My new sounds:

Little Choo Choo

This past Saturday I was lucky enough to be invited to play with blues musician Jerome Godboo and his incredible band for a CD/DVD recording called “Wishes in Blue”.  This first show of three took place at Bradees in Kingston, Ontario.  Two more shows are in the works for Ottawa and Toronto.  All proceeds from sales of the CD and DVD will go to The Children’s Wish Foundation.  They’ll be released in the spring of 2011.  Enjoy this little sample.

Roam

This is the first ever performance of my tune “Roam”.  I posted a rough recording of it in the summer but there’s no percussion and I love what the percussionist is doing here.  We’ll be heading to the studio next weekend to lay it down.  I’m playing the melody and the other fiddle is improvising.  (Fiddle: Brian Flynn, Percussion: Andy Love)

PS The video is fairly crappy and backwards for some reason.  Sorry ‘bout that.  The sound’s not bad though!

random footage from months ago….RCHA Club, Kingston, ON

Fiddle…..me and Brian Flynn

Percussion….Andy Love

Angel From Montgomery

Ugh, I don’t want to be one of those people who starts something like a blog or a tumblr and then never updates it.  But it seems that’s what I’ve done, so I apologize.  The month of September was stupidly busy but I think I’m in the groove now so we should be good.  So getting back to work is my excuse.  Well, that, and spilling vodka all over my keyboard - but that’s a whole other story.  Here’s a recording I found while cleaning out and backing up all the stuff on my computer (yep, the vodka was a wake up call on that front).  It’s me about 3 years ago I think.  The guitar playing is mediocre at best but I think the singing’s pretty decent.

Every now and then I get invited to join in with a really fun local band called The Swamp Ward Orchestra.  They play all kinds of great dance music from French tunes that sound like they should be played in a Parisian Cafe to crazy Macedonian tunes written in 11/8 and even the odd traditional fiddle tune.  The long and short of it is that the band is made up of three hot women, a kick ass drummer, a cello (here it’s me on fiddle), an accordion and a hurdy gurdy.

Point Seven Five

If you’ve ever tried to play an instrument and talk or sing or do anything else at the same time, you’ll understand why this is so awesome.  If not, I think you’ll still get it.  Too bad about the black jack machine in the background.  I guess this is avant-garde enough that we can pretend it’s part of the song…

If Ever You Were Mine

I recorded this gorgeous waltz by Maurice Lennon (who commented on it!) about two summers ago for a friend who was going to be playing it with me on guitar.  I had just moved (hence the boxes) and was in my pjs so I just decided to put the camera on my cat, Logan.  My mom, who is a self-proclaimed cat hater (oh, she’ll be mad I wrote that…cat disliker), decided she was in love with Logan after watching this video.  YouTube has proven to be a valuable resource for rehearsing music - especially when there are 300km between myself and my other musicians.  So between getting rehearsal material out and convincing my mom that cats are cute and cuddly, YouTube has once again brought us another step closer to world peace.  Enjoy.

This is a song I wrote years ago.  It was originally called Lost because I was watching Lost when I came up with the tune (and my creativity can only go so far folks).  I then changed it to Roam cause I figured it didn’t really sound lost but more driven to get somewhere.

Anyway, I rediscovered it on my hardrive in Finale Notepad and decided to write more parts to it.  This recording however, is just me and my buddy Andy on the drums.  It’s mid January 2010 and we’re in his warehouse studio and it’s effing cold.  The main purpose of this was to play around with various drum beats to see what we could do with it.  Turns out we can do just about anything.