole hell of a lot easier, and i don’t have to work anywhere near as hard to get things sounding the way i want them to than i did with other preamps. thing is, i could have taken some of the money i spent on mic pres and paused to grab some stereo eq and a compressor or two. granted, i don’t find myself feeling a need to eq much when i’m recording (i learned the hard way that less is often more here, and with mic placement you can eliminate a lot of the need for eq right off the bat), but i have a feeling that adding some high end eq with a good outboard piece would probably sound a bit better than the digital boost afforded by the roland 1680 when it comes to something like giving ribbon mics a bit of air. maybe i went a bit overboard when i discovered what a difference genuinely high-end preamps made…i mean, there are mic pres i have that i don’t even use.

forget the cheap art pieces of shit that were my first sweaty steps into the magical land of mic preamps after not having any at all for a long time. forget the bellari piece of shit i got burned buying on ebay (instead of the more expensive two-channel unit i paid for, i got the bellari equivalent of the cheapest mono art pre, with a fried tube for good measure). forget the dbx pres that were a huge improvement but still withered in shame when they heard what the 2NVs could do—they’ve depreciated so much in value since i got them that selling them would be kind of stupid, and besides, they kind of look cool even if i’ll never use them again, and they work well as pedestals for other pres to sit on top of. i never could really get into the concept of rackmounting, you see…i’m more a “stick stuff on top of other stuff” kind of guy. i could say a lot about all of these preamps—the things i recorded with them, what i learned from them and what they were like in bed—but they’re not the point here.

what i’m getting at is that there’s a chandler tg channel just sitting around getting no play. it doesn’t have the quarter-inch line-level input like the MKII version does, but that’s no excuse for letting it feel unloved for so long. it’s home to the only outboard eq i have, and it’s only one channel, which is part of the reason it gets no play. i need at least stereo eq happening, preferably separate from a preamp altogether, since i already have more than enough of those. then there’s the cranesong flamingo. a seriously cool-looking piece of gear with possibly the best metering i’ve ever seen on a preamp; i could track something at the other end of the room (pretty far away in my room), and as long as the flamingo was facing me i’d still be able to see very clearly how much headroom i had to work with. there’s no quarter-inch input here either, but this is probably a pre you’d want to use more with mics instead of keyboards or direct bass anyway, given its cleaner, faster sound. the only time i could ever live with myself using the rode K2 as a vocal mic was when it was going into the flamingo. it would probably sound pretty tasty with the stereo ribbon mic going into it, but i wouldn’t know, because i’ve been thoroughly sucked into the great river vortex. i just don’t find myself moved to turn to the chandler channel or the flamingo for anything when the great river already gives me what i’m after with no argument or resistance.

so it would make sense to sell at least one of these things, if not both of them, which would probably generate just about enough money to get two channels of some nice eq without making me weep to think of how much money i’ve now spent on gear in total (i figured it out last night while updating my studio “inventory” for insurance purposes, and it’s pretty insane…sometimes i forget just how much stuff there is here). the problem is, these aren’t the cheap art pres. i paid a lot of money for them, and i don’t think they’ve really depreciated in value at all over the past few years. the chandler piece is probably less desirable than its line-level-input-endowed successor, but it’s still easily worth somewhere in the region of two grand. the flamingo costs more than that. these are serious pieces of equipment that have been well-cared-for, and i wouldn’t want to sell them for substantially less than what i paid for them. but who would want to spend that amount of money on a used mic preamp? professional studios either already have enough high quality pres or a console for whatever they need to do, they don’t want to spend the money (because that game is about making money), or they’re happy with their low-end mackie and art stuff, a hundred dollar mic and a bunch of plug-ins, and would wonder why i would want to sell something that would look pretty on my lawn. not that there’s anything wrong with that…i started with low-end gear and knew nothing about what i was supposed to do with it all once upon a time myself. it’s what you do with what you have, and all of that jazz. but i digress. it’s not something i could put in the classified section of the newspaper expecting to get a serious response (buy a mic preamp for $2,000! free patch cord!), and i doubt kijiji would be the way to go here either. nor would most people with home studios have any interest in something so expensive. i guess i was the exception to the rule, because i’m a whore. a gear whore.

on the other hand, why would i want to sell them? unlike the art and dbx pres (which would net next to nothing because their resale value has gone to seed), there might come a day when i will get some serious use out of them. maybe i’ll come to a point where i’ll want a cleaner sound for something and the flamingo will be there to show what it can do, or i’ll snap out of minimal drum mic’ing and the chandler channel will bring the kick drum to life when i put eighteen mics on the kit and nickelback it up. so maybe i should keep the tools around, even if i haven’t really found cause to use them yet, because someday they might save me from a fate worse than dinner with tom cruise. i’m not good at getting rid of things anyway. the first guitar i ever bought is a hunk of junk with the tone of a toothbrush, but i could never part with that shitbox. we’ve been through too much together.

i dunno. these are some things to think about if you are between the ages of 8 and 11, and you’ve decided to put together something of a home studio. i think the time has probably come for me to look at finally getting some outboard eq one way or another. the compression i have, while nothing to salivate over, has served me well and i enjoy the fact that it never really imposes any sound on anything, so i don’t feel a need to upgrade in that department. it’s just there, making sure i don’t overload anything while recording. i’ve never really gotten into transient-shaping with compression, and i’d probably be lost with a four thousand dollar compressor and endless tweakability anyway. with eq, though…the digital stuff will only take you so far. and most of the time you won’t even want to go there in the first place. i think a good outboard piece would make a discernible difference, especially at this stage in the game. some would say i should dump the VS-1680 while i’m at it and jump into the world of protools or something, but i’m too set in my ways for that. outboard eq wins instead. hey…my birthday’s not that far away. anyone want to buy me a neve 8803? or a great river eq-2nv? or two avedis E27s with an R52 case? i’ll make it worth your while…i’ll sing you a song about the trials and tribulations of a fast food restaurant manager. that’s just how much i care.

on a random note, i just discovered that i lost a patch cord to the show on the weekend. fuck that shit.

potty mouth is back in full force! yes!

sometimes a pony gets the blues.

after the experience i had playing live last night, i’m not sure i ever want to do it again in any capacity unless (a) i’m the headlining act and therefore have control over how things sound on-stage, and/or (b) it’s at taloola or in someone’s living room where there’s no p.a. system or amplification to speak of. i can’t keep doing this live sideman thing. i feel like a lobotomized caged animal. and the absurd volume everyone seems to think everything has to be in a live setting makes me want to kill things. giving everyone hearing loss serves no purpose when you can’t even hear a note you’re playing on-stage. maybe i’m alone here, but i actually like my ears. i like being able to hear things. there’s a lot more to it than that, but i don’t feel much like getting into the specifics. the bottom line is, this recent break from avoiding live performance has served to remind me of some of the things that made me decide to stop playing live in the first place. i’m not saying i’ll never play live again…maybe just once every year or three. there’s too much bullshit involved in doing it on a regular basis, particularly when you’re not the person calling the shots.

on a happier note, the next album is coming along, now that i finally have some time and energy to devote to it. so far it’s very synth-heavy, but it doesn’t really feel like any of the synth-based things i’ve done in the past. i’m having an interesting time trying to force myself to break away from the vocal multi-tracking i’ve grown accustomed to, and realizing that it just feels right to me most of the time to overdub myself on top of myself. and then do it again. i guess we’ll see what it turns into as it gets closer to the finish line. i’m not sure why whenever i play guitar on a synth-heavy song i tend to gravitate toward funk-influenced licks, but it’s fun to play that sort of thing, especially when it’s on a funky guitar like a kay thin twin. here’s a picture of jimmy reed playing one:

i thought about trying to recreate that picture with me in jimmy’s place…i’ve definitely got the dressy clothes and harmonica/holder to pull it off. but in the end i decided not to traumatize you with my sexy smile. even so, the thin twin is an interesting guitar, not quite like any other axe i’ve played. about the only fun i was able to have last night came out of the thing as it drove my tiny paul tube amp into grunty heaven. it has what look like lipstick pickups on the surface, but they’re actually specially designed “blade” pickups that are apparently much hotter and more feedback-resistant. they’ve certainly got some push to them, and there’s some nice variety in tone between the two pickups, but i’m kind of partial to the neck pup. it’s got this round, sexy bluesy tone that makes me think a bit of a much beefier, darker telecaster. i like it. both pickups together make a very different sound—thin but not twangy, and not the least bit like any other guitar/pickup configuration i’ve ever heard. it should be an interesting sound to play around with.

here’s t-bone burnette playing one:

papa’s got a brand new synth.

i got me a new toy—an alesis micron. little brother (or sister) to the alesis ion. thanks again to eric for letting me borrow the ion for a few days last month; that was what inspired me to get the micron. it’s pretty cheap and small, which is a strong selling point for me, because i need to conserve all the space i can around here, and spending money is about as much fun as…spending money. but this thing packs a lot of sound and tweak-ability into a small package. needless to say, if it wasn’t already the case, it’s now a pretty safe bet that there will be a lot of synth and general sonic wankery on the next album. i don’t know what it is, but something about new synth sounds always inspires a torrent of songs to come pouring out of me in short order…it happened in the past with the likes of GROWING SIDEWAYS and WHO YOU ARE NOW, and now i expect it’ll probably happen again. i wish i had this thing a few weeks ago for the show at the fm lounge…could have made some pretty wild sounds when max and i went to hell at the end of “capricorn cloves”. i guess there’s always the next show, which will probably take place in 2011.

also got me a ridiculously cheap no-name banjo from the 1920s. the tuners are a little weird, but the intonation doesn’t seem to be all that wonky, and the thing sounds better than it has any right to, given its price and no-name pedigree. what is it about funky old instruments that makes them funky? maybe it has something to do with old wood. i’d be hard-pressed to find a new acoustic guitar that really speaks to me, even in the several-thousand-dollar price range, and yet i can find a guitar that’s two or three times my age at a fraction of the price, and it sounds and feels so much better and more inspiring, it’s hilarious. old wood: it’s not just getting a second lease on life thanks to the likes of viagra anymore.

also, it’s been as muggy as a cow’s rectum outside. all i can say at a time like this is, thank god for central air. or maybe i should thank dionne warwick.

announcing your plans is a good way to hear god laugh.

why is it that just when things calm down after a protracted period of ridiculousness, you get sick? or does it only happen to a select few of us who always have a project or seventeen on the go that we want to work on, just to frustrate the fecal matter out of us? whatever the reason or case may be, it happened to me again just after the three-shows-in-one-day extravaganza, and that’s why things have been quiet around here lately. i didn’t have anything very interesting to say—or any news to report—while i was coughing all over the world. being sick did at least give me an excuse to go through all three seasons of deadwood from the beginning again, so that was fun. if you haven’t seen that show and you have any interest in westerns, profanity, the use of the english language, nudity or what is known as the “blowjob monologue”, you’re missing out. i first watched it on a whim some years back to kill time while waiting for the season premiere of six feet under to come around (i think it was in its fourth season by this time). watching the first season finale of deadwood, i had no idea who the characters were or what the hell was being said half the time (the dialogue is not at all your typical dumbed-down “no character’s vocabulary shall exceed 34 words” shit). but something about it grabbed me. i went back and watched the season from the beginning, and after a few episodes my brain adjusted to the density of the language and i suddenly found that deadwood had supplanted six feet under as perhaps my favourite thing to ever grace the idiot box. i’m not sure i’ll ever find another television show that comes close for me, or another character as wonderfully complex as ian mcshane’s take on al swearengen. the music (incidental and otherwise) is pretty great too.

the point is, hbo are fuckheads for canceling the show after only three seasons. if i had a subscription, i would have canceled it with extreme prejudice. but i don’t. so i didn’t. does hbo even have any good shows left anymore? deadwood’s gone. the sopranos and six feet under are long gone. oz is ancient history. good thing we’ve got the dvds.  the wire is supposed to be good, but i’ve never seen it. i like gabriel byrne, but i don’t have the patience to catch up with all eight thousand episodes of in treatment.

when did this turn into a blog about television without borders?

on that note (sort of), don’t ever watch star 80 if you can’t handle horribly depressing movies. myself, i have a hatred for happy ending sugar-coated hollywood bullshit that knows no bounds (for example, i loved hitchcock’s rear window up until the last five minutes or so, and then it suddenly jumped the shark for me), so i’m all for a butter knife in the thigh of convention. but man…that’s one movie that isn’t going to leave you with any good feelings when it’s over, unless you’re a very sick person, and a misogynist to boot. to quote the immortal mickey rourke, someone needs to give eric roberts a meaty role in a good movie and let him “show his shit” again, because the guy can act. he’s scary in star 80. as slimy and depraved as his character is, and as horrific and disgusting as what he ultimately does is, he comes across as painfully human and you almost feel sorry for him, which makes it even more scary. dude has more talent in one of his toenails than his sister julia has in her entire body. he was on a roll for a while there in the early-to-mid eighties (runaway train, the pope of greenwich village, star 80) and then after runaway train it seemed like his career immediately descended into bad hollywood and direct-to-video hell. and then cameos in music videos by akon, the killers and mariah carey. yikes. someone give the guy a part in a movie that isn’t dreck already. i mean, take a look at his imdb page. out of the nearly 200 movies and tv shows he’s been in, the ratio of “good” to “crap” leans very heavily in the direction of “crap”. so much so that the scale is probably warped to the point of looking like a snake attempting to ingest itself. there’s been the occasional exception, like his guest bit on an episode of oz, it’s my party, and la cucaracha is supposed to be a good little indie film. there have been quirky small parts in spun and the dark knight, but a real comeback along the lines of mickey’s has yet to happen. though you have to admit, something like best of the best is pretty hilariously horrible, in the best/worst “unintentionally cheesy” way. you’ve even got james earl jones doing his best to add gravitas in a movie that is gravitas-repellent. and speaking of that guy, it’s easy to forget that once upon a time he was a serious actor as well. another horribly depressing movie is the great white hope, based loosely on the jack johnson story. it’s maybe a little overdone in the melodrama department, but still surreal to realize that jimmy boy can be a powerful, resonant actor when he wants to be. maybe we’ll see it again someday when he decides to stop doing voiceover work almost exclusively and occasional bit parts in depressingly bad movies.

enough film talk. let’s talk about music.

as usual, i’m working on several different things at once right now. the aim is to at least get an album out there sometime this summer, probably in july or august. maybe there really is something to that “seasonal release” idea after all. i would probably have a new album finished or nearly there by now, but some unanticipated bull’s semen got in the way for a while. part of me is glad, because i think it might have helped to have a bit of a break for a change, instead of just plowing on into the next thing the moment i finished the last album. sometimes it’s good to take stock and think a bit about where you wan’t to go next. not that it’s going to matter much in the end, since whatever i plan on doing generally finds itself warped into something unrecognizable from my original intent by the time it’s finished…

regardless, more new music is on the way. i’d tell you what to expect from it, but i don’t even know which projected album is going to get to the finish line first, so i couldn’t say. it could be something jazzy. it could be something synthy. it could be my idea of a rock abum. it could be a return to the folky/bluesy sort of thing that permeated CHICKEN ANGEL WOMAN. or it could be all of those things fused together. only thyme will tell.

finally, here’s something to watch and listen to. pardon my spanish, but this is how you play a fucking medley of hits. nobody seems to know how to do it anymore without everything coming off sounding horribly truncated and…well…lame. let sly take you to school, little children.

don’t lie, steve.

so, the field assembly cd release shows at phog and the fm lounge both happened. on the same day. i played three different sets in the space of about six hours. i actually got through it all with more energy than i was expecting to have, and didn’t really feel it all catch up with me until i got home after it was all over, when just brushing my teeth started to seem like a herculean task. but let’s start from the top and work our way forward.

SET # 1 (at phog)

michou opened in the form of michael hargreaves and stefan cvektovic. good stuff. really nice, tight vocal harmonies. there was a funny moment when michael asked how everyone was feeling, and the response was pretty much dead silence until i let out an inappropriate high-pitched cackle. the audience consisted of what seemed like roughly a dozen people…maybe even somewhere near twenty. and it didn’t get any larger. but i kind of liked that; it had a nice way of diffusing a lot of the nerves, and the people who were there made for a really respectful, attentive audience. for this field assembly set the band was just adam, dean drouillard and myself. i got to dig in a bit more and play meatier things than i would later on in the full band set, so that was fun. singing the harmonies in just about every song was a little awkward…i’m used to doing that in maybe two or three songs at the most. i couldn’t really tell if my pitch was on or not. it felt kind of wobbly to me. but i wasn’t that nervous, i didn’t play anything ugly on the piano, and all in all it felt good. it was the first time i’d played with dean, who’s a really great, tasteful musician. he did some tasty things with melodic feedback while playing a very pretty red gretsch guitar. funny to think that i was almost seduced by a vintage gretsch last summer, but soon found myself swayed by the infinitely cheaper teisco instead. also worth noting is the fact that tom and i were both wearing our CJAM t-shirts from the last pledge drive. as the kids like to say, “represent!” people still say that shit, right?

after the show at phog the full band met up at the fm lounge and set up the gear for sound check. i played a few bugle blasts for good luck and got to listen to matt rideout playing some tasty latin-jazz sounding things on one of my funky old acoustic guitars. we played a bit of “eye of the tiger” during sound check, which was fun. sound was checked. things were done. max joined the party and we did our own sound check as the doors opened and people started to trickle into the place. then a few of us went off to the pourhouse to grab a bite to eat before the show. i’d never been there before, but the combination of a pretty waitress with a fun personality and a sexy salad made for a winner in my book. back at the fm lounge, there were suddenly quite a lot of people there. strangely, i didn’t really feel nervous at all, which contradicts just about every experience i’ve had playing live in any capacity since high school. maybe part of it was because the show at phog had gone well and i felt sufficiently warmed up. i don’t know what it was, really.

SET # 2 (FM lounge, aka “the fish market”)

max and i took to the stage for what was the first proper live show i’d played that didn’t involve being a sideman or backing someone else up since…2005. we opened with a pretty radically re-worked bruce springsteen song that only die-hard fans of the boss would have recognized. i threw in a melodica solo. it felt good. what’s funny is that the set list had originally leaned pretty heavily on covers, with something like a 60/40 ratio in favour of other people’s songs. one by one the covers ended up being discarded until suddenly all but one of the songs were my own, and almost all of them came from AN ABSENCE OF SWAY. i’m not sure why it turned out that way, but it’s amusing to me that i ended up unwittingly defeating my own attempt to hide behind obscure cover songs. an intended improvised instrumental piano piece completely fell apart before it could really go anywhere, probably because i was trying to juggle three different sets of music in my brain and something had to give, but i was able to shrug it off and move onto the next thing. i have no idea how it happened, but i actually felt pretty comfortable up there on-stage. a lot of the credit should go to max, who’s a fantastic musician and a great guy to have in your corner when you’re unsheathing your musical genitals in a public setting. there was a lot of improvisation going on in some songs, and with some people that could have been disastrous, but with max it felt comfortable because the connection was there. but even vocally i felt absurdly confident…i pushed harder than i have in a long time—not screaming or anything like that, but really full-on belting some things without relying on the falsetto and backing away from the mic, and it felt like i could do pretty much anything i wanted with my voice during our set. my vocal cords were there for me. thanks, guys. i know i mistreated you in the past, but thanks for sticking with me.

one of the highlights for me was probably “capricorn cloves”. i brought the bugle with me, but when it came time to play it with one hand while still playing piano with the other, i discovered the mouthpiece had fallen out when i had inadvertently kicked it over on the stage. there was a bit of a pause while i fixed that, and then started making drunken elephant noises. people applauded my bugle “solo”. really. it was the craziest thing. i can’t even play that thing. on the album the song gradually fades out on a jazzy piano/fake upright bass vamp, but we decided to stretch it out and completely improvise it live. i played the bass line for a while and comped a bit while max played a long, ridiculously sexy bass solo. then he picked up the bass line and i did a little exploring of my own. and then, in max’s words, we “went to hell”; i broke the tonality and he created a gigantic, dissonant swath of noise using his upright bass and a delay pedal. i didn’t know you could get sounds like that out of that instrument. it was pretty nutty. i played some dissonant piano runs underneath that, and then we eventually brought it down to a more melodic, muted close. it’s fun completely messing with a song like that. likewise, “water to town” was basically rewritten as an entirely new song. the lyrics were unchanged, but the music was completely different. i wonder if anyone familiar with the album recognized what we were doing there.

either way, the audience response was pretty crazy. people seemed to be into what we were doing, and it was a nice feeling to have a genuinely positive live experience playing my own songs after so many disasters and so much indifference in the past. thanks to max for being my partner in musical mayhem (you might be seeing an album from the two of us before too long), thanks to adam for having us open the show, and thanks to everyone who came out and showered me with gifts of floral-smelling undergarments. or applauded. same thing, really. thanks to all you folks who came over and said nice things to me after the show, too. my head grew at least six sizes before the end of the night. standing up is difficult now, but it was a nice ego stroke nonetheless.

SET # 3 (same place)

normally after you play a show, you get to relax, and if someone else is playing you can hang out and listen. i got about five minutes to take a breather, and then i got back up on-stage for the full-band field assembly show. it was like some kind of windsor supergroup…adam fox at the helm of it all, dean drouillard on guitar, adam rideout-arkell on guitar/bass and matthew rideout on drums and percussion (both of yellow wood fame), eric arner on bass, guitar and glockenspiel, stephen hargreaves playing hammond organ sexiness (along with the processing of said organ sexiness) and percussion, and my hairy self playing piano/wurlitzer and glockenspiel. that’s right—i got to play a real wurlitzer electric piano live. fun times. while there was a whole band full of singers up there on the stage, i ended up covering almost all of the vocal harmonies, which again wasn’t something i was expecting going into it, but hopefully it sounded alright. i haven’t done enough of that in a live setting to judge how good my pitch is when i’m harmonizing with someone else’s voice. at home with no amplification it’s fine, but once a p.a. system becomes involved my confidence in my live harmonizing skills takes a hit to the nether region. in any case, it was fun, and my first time playing in anything as large as this seven-piece band. everybody got their moments to shine like sinead, and adam r. played some especially nice lead guitar on the instrumental track. stephen and i also had a nice moment during “old spell” where i was dancing around since there wasn’t much for me to do between glockenspiel cues, and we did a bit of a spontaneously choreographed dance routine during the instrumental break following one of the choruses. jumping back and forth between playing wurlitzer and piano in a few songs was fun too. i’m really glad i got to meet all of the guys who were in the band…they’re all great people and great musicians. thanks to adam for inviting me to be a part of it all, and also to ryan fields for doing a great job making everything sound as it should. another hearty thanks goes out to ron marston for taking all of these great pictures and letting me post some here. to that end, here are some more:

all in all, it was a fun night. insane, but fun. congratulations to adam on the successful release/launch of his first album under the “field assembly” banner. everyone who doesn’t have a copy should go buy one at dr. disc or from the man himself, because i said so. support!

big swing face.

check this out. buddy rich on the muppet show in 1980. the man was 63 years old, but even animal can’t keep up with him. alas, we don’t get to see the very end when animal gets so angry about being bested that he smashes a bass drum over buddy’s head.

reviewage & raw sewage.

i be reviewed, over here. thanks a lot to matt for all the kind words. looks like there’s a lot of interesting music and writing on his blog. it’s always nice to have new brain food, so if your brain be hungry, check it out.

also, on the topic of kind words, adam fox says some mighty nice things about me and my spinach supply in the new issue of WAMM. you should buy a copy of his new album “broadsides & ephemera” when it’s officially released at the end of the week; it’s tasty stuff. i’m on a few songs, making piano noises…most prominently on “out of the arms” and “still life”. a lot of the keyboard parts are played by adam himself, though (a lot of everything is played by adam himself, actually, which is always something i enjoy hearing, and he did a great job recording it himself). the way to tell the difference is thus: if it sounds like it’s been processed in a cool way or it’s a wurlitzer electric piano, it’s adam. if it sounds like an acoustic piano that’s free of effects, then it’s probably me. on “alkali”, it’s both of us—adam playing the chords, and me playing the piano melody along with a heart-stopping glockenspiel cameo. you can hear how much the beast needed tuning at the time on that song, but i kind of like that. as adam said, it gives it character. i’m on “daylight” too, but almost all of the piano on that track is adam’s work…i’m just there for about five seconds of piano harmony in the middle of the song. i like how he processes the digital piano and dirties it up until it doesn’t really sound digital anymore. my favourite thing that i did on the album is probably the piano part on “still life”. it’s nowhere near as busy as my playing on that song would later get in a live setting, but i think it fits. i was just kind of winging it when that last piano line came out of nowhere. that’s one of the fun things about playing on someone else’s songs, at least for me; it often inspires ideas i probably wouldn’t have come up with if left to my own devices. technical details aside, it’s a great album, and i’m glad i got to be a part of it. thanks to adam for having me play on it, and for coming here to record my piano for the occasion—it’s fun to listen and think, “that’s my piano! it’s a real piano!” it’s the stuff rejoicing is made of. i really don’t think i could go back to playing a digital piano at this point, at least when it comes to recording. the real thing has a much nicer shank to it. so if you want me to be a session musician and play piano on your album, you’re gonna have to come to me. i don’t know of any other way to prove our love. oh, wait…i just quoted from one of my own songs. never mind.

and looky-see over here: i’m part of a facebook event. fun stuff. y’all should come out on friday and give me homemade brownies. it would totally help me play and sing better. chocolate just has that effect on people. they even did studies that proved it. don’t ask me which studies or where you can get your hands on them, but they exist. somewhere.

urban garlic.

random funny cat pictures are fun.

check out the two good-looking guys on the cover of the june issue of WAMM magazine. there’s even a sting reference there! and you know how i feel about sting references. or maybe you don’t. the point is, if i’ve built this fortress around your heart—encircled you in trenches and barbed wire—then let me build a bridge, for i cannot build a chasm. and let me set the battlements on fire.

swoon.

i thought it might make sense to put up lyrics for more than just the last few proper albums, so i’ve been slowly working my way backwards and adding to the album pages. a few songs are missing, either because the lyrics were improvised or because i haven’t got around to typing them up yet, but the point is that there are words in places where there were none before. i think i’ve made my way back to about OH YOU THIS right now. for some reason it never occurred to me that for all of its “niceness” and being one of my most “normal” and accessible albums, the lyrics are incredibly bitter and cynical. it really reads like a breakup album, even though it wasn’t and i was consciously trying to get away from that sort of thing after just about beating it into the ground over the last several albums leading up to it. i suppose in a way it makes sense, though, since i was in the process of destroying what social life i had left and intentionally burning some bridges that were already looking pretty precarious. it’s just strange to be reading words from years past and realizing that “aura of the insipid” is one of the most morbid lyrics i ever wrote, coupled with some of the catchiest music to ever come out of me. funny stuff. i still view that album as something of a black sheep, but maybe it’s time to pull it out for a reassessment and try to make it a bit more visually presentable for anyone who might want to hear it. some albums i’m not so sure about posting the lyrics for…a lot of things back in the day were improvised, and some of the more unguarded stuff doesn’t look very arresting when divorced from the music. i mean, “so you don’t give a shit about me / that’s okay / nothing changes without me / that’s okay” isn’t exactly poetry. but we’ll see how it goes.

in the meantime, all of the thumbnail images on the “discography” page now link to their respective album pages when you click on them, instead of just showing you an enlarged version of the image itself. i should have done that in the first place, but it never occurred to me until now. i also added brief descriptions for perusing purposes, so if you hover your mouse over an album image some text about the album will pop up. sometimes there’s too much there to read in one hover, since the text only seems to stay there for about ten seconds, but you just hover on back and the words will still be there. it’s magical.

max and i have been rehearsing for the show coming up next friday, and i think things are coming along pretty nicely. hopefully it’ll be enjoyable to listen to, for whoever is out there in the audience. i’m just having fun taking some songs in different directions, stripping them down, and playing around with some obscure (and not-so obscure) covers. i like the intimacy of the piano/upright bass combination, and there will be a lot of improvising in the midst of structure. it’s a fun dichotomy—taking things that have already been built a certain way, leaving some of them alone, tearing others down and rebuilding them differently…controlled chaos, maybe? i don’t know. it doesn’t seem all that chaotic. i just know that i plan to attempt to have a good time up on-stage, which is something that’s become increasingly difficult for me to do over the years. hopefully it’ll be a positive experience for everybody in the room, and clothes will be shed in a moving display of collective arousal. if the gospel songs don’t get you on your feet, the nickelback covers surely will.