Had a great time a couple of weekends ago playing a couple of songs friends, family and family friends in my hometown of Salt Spring Island.  It was part of an all-day gathering at our place with golfing, potluch, taco stands, some performances and dancing – we set up kind of an elaborate little stage with hay bales all around for seating!!  Good times

I spent yesterday in the studio (which I never find not fun….) recording the first episode of the “Paracast”, a new monthly podcast borne out of a drunk conversation with friends, one of whom is an owner of the Paragon Theatre (only the finest indie music venue on Canada’s East Coast). We though it would be a fun idea to take the concept of an old podcast we used to do a couple of years ago, and turn it into something more…. practical. We play songs by the kick ass bands coming through the venue, and banter about them in between.

Anyways… at time of writing it’s not up on the Paragon site yet but check the blog for when it gets posted, it’s pretty hilarious.

Update: the podcast is up on the Paragon website now – you can listen to it here!

I went to Osheaga last weekend (killer festival this year!!) and was excited to see Fran Healy play on Saturday.   He’s the singer of the Scottish band Travis, who I would consider to be one the big influences on my msuic, with the whole lyrically-driven acoustic-guitar-based rock song style. Needless to say I’m a huge fan and I would easily list Fran Healy as one of my musical heroes (is that kind of geeky to say?).

Anyways he played an excellent solo acoustic show and afterwards came off the side of the stage and graciously took the time to stand around and chat with people.  I was a bit star-struck but waited around to say hi, shake his hand and get a photo.  Big moment.      And to top it off my awesome friend Vero got the guitar pick he threw into the audience after the set with and gave it to me. Very inspirational day!!!

I’ve been working a lot lately on my new EP – super excited to show it off in a month or so when it’s ready. I get pretty amped up when I’m working on a new recording and start layering up the song with guitars, vocal harmonies, effects and such. This photo is where I do all of my demo recording, at home. It’s pretty modest but it does the job – I have everything I need. Last weekend I spent a whole day with my guitar amp cranked up, recording electric guitar tracks for “She Could Be”. It sounds freaking sweet, especially with the masterful drum performance of my friend Ryan Stewart, out in Vancouver, who laid down the drum tracks at his studio.

Can’t wait to show off the new tracks!!

I love my Seagull.

The guitar in the picture here is the first acoustic guitar I owned (in fact, the only one). I learned to play guitar on it, and every single song I’ve ever written was on this guitar. It helped get me into music school and with a few other things too, accompanied me around Europe, in every city I’ve lived in and on every stage I’ve played on.

It’s a phenomenon pretty well-known among guitarists and other musicians of wood instruments – like violins – that, as the wood ages over time, the tone or feel of the guitar begins to reflect the way it has been played. The vibrations of sound through the guitar changes the cellular structure of the wood, the resin, etc. Since you could say that music is an expression of your soul, and since I’ve been “expressing my soul” through this guitar for so many years, you could say that a piece of my soul lives within the wood of my guitar. It sounds weird, but when I play my guitar, I know it’s true. When I play other guitars, the music the guitar makes feels kind of empty and lacking…. something…. in comparison.

So there you go, a little ode to my little wooden soul mate.

So I had this great idea recently to film myself playing songs in my room – just kind of chilling out, practicing my songs, as I do. Ok, it’s not the most original idea I’ve ever come up with, but I’m working on some other stuff. I thought this would be cool anyway. Here’s one of them that I did last week, of one of my old favourites ‘She Do’, a song I wrote a bunch of years ago!! You can see this and others on the Video page of the website.

You can see this and others on the Video page of the website.