Day 8 and 9: His name was Derek from Canmore

Now it's tough enough to get people out to shows as it is. You're coming in from a different town, you know people who know people in the town, but all you can do is notify them and hope they pass on the word. you're best hope right now is to use facebook and myspace to the best of your abilities, but you're busy with several other shows. and your friends never pass the word on as well as you hoped they would

After another day of rest at the Lynch's in calgary we arrived at the venue, the canmore hotel, on wednesday night. now i'd heard crazy stories about this place. Some say that it's 'the place' for indie bands to play in canmore.

Warning sign #1: outside the door of the bar there is a chalkboard/sandwich board with the heading "what's happening tonight?" We read it to learn that apparently the event was 4 dollar high balls? "no mention of the band? mmm that's strange". Inside a bunch of guys are playing pool and on the other side of the bar there is a hall with a good sized stage at the front. in front of the stage the hockey game was being projected on a big screen, but only 2 or 3 people were paying attention.
Warning sign #2: As we looked around the bar we noticed several posters for bands that were coming to the bar. it appeared that this was 'the bar' to play in town. "but wait, where is our poster??". Josh thought this was exceedingly strange too, as he had confirmed with the 'Ho' when they recieved the posters. Not a single poster of ours, however, hung from the walls.
Warning sign #3: Much like the sandwich board outside, there was another chalk board inside the bar that listed the goings on for that week. On the board they had clearly written what bands were playing on tuesday, thursday, friday and saturday. our beloved wednesday was of course left blank.
Sign #4: As the icing on the cake, when we started to load the stage some long haired dude hobbles on over to greet us. "Hey are you playing a show tonight?" he slurs jovially.
"Yes", we respond.
"Oh!!" he laughs, "it's a good thing i stopped by, i was about to head across town and continue getting drunk with my friends!".

The long hair was Derek our sound guy for the night, and probably our saving grace. You could just tell that things weren't going to work out that night. There was a strange apathetic feeling in the room. So when Derek asked me if i partied before i played, in the same way ricky fitts asks lester burnham in american beauty, i responded, "not usually, but i do tonight".

Armed with a cannon between us, Derek proceeded to tell me a series of disjointed stories. Derek was just one of those souls you'd hope and expect to find on the road. Definitely a kind hearted fellow, Derek continually appologized for his odd ball sense of humour, though we were both laughing the whole time. Derek's shining moment came when he told us how to deal with the crowd at the "Ho". I kind of need to show this in person, but essentially a band best reel them in with simpler straight forward numbers and then, when they weren't expecting it, shock them with something insane.

Derek's imitated this musical insanity by swinging the guitar he had fetched from his quarters in a slap shot like manner at our faces. Shawn and i were on the floor.

We hit the stage with about 6 or 7 people on our side of the bar. Somewhat discouragingly there was a line of people at the bar at the back, kindly turning their backs to us the whole time and watching the game or conversing with their favourite local bar tender. We decided to play our whole repertoire as the stage was nice, and we were having fun all the same. From behind me i swear i heard shane yell out between every song, can someone get me a beer. Which as it was happening, i of course did nothing to help but thought to myself, "can somebody just get this guy a beer already". As he stumbled off stage at the end of our set i was relieved to know that Josh and the bar tender were in fact fetching our boy beers, perhaps, everytime he asked for one.

With about 4 songs to go, our film-maker corey's brother and his friends show up. They kind of saved the day. We just wished we could have had them the whole time. Ah well, such is life. Canmore was in the least an adventure, and a dip that made peaks like broken city and salmon arm that much more special.

dom

Adaline is beautiful

I've forgotten to mention this for months now. Our dear friend Shawna who's musical project goes under the name Adaline has just recorded a wonderful and preciously beautiful rendition of Silent Night. You can hear it and download it (download it if you have a myspace account) at www.myspace.com/adalinesmusic .

Adaline also sang prominently on one of our own songs on So Much for the Rain. The song, East of Eden, is also on her myspace page so check them both out, as they are both splendid tracks.

dom

Days 5,6 and 7: Broken City

Being that we couldn't do Regina, we had a couple days off before our 2nd calgary show. After slowly making our way to calgary we spent a nice couple days relaxing with Shane's family. The Lynch's are totally sweet. At times i felt bad for how much i was relaxing but they assured me that it was totally cool.

On our second night off we talked about perhaps hitting the town and going to a bar. The thought of drinking alcohol or hanging out in a bar on our day off wasn't appealing to any of us. Instead we had a taboo death match. Taboo, for those of you who have never played, is like pictionairy with words, but you aren't allowed to say 5 words or terms that you would probably use to describe the word you are trying to get your teammates to guess. We decided on playing girls vs. boys: shawn, shane and i against shane's sister allison, leah and josh. You may be able to sense my bitterness from losing. Josh and the girls beat the boys, though it was by a narrow margin.

Mcnorton was somewhat of a machine at this game. He and shawn are both quite fierce competitors, though josh tends to be a bit more 'confident' in his table talk. Josh and I used to play doubles tennis against zach and tom from lotus child, and josh's major contribution was definitely his trash talk. His trash talk is one of those things that you love to have on your side but when you're going up against it, it's a completely different story. On another of our longer drives, josh proposed that we play a game of "name bands that start with the letter __". Josh's presented his suggestion by opening with "i will start of by saying that i will definitely win this game". To his ego's peril, he did end up winning the game.

After two days off we were very eager to hit the stage again at Calgary's Broken City. As you may remember our first Calgary show left something to be desired. Broken City definitely made up in all areas that Stetson's was lacking. We managed to bring down a good amount of people for the show, and we played like we didn't care what people thought or felt. I was pretty stoked to have Shane's sister Allison join me for East of Eden. I'd like to send a big thank you to Allison Lynch, as it was truly a pleasure to have her beautiful vocals on that song live. I would also like to send a big thank you to the whole Lynch family who housed and fed us for a good few days, the food was delicious and i can't wait to hear that Christmas album Gaby and Frank.


It's great, we have shawna in BC, Allison in alberta, pretty soon we'll have somebody to sing the duet wherever we go. That or we'll just be able to bring somebody on tour with us.
The night was smashing, and if it weren't for the fact that we later had one of the best shows of our lives in Salmon Arm it would have been by far the best show of the tour.

Edmonton Pic's

We must be at least 5 songs in, Shane isn't wearing a shirt. (Shane's shirt taking off statistics calculated bi-monthly courtesy of Corey Fischer, his best friend and our resident film maker)

After our day of shopping at West Ed, we stop off at our good friends the McAllisters. This is Brandi. I actually married her and her husband Matt off, but that's another story completely. The McAllisters like to watch ultimate fighting (UFC). Me and my musician friends, unfortunately, can't stand watching UFC. Although i did kind of enjoy watching shawn and josh painfully wincing as they witness some brazilian getting the crap kicked out of him. He put himself in the ring, i think that meant he deserved it.

Day 4: The murder Capital of Canada, Edmonton

For those of you that are perhaps starting to get tired of my negativity, perhaps I should have warned you that these three consecutive shows would be kind of the low point of the tour. Actually, no. There were lower points, and stetson’s and edmonton both had great parts about them too.

We had booked a billiard hall to play in Edmonton, and because the Edmonton band that had agreed to play hadn’t responded to our emails in over a week, we invited Alpha Baby to come up to Edmonton with us, which was once again awesome. Our invite, led to them inviting us to Regina on the following night. There was the half hour or so of us being ecstatic about flying by the seat of our pants, but that was later crushed by the fact that we couldn’t go over a certain amount of miles on our rental van, and the fact that the gig was a fundraiser and therefore a massive money losing venture. Sorry regina, we promise to be less practical about our decisions next time.

A cloud was unfortunately cast over Edmonton shortly after we played. I remembered hearing yelling and witnessing the commotion of 5 or 6 guys running towards the door of the establishment. A friend of mine told me that it was a fight, and this was quite common in Edmonton, the murder capital of Canada. Alpha Baby and Shawn allerted me lately that during the fight someone had pulled out a knife, and after chasing eachother around our parked van somebody got stabbed in the abdomen. I heard the story shortly after seeing the trail of blood that led from the front doors into the bathroom of billiard hall. As far as I know the victim survived, so not all was lost. Definitely, however, not a highlight of our trip.

Our next two days were days off, so led by shawn, our former edmontonian, we headed to West Edmonton mall for a day of leisure, and shopping(?) I cut the latter down to a minimum as I can’t really stand shopping.

dom

Day 3: Calgary (tpb vs. Dilbert and his motorcycle gang)

We awoke at the marshall's house an hour later than we had planned. this didn't mean much to us at the time, but it will later in the story. i, personally, awoke satisfied that i had been made D.D. the night before.

about 20 minutes after we finished our set, shawn announced that we were doing another round of jaeger shots, and because i had been left out of the first round or two, it was just easier for me to continue NOT drinking. a disappointment at first, but i wasn't really in the mood for debauchery. or girl chasing for that matter. so i left it up to them. a couple hours later we had somehow been led, (this must have been the girl chasing) to the bar next door that was allegedely closed, but for some reason didn't stop us from entering and was still serving my comrades drinks. after we sat around and waited for the two no show's (the waitresses from the commodore) i finally convinced shawn and shane to get some late night eats with me.

really it wasn't a tough time convincing them to go and get food. with both of them, late night treats is almost always a must have. upon arriving at denny's (the only establishment in the interiour other than tim horton's that is open all night) shawn demanded that we order him the biggest thing on the menu. this is quite common. shawn's eyes tend to be a bit bigger than his stomach. he'll plow through most of his meal, and then upon admitting defeat, as he did on this occasion, he'll sprawl out on the table and show no noticeable sign of life but a single finger that will still attempt to answer your questions. i'll leave you to decide on which finger that is.

Shane on the other hand, manages to remain as energized as he was at the beginning of the night. perhaps this is why we call him stallone (or sly). no that actually has nothing to do with it.

getting home at 4, i laugh at the likelyhood of us actually leaving by noon as we had planned. i awake to the sound of eggs on the frying pan coffee being brewed and i am so glad to remember that i still have to go for my sauna. needless to say, we took our time with leaving kamloops and didn't get on the road til about 1:30.

now i'd done this once before, and that was forgiveable cuz we weren't actually leaving the province. but to forget about the time change when we were on our way to calgary is just ridiculous. we were lucky for two reasons, sly drives like an animal and the venue didn't actually need us there for a sound check. so us rolling in at a quarter after nine was actually just fine.

we were psyched to meet up with our boys from Alpha Baby (www.myspace.com/alphababy), a kelowna band that we had already shared the stage with twice in the summer. great guys who play great music, so simple but remarkably hard to find. alpha baby was slotted to play first with us going on second and some calgary band going on third.

now normally i'd give a shout out to all the bands. but this band made a good run at trying to ruin our night. now to set the scene the venue was sketch. one of those hotel bars that you could still smoke inside of . there's some kind of acronym for such bars but you'll recognize them by their electronic gambling machines. as i said we were supposed to go on second. josh had booked the show with the promoter, and our set was slotted for between 10 and 11:30. Right after alpha baby rocks out an amazing set, we start setting up and this tall guy who kind of looks like the human representation of the comic character dilbert starts telling us that his band is on next. i'm confident that he is wrong. shortly after josh comes back from a brief meeting with dilbert and the promoter we find out that we are actually on last. turns out dilbo is good friends with the promoter and he can get his way. now i can see where they were coming from. nobody really wants to play closing slot on a weeknight. there's a good chance that everyone will be gone already.

what really annoyed us, though, was that dilly and his boys managed to make sure that most people headed home by playing the most obnoxious plug your ears crap bar rock imaginable. people were standing up and leaving in their first song. the rather nice looking crowd that had gathered on this thursday night basically dwindled down to shane's 20 or so family and friends, and a couple members of shawn's extended family. now i understand that music isn't exactly easy. i at no point claim to know what i'm doing. but when you have no consideration for your audience whatsoever, stay in your jam space and flex your muscles. it was like dilbert and his dudes were sitting around revving their harley's and trucks in a parking lot, and "no, sorry boys, we weren't impressed".

when we finally hit the stage at 1, shane regained my strength and positivity as he would do on many occasions on this trip by giving me one of his pep talks and assuring me that this would be a nice concert for family and friends, which it definitely was. the audience welcomed us by gathering around the stage and singing along to a lot of our songs, most notably 'intimate mistake'. highlight of the night was probably francis joining us on stage and providing the egg shaker for our newest song 7 Days.

we crashed late that night at a friends house in calgary, and could sleep in late cuz edmonton was only a couple hours away.

dom

Back to the Present for a second

Fear not, i will return to the telling of our BC Alberta Tour Tale briefly. We just played the festival of Guns festival here in town and i felt like posting a few things. Mostly the pictures that our photographer and former roommate Erin Pasternak took.
As for the festival, i've never heard so many people be confused by a name. Plus a lot of people who really didn't like the inclusions of 'guns' in the title. And where the heck was Charlton Heston? i think nerve magazine should really re-think this festival if they want to have any credibility whatsoever.
My sarcasms aside, the show was small and intimate, and definitely a good time. Thank you to all of you who came out and supported. I made a comment that may have seemed like a slam on Elton John, and it was. I appologize, i do like EJ it's just that i was raised to dislike him and think all of his songs sound the same. Now that i've grown up, i've learned that i was wrong. i appologize.

dom

Day 2: Kamloops

we were pretty happy about not having a huge commute from Kelowna to Kamloops on Wednesday. After having breakfast we finally gave our good friend Ara at the River, the radio station in Kamloops, a phone call. The last time we had been through, Ara had done an interview over the phone with me to plug our show. I remember being quite amused as we'd talked for about a minute before we 'started' the interview, at which point Ara turned on his radio voice which caught me quite off guard. I've called friends at their office jobs before and it's always quite amusing as their professional voice always sounds so serious or mature compared to their everyday voice. Radio personalities, however, are in a whole new ballpark. His voice was alive. Or comparative to Russel from still water's guitar sound; incendiary.

Since we were only a couple of hours away from kamloops and we could make it there with time to spare, ara suggested that we do one of our songs acoustic on the air. After the interview and song Ara's final comment was "How bout you give a good shout out to your boys!" Now my instincts told me to either yell out enthusiastically "Yeah boys! woo hoo", or wait for the rest of the band to do the same. I instead froze up and had to ask him what exactly he meant. Apparently this was my cue to introduce the rest of the band, which i did immediately after he clarified. the boys all laughed at me for my cluelessness, though shane did admit that he was also confused by the question.

later as our opening band played we overcame the ever returning anxiety of whether people will come or not. a good amount of people were piling into the commodore, (remember this is kamloops, not vancouver) and we were quite optimistic. that optimism, however was unfortunately somewhat squandered when we had to set up our stage. i have described the stage we played that night as something you might see in a safety manual, a diagram of a work environment in which there are several obvious hazards that you are supposed to label.

our diagram would have included a stage that was sliding all over the floor leaving a huge gap to fall into in the middle of the stage, cords hanging from the wall, leading to the sound man who was behind us and thus, couldn't hear his mix at all. shawn's favourite element that from where he was standing his bass was perfectly close-lining anyone on their way to the bathroom, or running orders to and from the kitchen. to top it off there wasn't enough space on the stage, so setting up felt kind of like loading the van on the first day again.

i had high hopes for kamloops that were somewhat let down by several external factors. i guess i realized for the hundredth time that when my hopes are too high i usually end up disappointed, and also that larger crowds don't always guarantee more enjoyable situations. we were once again battling against conversation, and it didn't help that we were playing in an echo chamber built out of tin.

i'm being far too honest with you again, though i must say that kamloops did give us one of our biggest highlights and that was hanging out with cathi and trevor marshall again, our good friends from our last trip. (i believe this is a... 'shout out'?..) their hospitality and good spirits were rejuvenating, as was their sauna. we'll see them again soon i hope.

dom

Tour Beginnings: Kelowna

October 16th we headed to our jam space in gas town to load the van and head to our first gig in kelowna. we don't have the funds yet to buy our own van so we have been borrowing from our friend matt mc'd of the local act shukov, or renting for shows when we have to. for our last tour it was quite the task finding a van that could fit every one and everything that was still economically feasible. we ended up renting a mini van and using my sisters car. for this tour we definitely had to cut down on gas prices, we also needed all four of us inside one van bonding and getting used to each others' smell and/or idiosyncrasies .

my good friend Zach from lotus child had given me a tip that we could rent a certain "grand caravan" that could fit all of our gear in it, as he and his boys had done a similar tour in the same vehicle. feeling over confident about his suggestion I rented said 'grand caravan' and tried our luck. needless to say after about 20 minutes of shifting things around and looking at about 25 cubic feet of equipment and about 15 cubic feet of space, we started pitching things we didn't need.
pedal board, gone, 2nd lap top, chucked, josh and shawn could share. Back up bass, left behind. Shawn's suggested that we share his duffel bag for our clothes as that would cut 3 bags down into 1. along with half of my shirts, i decided to toss my school books as well.
It took us about half an hour to design a configuration that would fit all of our essential gear and merchandise. it wasn't comfortable but it worked. we had mountains of stuff in between the left and right hand side of the vehicle which on a rough corner would shift and fall on the person who was sleeping. but again, just more fun to be had.

we arrived in kelowna with time to spare. we were playing a good venue downtown, close to the water called doc willoughby's. i came to the realization at this first venue that as a touring musician you are paid in about 4 different currencies. one is of course the door money, which from my experience they always seem the most reluctant to give you. the other three are accomodation, which any touring artist normally needs unless they have friends in the area, and lastly food and beer. beer is great, though i kind of hate how they've established it as a method of payment. for one, and i know this sounds a bit whiny, i hate how it perpetuates the stereotype that we're all here to play a show get drunk and party etc. if anything, the painted birds are horrible at this. ok that was an outright lie, but there will never be any mud shark stories about us, and i'm not too interested in snorting cocaine off of strippers as every one assumes.
after about four shows i don't want any beer, i'd rather not even be in a bar, and we'd rather just take some money instead, but, alas they won't give us that.

kelowna managed to do a 360 from our last experiences there this summer. kelowna was packed last time, so much so that i had friends who were waiting to get in who missed the whole show because the bar was at capacity. you'd think this would be great, but i felt the show was lost in confusion. i think we successfully connected with 2 or 3 people, one of which was some guy who told us he wanted to put our music on his "ski-do" video, and wanted a free CD because of it. a good ploy i felt. a packed house is close to always great, but on this occasion we were battling with a crowd who was way louder than we were. mcnorton, however, did tell me after the show that he thought it was our best show ever, so maybe i had just missed something.

kelowna this time was a practically empty room. (what could we expect for a tuesday night in the fall?) by the time we started the crowd had filled out to about 30 or 40 people, and they were all ears. from start to finish we played our set to a virtually silent audience. they greeted the end of our set with cheers for an encore, and a last call bell, that really confused me as it was still before midnight. the bar tender, however, assured me he was just trying to make more noise.

we loaded out and went to our hotel across the street. perhaps one of my favourite shows of the tour, mainly because i was so surprised at how good it went. the next morning we were off to kamloops, where more adventure awaited us...

a sort of homecoming

Whoa. two months. where on earth does the time go. We've been busy, and we've also been relaxing. August was home to one of the most intense tours known to man. 6 shows in three days. A short little jaunt up to the okanagan with tonnes of ping ponging from salmon arm to kamloops, to salmon arm, to kelowna to salmon arm, you get the picture.

The whole experience was of course tiring, but exhilarating. Each venue offering a completely new environment and space to explore. From a wide open parking lots, to a crowded coffee shop like wine bar, to restaurants, to (and this was definitely the highlight) playing our own stage at the salmon arm roots and blues festival. each venue seemed to have it's new set of rules, the do's and dont's so to speak. we were lucky enough to have our good friend Shawna of Adaline ( http://www.myspace.com/adalinesmusic ) in kelowna to perform East of Eden as it was originally intended, and while i swear the song would have killed on any other night the bar scene in kelowna didn't really seem into simply listening. their loss i guess.

My personal highlight was kamloops which was a gong show in the best way possible. as we entered the coffee shop slash wine bar i knew that something had to change. i figured it was the set list, as it just seemed like we'd be far too loud for this tiny little space. receiving resistance from my compadres i resigned to leave things the way they were. 3 songs in, however, i noticed an elderly lady sitting right in front of the speakers with her elbows way above her head, her hands doing everything they could do to stop the sound from coming into her ears, and a painful grimace on her face. the lady was chris', (our opening act http://www.soundclick.com/chrisbrock) grandmother. i decided we had to insert some of our more mellow tunes, and from then on in the night was great.

a big thank you for all that came out. we're finalizing a tour as i write this to return to the okanagan and continue on into alberta in mid october. check our myspace for more updates.

dom

scary with a dash of excitement

only 4 days remain before we officially release our debut album. until now we've leaked a few copies here and there to friends, and though i'm always nervous about how people will react to our work, this week seems to hold something greater.
i sat down with shawn the other day and we talked about how the critics would react to the album. i've developed a mentality that i hope will protect myself from any sort of emotional injury, though i know that i'll read every little bit and analyze until i'm blue in the face. the way i look at it, the worst thing to happen would be if they give it a passing grade like a 3 out of 5. Of course we're going to be happy with a 5 out of 5 and a 4 out of 5 isn't a 5 out of 5 but at least it ain't a 3. (now that i've said this i will knock on wood and wait patiently for the 3)

why do i hate the number 3? it's not the number, and it isn't mediocrity even. the way i look at it, if they hate it and give it a 1 or a 2 at least the album evoked a response. 3 or a just passing grade seems too indifferent to me. it's like when you hear someone complaining about how much they hate something. chances are you'll hear them talk about it a few times over and after a while you'll start to wonder if the person is in denial and actually liked it... a lot.

i may have just listened too well when my sister explained to me a long time ago that the true opposite of love wasn't hate but indifference. hate and love seem to be sitting right next to one another in the spectrum of emotions. with the right nudge you can quickly turn one into the other. furthermore, if somebody hates it there has got to be somebody out there who loves it. it's science.

besides they're reaction to the music, even if it does receive a positive response will we be able to pull it off live? with integrity? and will people come? these my friends are the doubts of a rookie recording artist days before his first official release.

at the same time, things have never been better. we're on a great bill this thursday and it seems like people are excited to come. we're heading home to Salmon Arm for the Roots and Blues festival which should be a great time, not only playing at a great festival but seeing a lot of old faces. i remember when i got back from Germany i bought tickets mainly to walk the fair grounds and see what old friends i could run into. it's a small town like that. we'll be rushed this time with shows every day in neighboring towns so it'll be brief but we'll make it good.

so yeah, things are a little bit scary right now, with a strong dash of excitement, but i guess those things are supposed to go hand in hand.

dom

How's about you drink 6 cases o' me, Joni?

"Phoebe wanted me to go out, but I said 'These guys just finished their CD, they really want it tonight, and I'm not going to deny them that!'"

One of the many, many reasons I love our design team. They get it.

Aren understands that to the concierge at the front desk of his building, this is just a pile of 6 cardboard boxes, but to us, this is two years of diligence, panic, excitement, apprehension, euphoria - the utmost of emotion and intimacy. This is how Seth Rogan felt watching the baby crown in "knocked up" (which, I'm sure, was quite a bit different from how I felt watching that particular scene in the movie = how to make one of the most delicious leading ladies in hollywood lose all sex appeal in one shot...ok she lost it for like two minutes, but let's get back to the point).

There's something to be said for having music in a tangible form. I guess this is why I spend all day pushing paper in a record store. I really just don't get iTunes, Limewire and the like. Granted this is the future, and like my Grandma embracing the internet, I'm sure I'll fall in line eventually, but I'll miss being able to sit on the carpet in front of my speakers, flipping through the pages of some random OLP album and wondering if Dom will ever be able to pull off the "chicken" rock pose as well as Raine Maida. I'll miss knowing that Siamese Dream sounds like three different albums if you play it on CD, cassette and vinyl. Most of all, I regret knowing that at some point in the future, no one will care that our CD features the most beautiful artwork I could have imagined, or that it has three different covers (on cardstock), or that I won't get to spend mountainous amounts of time scheming and planning (and learning) with Phoebe & Aren...phone calls, e-mails, and many a meeting of beer and tasty delights at the Irish Heather or the Six Acres (you should all go here; the beer list is monumental).

Either way, our album is pressed, signed, sealed, delivered. I'm excited as hell to share it with you all. I can't wait to hear which tracks win out the "this one's my favourite" race, and which ones get utterly rejected.

Many, many thanks to Phoebe & Aren (Glasfurd & Walker), who took soooo much time out of their crazy busy schedule (designing for real clients, like MTV) and without whom this process would have broken me.

Cheers.

~S

certain agitators...

so i'm about to delve into something that is no business of mine, predominantly because it is political and what do i know about politics?
sitting on the bus yesterday i picked up one of those free disposable mini newspapers you can find anywhere these days, except, perhaps, inside garbage cans.
after finding out that paris hilton is once again in prison (or out of prison, i forget), i flipped to this article on Prince Harry. Harry, the bad boy and my favourite royal family member, had allegedly been out partying on the same night that the 150th british soldier had been killed in Iraq.
I always hear these totals. And frankly, besides them only ever being totals of Western soldiers killed, they always sound surprisingly low. And yet somehow, Bush, or our local newscaster or whoever is reporting such totals, is always overcome with such shock and dismay.
Don't get me wrong, i'm not in support of more American or British soldiers dying in Iraq, or Canadian soldiers dying in Afghanistan, or anyone dying for that matter. But why haven't I heard totals of Iraqi soldiers or civilians killed? My gut told me, the totals would be a lot greater, and after reading the BBC article below, my gut was right.
A research team from the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimated last fall that Iraqi death totals were in the neighborhood of 655 000. It is just an estimate, but at least the school bothered to take notice of how the Iraqi's were doing. And, furthermore, if they are drastically wrong, oh let's say they accidentally doubled the totals. There's still over 275 000
Iraqi deaths compared to... wait for it... 3500 American deaths, and let's not forget 150 Brits.

It's kind of like we're complaining to the kid who's failing math for the 3rd time that the teacher screwed us over and gave us a B+ instead of an A! 85%, looks like little Georgey won't be getting the super soaker 7000 from mommy after all. better luck next time kid.

link pasted below
dom

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6040054.stm

re-writing

i helped a friend read through the first draft of his movie script with a couple of readers the other evening. half way through we started giving him some compliments, to which he said "thanks guys, and seriously if this script sucks, tell me because i'd kind of like to make a career out of this, so if its bad please tell me".

hearing this and reading on, i was reminded of something my old professor Stephen Heal once said in a scriptwriting class. he said, "there is only one thing that separates good writers from great writers. great writers are good re-writers". of course, Mr. Heal had said this when all the students in his class, including myself, had failed to do any rewriting on our scripts as he had assigned. which perhaps made his lesson have even more impact.

i think that's the thing with this business of art. or any kind of vision that we want to reify. my friend had the foundation for something great, the real question was if he had the perserverance to hammer and chisel and fix this thing until he was blue in the face, and this thing was perfect. it gives us simple people hope. we don't need to be mozarts, who's manuscripts were allegedely flawless, perfect first drafts. we just have to have the determination and the patience to work on it until it's perfect.

it also reminds me of one of the songs on the album, which i will in no way claim to be perfect.
in the middle of shawn' and i's writing period two autumn's ago, shawn, when i was away, decided to rank our first 15 songs. this was upseting to me cuz how on earth could i compare my, or our, babies in such a way. needless to say i eventually came to terms with it, and made my own ranking, which i didn't like but i could deal with. at the bottom of both of our lists was a song, that we pulled out of the rubble, rebuilt and improved enough to make it on the album.

so, in a way i'm glad he made the list. the song may have just fallen by the wayside if we wouldn't have admitted to it needing all the work.

anyhoo, go back to your lives

d

The Suit

I work at a wine store, which deals mostly with fine wines, but also supplies the more “economical” hooch (dirt cheap wine) and coolers. We in the industry, or my colleagues Andrew St. Cool, Jerry and I label said drinks as “loser juice”. The reason for this being that loser juice is largely bought out by the people who come in once, twice or even five times a day to buy their daily get drunk treat. The spectrum of loser juicers is pretty broad. At the bottom of this spectrum you will find ones that stand outside our door pan handling until they accrue the 2 dollars they need to buy a single cooler and then repeat. Other ones you would guess have stopped eating completely to fill their bodies with whatever nutrients you would find in an 8 dollar bottle of Almond cream sherry.

As icky as some of these patrons get, on Wednesday a man with a suit and an American Express came in and out grossed all of them. It was a slow hour so when he came in he was alone and under the magnifying glass of St. Cool and myself.

Sweating like a pig in his finely cut suit, he taps me on the shoulder.

Suit: Hey buddy, I need you to get me a FABULOUS wine

Me: Ok, how much are you looking to spend.

Suit: Doesn’t matter I need it to be fabulous.

enter St. Cool

St. Cool: How fabulous do you want it?

Suit: Honestly?... I want her in bed.

St. Cool: Oh so you’ll need high alcohol then.

Suit: Will that work?

St. Cool: oh yeah, should do the trick. So how much do you want to spend?

People often give us really evasive answers to this question, but really it saves us a lot of time. We can get you a good bottle of wine for $13, and we can get you a great one for $25… or $400. The options are endless. The man in the suit chooses to beat around the bush

Suit: Look don’t dog me, but don’t puppy me either.

(What on earth does this mean? please i need to know)

St. Cool: I’ve always been more of a cat person, so you’re gonna have to be a bit more concrete.

(The final Verdict!!)

Suit: Like 28 or 30 bucks.

I wish I had one of those shocked as heck emoticon faces. Not only was this sleaze bag trying to coaxe some woman into bed with his wallet, but he wasn’t even even spending the standard sleaze bag amount, which is $50 dollars for you sleaze bags in training. Cmon!

So St. Cool runs and picks him out a french syrah in his price range, keeping in mind that he wants a wine of at 14 or 15% alcohol and starts to ring him up. The icing on the cake is that when Suit tries to pay with his American Express, we have to tell him that we only accept mastercard or visa. To this he says

Suit: Oh I gave all my credit cards to let her to go shopping with.

The suit then leaves the store sans bottle of high alcohol wine. Hopefully his mastercard, visa’s 3 thousand dollar shopping trip were enough to get him somewhere. Deep down I hope it was the curb.

Dom

Aquafina vs. Dasani (title bout)

The thing about the Vancity music scene, more than any other city I've lived in, is that every show feels like a gamble. It's never really possible to determine if all of the friends and friends-of-friends-of-friends you invite to your performances are willing to give up the violent appeal of the Granville St. nightclub to come see music at it's source. Seeing a band live is like drinking from a glacial river, whereas the majority of people in the city seem intent on their filtered & purified bottled water (yes, by night I'm a poet). Which I am sure as hell not knocking (did I mention that we just finished a record to rival Evian?). So I've decided that the obvious way to combat this is to do a show at one of these aforemention Granville nightclubs, create a web of confusion in which you include options A(concert) and B (nightclub), and mix them up with the ridiculously familiar (S of S, anyone?) and such a potent kick (donkeys) that potential attendees are powerless to resist.

We played the Plaza last week to the most receptive crowd that we've had, strong proof that everything I wrote before this is utter, utter bullshit. We didn't play every song perfectly (as I always hope we'll do), but we played most of them pretty well. Josh didn't fall over, although his recovery from the one fall was the most rock'n'roll moment I've ever experienced. There were a mountain of our fans there, and a mountain of potential converts. Even considering that we had nothing in common with the other act, apart from possession of guitars, I think we had a fairly good success rate in that area. Either that or Josh brought 100 new friends that felt obligated to tell me they loved the set. (as we all know, this is entirely possible. I swear he breeds people like chia pets). Highlight of the night: a handfull of fans in the front rows singing with us for "intimate mistake". Probably doesn't hurt that most of them just did the same on our record.

By the way, the album is mixed, mastered and EPIC! And I'm usually a humble guy. We've decided to be horribly selfish and keep it to ourselves for the time being, but, as is always the case, I'm sure most of you will come into contact with it soon enough. We'll keep you posted on the various happenings, album-wise.

And thanks to Dan for coming to the show, standing front¢er and belting along to songs he's never heard. This man IS character.

~S

Honey and lemon

so it's been a while. i appologize.

does anybody else ever have a letter or email to write that you put off, and the more time you put it off the more substantial you feel the letter or email has to be?
my brother did this to us for 3 or 4 years once. he called up one day and admitted that he'd been there by the phone listening to us leave messages on his answering machine, but was too embarrassed to pick up the phone.

i was suffering the same thing, but i figure its better to just jot a couple things down than write you a novel size account of what we've been up to.
we're nearly done. i have one day left of lead vocals to do, and then we're on to final overdubs and background vocals.
i've developed a serious addiction to hot water with honey and lemon. someone told me last year that it was good for the throat. i'd somehow blown my voice out before our first gig and needed a quick remedy. it seemed to work pretty well, so when dr. boss and i were talking about how we were going to knock off so many vocals in so few days, the answer was honey and lemon in hot water.
actually it was honey and lemon tea, but i the fool, knowing not to buy caffeinated tea, as caffeine dehydrates you, went across the street and purchased the first herbal tea i saw. sleepy time.
the fellows were quite amused. we unfortunately don't need any snoring takes on this record. maybe on the sophmore edition.

Dr. Boss is totally beating me up in there and i'm loving every moment of it. He somehow manages to rule with the iron fist, but not do it in such an abrasive way as my father used to.
Reminds me a lot of one of my first great teachers, mr. Stephen Heal, who sadly passed away last month. Heal knew how to pull the full extent of one's gifts out of them. For this and so much more i will greatly miss him.

It's nice how at key times, I can be reminded of such greatness, and Boss definitely does that.

We're nearing the end. Our baby is nearly born.

dom

Back to the Real World

I swear the world stops when we're in here.
It doesn't, I just stop really interacting with it.
There are no windows and the only time we leave is to get sandwiches at the market across the road.
Needless to say it's a shock when we find out that it's still light outside or it's already dark.
And there's no internet and no landline phone (which there never seems to be anymore, i'm against cell phones by the way).
I go home at night for 2 hours before I pass out, to realize that my room is still a mess and I still have nothing in the fridge to eat. In brief stints, I love this.

We've just finished our first four days of recording, straight through easter weekend. Guitars, guitars and more guitars. Everything is sounding amazing. The first time i did this when i was 16 with shawn in a crappy little studio in Salmon Arm, (i say crappy cuz of the engineer and the quality of the equipment, but honestly it was much larger than the one we are in now) we had all these visions for how it would sound, and the recordings fell short time and time again. This time, the visions have only gotten bigger and our producer Mr. Cole or Dr. Boss, manages to blow us away and exceed our expectations time and time again.

Surrounded by the "O" of amps you can see in the picture below, Dr. Boss can do anything, i repeat everything. And that's not mentioning his ability to time and time again bring out a new toy out of his seemingly endless closet of tricks and contraptions.

I'm quite interested to see what will make the album. The list of songs we are recording is basically split into two breeds of songs. Both sides of the painted birds. There will definitely be some crossover, but it's interesting to see what gets picked in the end.

As a challenge i dare anyone to pick the 10 from the picture below that they think will make the album. and it doesn't matter if you've never heard the songs before. 10 from the list, on our comments board. Winner gets a copy of all the songs that were recorded including the ones that won't make the album.

Dom

Lab Monkey Beginnings

Mr. Cole is able to give Josh and I the endless options that we desire for guitar sounds.

From the outside in: Lab Monkey Studios. this is where the magic happens.
Shhhh don't telllll.. when josh and i were in portugal 2 years ago we actually joked about naming our band that. shhdon'tell.. it never stuck, but we still laughed about it.

these are what we have to choose from. the song list that is. the empty boxes need to all be filled in before we're done here. we've got work to do.

Recording @ Mushroom Studios

TPB Mar 31 recording @ Mushroom, originally uploaded by rinlee.

click the photo for more pics from the guys recording at Mushroom Studios, March 31.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

badger, badger, mushroom MUSHROOM

the time just didn't seem to stop flying. we'd already scheduled to track drums and bass at Mushroom studios on March 31 and April 1st for a couple months, and the dates seemed to be flying towards us.
it was totally up and down. one week i'd have the fear, the next week i'd be totally confident. we didn't get in to do pre-production with our drummers until 2 weeks before which made most of us nervous minus our producer Shawn Cole. he assured us that we were in good hands, and after this last weekend i can confirm that he was quite right.

as calming as he was at the time, there was still songs i felt we were going in unprepared for. segments that weren't doing what i wanted them to do. time signatures that weren't coming together. 3 days to go and i have the fear again. great, i'm going in with the fear.

on friday, the day before we went in, i decide that the world is out to get me. i'd just found out that my employers decided to give every one of my colleagues a yearly bonus but me, and a handsome one at that, a professor does basically the same thing and marks me lower than the rest of my group on a group presentation, and my buddy from Shukov, Matt McD, phones me to tell me that the amp that i'd lent him is apparently broken. a fact that was quite new to me.
"you're having bad luck with guitars" he says. Nope i'm having bad luck in general.

It may seem as though these are only three small things, that coincedentally occured all on the same day. And looking back they are. But at times like this, i think a lot of us start thinking about all the stuff that's gone wrong, and all the reasons to feel sorry for ourselves.

The shit storm didn't stop the next morning. the van we'd arranged to borrow needed to be jumped. Berke and i already knew this, so after we'd stopped a couple different cars to jump us and we couldn't even get the engine to turn over we really start feeling like idiots.
"man we're really professionals. we're spending an arm and a leg to record this album at one of the best studios in town and we cant even get our equipment there". I mention how much each of our fathers would be shaking their heads at us right now if they could see us.
"with good reason" shawn agrees.

after renting two van taxis to move everything, we amazingly arrive ahead of schedule. from this point on, though i'd never have believed it, everything was great. i forgot all of my anxiety. drums sounded amazing, bass was tight, and the whole experience was a blast. i'll post photos when i get my hands on them.

if i had to make any more comments that it was awesome, and the days were long, but stressful and tiring in that wonderful kind of way, i would only be letting you in on what songs we are doing and what's happening to them. no i think i'll leave you all waiting. i will say that mushroom's piano is the silkiest object i've ever laid eyes on. All I Can do sounds 10 times better because of it, not to mention Shawn's (from notes from the underground and the doers...yes there were 3 shawns) new drum parts.
And as per mcnorton's demand we took a couple takes of the song for which this blog is named, just in case. twas a nice not to end on.

a thanks to nico and shawn and our publicity people pasternak and fischer.
onward to lab monkey, an equally creative environment, just not quite as prestigious or comfy as mushroom.

dom

this is where thoughts go

i have to just put something down here so we're not working with a blank slate. then i can write something serious. this is just a throw away. i do this when i write lyrics, other wise i'll just stare at the blank page for hours, and feel liike crap when i finally look at the clock. which happens around every 5 to 7 minutes. there. that's probably enough.
thankyou for your patience,

dom