Tag: musician

crazy is just what i do

Hi everyone,

It’s time for more of this:

I wrote this song in my apartment when I lived in the City Market building across the street from Canada Place in Edmonton… so in the first verse where it says “I watch the sunrise in the reflection of the building across the street” – that building is Canada Place.

I hope you enjoy this video and this song. It’s very fast, and sorta hard to play… but the song used to be much slower and much longer, and actually pre-dates The Confusionaires by a year or two, now that I think of it… but it drives the point home so I hung onto it!

Thanks for watching and reading.

rest

Rest. This is a big one because I don’t get much of it. I don’t allow myself much of it because I take on roles that are relentless, but those roles are important.

Fatherhood doesn’t relent. When they told me 17 years ago that the next 18 years of my life were spoken for, they undersold it by a country mile. I am something that I will never not be, and I wouldn’t have it any other way… even when I feel like complaining.

I’ve been split with my daughter’s mom for a good long time now. It’s fine. The kid is supposed to spend a week at my place and a week at her mom’s but in reality it looks more like 11 days with me and 4 with her mom. It’s not the end of the world. as a matter of fact, I play lots of gigs out of town, and need her help managing the dog.

I love it, even when my old introverted ass is yearning for an empty house with which to play loud music and loud guitar, sometimes simultaneously.

Rock & Roll doesn’t relent. We’d like to think it gets easier when you ascend to the next rung of popularity. That’s bullshit. It’s glorious and all encompassing… but it’s a mountain of work that nobody’s ever going to do for you. The best you can hope for is to have people do that work for you, but the reality is that you only pay people to do things you can’t or won’t due… which means you stay busy.

Then when you’re not busy, you load up a trailer full of gear and drag it down the highway for several hours where you and your equally old (if not older) band members unload it, play all night, and then barely make it to a hotel room to collapse before we repeat the cycle. We get home a couple days later and go to work… which is the closest thing to relaxing we get to do, regularly.

I love it, even when my old introverted ass is yearning for an empty house…

Endurance Sport is relentless. The very nature of endurance sport is that it is something to be endured, so it shares some common ground with parenting and rock & roll in that it takes up a bunch of time and I can’t live without it. Sometimes the best thing you can do for your old tired self is to get up early and go for a run. it makes me a better parent and a better rock & roller so it stays…

The rest of my life fills in the gaps. Being a boyfriend and a dog owner are not particularly taxing, though they do have their moments, just as I have my moments when I need the attention of my family members.

… my life straight up rules. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I have a music career, and day job, and a family and none of them seem to interfere with each other. I have a lovely home, dog, kid, girlfriend… I have cool stuff… I’m winning this game.

But it can be a lot.

We have to take our rest when we can get it. I was reminded of this when my body all but shut down on a monday morning recently. It was the kind of thing where I got up to go for a run and anytime I would turn my head, my eyes took a few seconds to catch up.

I went back to bed. I woke up in time for work, and after work I took a nap. Then I went to bed early. There was no other choice… and sometimes that’s just reality.

I would love to tell you to prioritize rest.
But I don’t do that.
The best I can do is tell you: Listen to your body.

Speaking of rock & roll… today I’m in Drumheller, AB playing a dinosaur’s birthday party. It’s an outdoor, free event, so if you’re not otherwise engaged on this long weekend, it’d be great to see you.

manifest

I have a full life, and I truly love my full life. At the risk of bragging, I have a family that consists of a very supportive girlfriend and a teenage daughter that wants to spend time with me. If you have a teenage daughter, you know that’s rare. I have an amazing dog that teaches me life’s most simple and important lessons every day… I have a fantastic job that doesn’t interfere with my art-life… and my art life is growing constantly.

There is no part of my life that actively interferes with any other part of my life and if that’s not balance, then I don’t know what is. I realize that I have manifested this; or in a more traditional sense, I built it.

The word manifest; itself, comes from two root words:
Manus – the latin noun for ‘hand’
Festus – which comes from the latin adjective ‘infestus’ which is the root for words like ‘infestation’ and ‘festival’

… so it more or less translates to hand party… or ‘to put a lot of your own hands into something.’ You cannot really manifest anything by sitting around and wishing for it… you have to put thought into action.

That’s the long way around… but it means: I wanted this and I created it.

This was made all to clear to me on a recent phone call with an old friend I don’t see anywhere near enough, where he reminded me of a conversation we’d had in our early 20s about what we wanted our future to be. We’d both fantasized about perfecting our artistic crafts in a humble way, being shit-hot writers and performers who lived covertly normal lives. Essentially being a big deal to a niche market, so we could have modestly nice homes surrounded by good neighbors who had no idea who we really were. A secret identity of sorts.

He spent a few minutes pointing out to me that I have exactly that life – with a few variables augmented slightly – but still, it’s a conversation I won’t soon forget that has filled me with gratitude.

So although this life is full, and occasionally it exhausts me… it was put this way with thoughtful intention and I am extremely grateful for it.

balance

I am always searching for balance.

I have goals to look a certain way, perform to a certain level, run certain distances, eat a certain way, write songs to a certain standard… in amongst working and sleeping and being an attentive adult / father / partner / employee, it doesn’t take much to knock it all off kilter.

So, I have to stop and take stock of where I’m at.

It comes down to what kind of life I want to live.

If I could have everything I wanted, I’d be a Ironman Triathlete who played 250 shows per year to 10,000+ audiences, and have a personal chef, and would train 6 days a week… but it would be a solitary life, surrounded by people and close to noone.

If I trained for an Ironman, I’d have to put my rock & roll band on ice for a while. Any vacation time I had would be spent training. I’d hardly have time for my family because all I’d be doing was training, eating and sleeping.

If I were to chase bigger crowds with my music, I’d likely have to scale back my training, and spend more time at the right parties, socializing, and I’d compromise my health and the quality of my art.

If I lean into my daytime career, I’d likely crater my band, and possibly alienate my family doing so. I wouldn’t train much at all and I’d eat in restaurants and sleep in hotels far too much.

So I try to live my life in the middle… and my life in the middle is pretty great.

I’m 43 years old. I am on 0 medications, and have 0 health complications to be concerned with. I am available to people who need me, including my employer, I have great artistic output with top tier musicians and we do things the way we want them to be done.

All this to say, I am grateful for what I have, and I am happy where I am – because where i am is in a state of progress. I am moving forward in my life and in my art, not backward. I train hard, and I eat like an athlete… but there’s still room in my life for a vegan donuts. I play rock & roll and write songs constantly… but I’m still home for dinner and a dog walk. I work hard, but I’m still available to my family and my friends.

I’m serious.
But I don’t take myself too seriously.

I’ve been trying to find balance for so long that I almost didn’t recognize it when I found it.

charming mistakes

I recently had a conversation with a friend & colleague regarding recording processes. He’s a fellow guitar player and; as odd as it feels for both of us to refer to ourselves in this way, we are composers. Rock & roll composers.

His question for me was; essentially, how good is good enough?

As in, when it comes to recording an instrument, and the ‘take’ in question is ‘flawed’ in some way – as they often are when they are performed by humans – where is the line for an acceptable take vs an unacceptable take. The easy answer is ‘well, if I did what I was trying to do, then it’s worth keeping’ and we are both inline with that. For me, the question is: Is it charming?

There are happy accidents and not-so-happy accidents in this business, but we both feel that if we get too ‘nitpicky’ with every passing note, and cut out every mistake and replace them individually, that we risk engineering the soul out of the song.

That’s a difficult decision to make in the era of quantization and auto-tune, where no mistakes are left to chance in most popular music, but it’s easy for us as artists to forget that there’s a rich heritage of raw and archaic practices. Once upon a time in 1955, when a young Elvis Presley, Bill Black, and Scotty Moore gathered around 1 single omnidirectional microphone in a room and performed their best renditions of songs, that the one that had the ‘best feel’ was what was chosen by the producer, regardless of mistakes, botched endings, and off-key flubs.

There’s a spot in The Kingsmen’s hit “Louie Louie” where the drummer apparently hit his thumb with a drumstick in the middle of the song and yells “FUCK!” loud enough to be picked up on the tape. Decades of AM and FM airplay later, it’s still there, never having been edited out.

And these recordings became iconic.

Surely, that was then, and this is now – but there’s something to be remembered there – The soul must stay intact.

In the end, it’s important that we’re proud of what we’ve made. We intentionally record on high quality instruments, into state of the art microphones, into an industry standard recording program. We hire fantastic mixing engineers, and fantastic mastering engineers. We hire great artists and have our records pressed by reputable companies. All the elements for a great recording are there, and our efforts in the studio should match those elements.

Unanimously, they do match those elements, but as I am currently partaking in yet another recording project with The Confusionaires, these thoughts and propensities come back into the foreground.

These things can be much easier to say than do.
Wish me luck.

keep pushing

The last little while has been a veritable firehose of creativity coming at me, or through me, or however it comes out. I feel like I am part antenna, plucking poetic metaphors from the sky, while simultaneously spitting out verse and peeling off chord patterns and riffs like they’re going to rot if I don’t get them contained.

It’s both inspiring and perplexing.

When records are made, there’s often a feeling of dread and doubt looming beneath the skin, perpetually asking questions like “what if this isn’t good enough?” and “what if you never make another record?” and I know this to be true because I’ve heard other songsmiths say it out loud, but the past few records I’ve made haven’t been like that at all. I know for a fact that I’ll make more and I have a dozen professional releases behind me to illustrate how that happens, but lately I’ve been feeling like the recording(s) that my band is about to start work on are actually really important.

There’s nothing “right now” about these songs, as far as subject matter. On the contrary, I find that records tend to be a marker in time – sort of a “this is what it was like that year” rather than something that affixes itself to a time & place and becomes irrelevant with the changing times. (By that token, if you want to know what my life felt like in 2010-2012 was like, take a listen to the Fuzz Kings releases that came out in 2013 & 2014. If you want them on vinyl, I’ll be happy to furnish you with them.)

Anyway, I have no idea what ‘really important’ even means. Will it propel me forward as an artist? I certainly hope so… I can’t imagine it not doing so, really. Will it top charts? influence media? challenge the status quo? I am certain that I have no idea. “Important” doesn’t always mean successful, and nothing is guaranteed in this life and in this industry. And I know as well as anyone that sometimes people don’t find your record until it’s 10 years old… maybe older.

I don’t think it’s happenstance that I’m posting this as I encroach on 2 years clean & sober. October 22nd, 2019 I had my last drink (in excellent company, mind you). A couple weeks prior to that I was pulling over on Highway 2 to throw up into the ditch multiple times on my way back from a music conference. I’m not here to tell anyone to drink or not drink, but I can tell you that in my case, it’s resulted in being much more present in my performances, much more present in my songwriting, and much more present in my interactions with people. It’s interesting that it’s also the anniversary of this blog, and the anniversary of the day I moved into my house… all happening in different years, and unintentionally.

What I do know is that this is what I am supposed to be doing right now, and this is the frame of mind I am supposed to be in. We can talk about destiny, or the illusion of free will if you like, but all I know is that it feels really good to be right where I am supposed to be.

I cant wait to share my art with you.

don’t sell yourself short

I’ve been selling myself short for most of my life. You probably have, too, but I can’t speak to that other than to say that as a species, we seem to have a tendency to resign ourselves to our own misery, and as cheap compensation, we give ourselves a dopamine hit as frequently as possible.

I’m certainly guilty of this despite my propensity to ‘do hard things’ but for me there has historically been some disconnect between physically doing hard things that are maybe kinda scary, and doing hard things on a spiritually-fulfilling level, like saying no to shitty gigs, or being confident.

A few years ago, I cleaned up my act. I started giving my body the nutrition it needs to thrive and stopped numbing myself to life, and a crazy thing happened. I felt young. That’s not a tangible thing as I type it, but the only way I can explain it is to say that I removed the things in my life that were holding me back the most, and I started to become more energetic and vital.

Energy and vitality weren’t the only things that came back though… the dreams I had as a young teenager came back – those pie in the sky things that I’d eventually talked myself out of over the years came back, and I had the energy to prioritize them, and believe them, and chase them in a way that was impossible 25 years ago.

Nothing happens overnight, but I just returned from an international tour with my band, and our next move is to play the 2 Canadian dates with legit Psychobilly legends The Nekromantix next weekend, before we play with Luke Doucet’s (Whitehorse, Sarah Mclachlan) old band VEAL and play a handful of festival shows. Confusionaires are now booking into 2025.

This is all very small compared to where I see it going, but a few years ago it wouldn’t have only been unattainable for me, but I also would have had a massive chip on my shoulder about someone else having these opportunities.

I feel optimistic.
I feel love.

Thanks for sharing in my joy this morning.