Sorry, my weblog has been down for the past few days as my hosting service changed the location of my site and deked out the configuration settings. It’s all right as rain now and I hope to be bringing you some good to great news in the next little while.
In the meantime if you are Canadian or interested in the great white north please consider reading and (hopefully) opposing Bill C61.
Here’s a funny and illuminating video describing one of the flaws of such a bill.
No big news lately so I’m just posting to fill in a few cool items that have happened in the last while.
One of my songs, Stay Awhile is being included in an episode of the Saskatchewan produced TV show Renegade Press. The touching melodrama is that (TV is all about the back-story, isn’t it?) I wrote the song for my wife while she was away in Regina, tutoring the actors on, you guessed it, Renegade Press. The first time she heard it was in the on-set school trailer behind Balfour Collegiate while they were shooting season 1 of the show. It took a mere five seasons and here we are!
Another recent happening took Eric Proffitt who’s first album I produced has had a song come to the attention of the United Nations. They have been using his song “Little Child” to draw attention to the issue of human trafficking at a recent conference in Vienna. Eric attended and I believe he actually sang the song for the delegation.
Interesting and exciting for me in a vicarious, remote-control sense.
Special thanks to Angela and Stephanie for making the translation happen. I think I want to learn some Dutch as the construction of the language seems (in translation) to be quite wild and fantastic.
Daryl Pierce comes from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in Canada. This is a place that is too beautiful not to mention in the beginning of this cd review. Together with his brothers Mike and Kevin, guitarist Kimbal Siebert and drummer Joseph Ashong, he has been in a music band under his name for a few years. You can place them in the same catagory as names like Paul Simon, Sting and XTC. In their opinion they’ve hit the jackpot with a few idols from the pop industry like The Police, Muse, Daniel Lanois and Massive Attack.
Daryl Pierce himself plays the upright bass, the synthesizer and, in eleven songs, he proves his talent on this first nameless cd. His voice is soul flavour and the music, created from modern pop with acoustic instruments and some electronic computer sounds, together make a complete sound. The complete sound is also partly because of the fabulous arrangements of the songs on the album.
Songs like the upbeat opener “Objectify” and “Blanket” are perfect for airplay on the popular radio stations. “Fame”, “Iceberg”, “Expatriate” and “Conviction” are a little bit more experimental, have more samples and ethereal sounds. And if we can select our favourite song of the album, we would choose for “Innocence”, which is sung in a very laid back fashion with minimal musical support. In this song I hear mostly the orchestra like the way Daniel Lanois does it with his songs. Also the instrumental “Watering Hole” deserves a honorable mention because of the atmosphere that it creates and for its character.
Daryl Pierce gets inspiration for the lyrics from things that happen to him in daily life; for example, his love life and what happens to him in his direct environment. This debut cd is recorded a few years ago and is internally released at this moment. We wish Daryl Pierce all the success that he is dreaming of and waiting for for a long time.
When I was young I would lay on the living room floor with a CD player and a set of headphones. I would shut my eyes and listen to the entire CD. It’s like having a profound little conversation between the music and your brain. Anyone who has listened to the very, bitter, bitter end of “Soul Cages” will know what I mean. There are ideas, constructed and inspired that are built into these recordings we listen to. I suppose it’s no wonder that when I put my hand to producing music this experience is a driving force in what I try to accomplish. Yes, I am one of those headphone bands. Please take some time in the next day to just do nothing but listen to an entire piece of music (album, concert, whatever) on the best playback system you can find. The experience is good for the part of you that needs to experience something good.
One caution, some recordings today are designed to be insanely loud. If you find yourself wanting to switch off the music because of a confused or anxious feeling then pick something else and try again, the loudness is probably why.
“Goodnight!”
Last week my wife achieved the monumental when she became relationally one degree separated from Oprah. Now that sentence sets up a back-story and here it is!
Many years ago Valancie tutored a young girl named Ellen Page while she was acting in a show that was called ‘Ghost.com’ at the time. This was in the fresh-faced and wide-eyed days when anything dot com was the peak of internet savvy. That show went on to become the moderate YTV success that we glimpse periodically as ‘I Downloaded A Ghost’. Ellen has gone on to star in the follow up movie to ‘Superbad’ called ‘Supergood’….I mean ‘Juno’ and as a result was interviewed on Oprah last week.
I also met Ellen briefly a few times during the filming of the ghost movie but I’m much more excited about the vast number of ‘Arrested Development’ cast members that I am now one degree of separation from, okay two degrees (I do mean briefly).
My self titled CD was reviewed by the Belgian based online magazine called Rootstime and I believe the review is written in Dutch. I’ve tried some online translators and can get the vague and general idea of the review but I would like to get some nuance and detail. If someone who is fluent in Dutch and English could translate for me I would be very grateful, in fact the first who can give me translation satisfaction will get a free copy of my new EP, “I Heart Elsewhere” (in your choice of download or normal burned and mailed CD format).
I would love to go to Belgium one day. I find the diversity of languages and cultures there fascinating….oh yeah, and the chocolate too.
OK, again with the advertising. There’s a new holiday series of commercials from Old Navy with the following lyrics
You’ve got your’s and I’ve got mine, You’ve got your’s and I’ve got mine
It’s all the usual visuals of folks lounging around in ways no ordinary person ever would. It should end…
All it takes is a voice like Feist and some marketing flash
(italics mine of course) I know it’s actually a ‘Stars‘ song but the gestalt of the thing culminated an idea for me. I like Feist, I like Stars, I like the sound of those voices. The interesting part is that I rarely here mention of the rise of Feist in popular consciousness without an equal mention of the role that a certain iPod advert played in it. In the commercial the video for the song “1 2 3 4″ is playing on several iPod video players that are edited together against a nondescript background. Some call it multi-layered meaning. I just wish I could tell which layer matters most, which layer actually means something to people. Is it the cool factor of the device that sells the Feist or vice-versa? An artist is most interested in their connection with appreciators, partakers and co-operatives in their creation (I feel this way so I create + you feel this way so you respond to my creation). In all honesty an artist is usually just as interested in selling records. I originally intended to just bash Apple and corporatism for the rest of the post but it occurs to me that perhaps on some level that iPod does at it’s core endeavour to celebrate or encourage that connection. If Apple wants to break someone like Feist to the world why not just make an entire music video with an iPod player playing a video of “1 2 3 4″! Why must corporatism always exploit and spoil art? Perhaps it’s time they become participants and patrons of it……oh, and could they pay the bill too.
Merry Christmas and/or Happy Holidays. May the iPod under this year’s tree be newer than the last.
I wrote to my Member of Parliament yesterday (Maurice Vellacott) regarding rumours about a new copyright bill being discussed in the House of Commons. I’ll include a portion of the letter here for your reading pleasure….
The “digital rights management” (DRM) technologies used by publishers should not stop the public from making lawful uses of their legitimately acquired media. It is my conviction that DRM, when enshrined in law protects these publishers from competing with the same free market forces they have benefited so richly from in the past.
In my opinion DRM can not help but be invasive to consumer privacy and sometimes destructive to consumer property given it’s unrealistic goals. The relatively recent Sony “rootkit” debacle illustrates this quite well as do several failed legal attempts to prosecute those who circumvent DRM in jurisdictions with tough DRM legislation. At this point in time, when large publishers and providers such as EMI, Apple Itunes Store and Google are relaxing DRM and rethinking outmoded systems of licensing, distribution and even content creation it would be a disservice to our country to side with these same outmoded systems in our law-making.
Having differed in opinion with my sitting MP I am pleased to say that I received a prompt response saying he agreed with pretty much everything I’d expressed in the email and that he would forward it to the Minister responsible for this area (either Jim Prentice, Minister of Industry or Josee Verner, Minister of Heritage, hopefully both). I am impressed.
Unfortunately it appears that Jim Prentice the minister responsible for the bill is refusing to answer any public questions about the bill until it is introduced. I guess the answer to all the questions will be the bill itself followed by a mad scramble to be sure the bill reflects the will of the Canadian public as opposed to the lobby powers of the legal department of a few large US corporations.
Please visit the website of Michael Geist for much more detailed information. Join the “Fair Copyright for Canada” facebook group and if this motivates you then write some emails or letters to our policy makers.
For a city that sits right next to an Ocean you’d think the drainage would be a little better. I’ve been spending the last week in Vancouver (BC, we’re back in Canada) and it’s been raining small house pets. The puddles soak the hem of my jeans and I’ll never quite figure out why in Seattle you’re strange with an umbrella and in Vancouver you are strange with a rain jacket (I swear they look at me funny). I like to think that in Saskatoon we just wear whatever seems sensible for the current weather although I can’t quite figure out what weather all the sweatpants suit (FYI IMHO lulu lemon are glorified sweat pants). Please forgive the gratuitous acronyms in the previous sentence.
So I’m unscrewing the hinges of a screen door to a house on Beacon Hill in Seattle and pondering the life of a touring musician. I’m removing the screen door because we’ve agreed that it’s safer during the house party with lots of people coming and going. I’m thinking that the one thing I’ve noted is that a small gig that allows me to make a personal connection with the performance is no less gratifying than a large gig that pushes a little harder on the eardrums. During our time on the West coast we managed to play an art gallery, a pizza parlor, a book store/cafe and an honest to goodness club, met some great people and experienced some really unique communities. I wrote in one of my artist biographies that “Unique (music) comes from life lived in someone else’s ordinary” (I really need to get someone else to write those biographies). The point is that Kevin and I really appreciate the unique experience of meeting all of you great Seattle and Portland dwellers. I will end as I began by thanking Jesse Perrell who really made it all possible with his hard work. Visit http://www.theleveebreaking.com, see some compelling art, buy a CD and support him in the worthy vision he is attempting to realize.