End of Month Review #2: February 27 poetry reading by George Elliot Clarke

Last night I went to hear George Elliot Clarke read poetry.

To be honest, I was only mildly interested in going. I'd read Clarke's book, George and Rue, and had loved it. But that was my only experience with his work, so I actually thought I was going to a prose reading.

Clarke opened with a seemingly random speech about how students in Quebec are protesting tuition hikes because they are the last students with any oomph left in them because they have been the least crushed by debt. And they sensibly want to stay that way. From the freedom of the sixties, GEC explained that there has been a concerted effort to use financial burdens to encourage students to toe the line. Clarke called for students and retirees to seize their relative financial freedom and be a force for change in the world.

Though unexpected, this speech set the tone perfectly for an evening of poetry that was revolutionary, joyous, free original and sexy.

Not knowing what to expect, I was quickly lost in Clarke's world of words and his rhythmic, impassioned delivery. By turns scholarly and earthy, and sometimes both together, my brain and libido both got a good workout.

My favorite moment came when a member of the audience asked if GEC had any advice for writers and aspiring writers. "Find your own voice," he replied emphatically. And went on to explain that even when that hurts the writer, or people around the writer, there is only one choice to make about speaking the truth.

Inspiring. Fascinating. Illuminating.

***George Elliott Clarke has written numerous books of poetry. Last night he read from three of those volumes: Red, Blue and Black.***

Song Note Sunday #3: Cardboard Heroes

Last week's Song Note Sunday was cancelled due to illness.

Cardboard Heroes goes back a long way. It was the title track of an album I made in 1996, that was released only on cassette.

1996 cassette release of Cardboard Heroes

I think I wrote the song in 1995. I was living in a basement apartment on Beatrice Street in Toronto. I was getting over the breakup of my first true love and feeling really dark about a lot of things. I felt like the way I had grown up made me unfit to have a successful relationship. 

Close by my apartment, at the corner of Harbord and Grace, there was a hockey card store called "Cardboard Heroes". The phrase ricocheted around my brain and developed into the basis for a song. The name of the store, and the idea that people were so invested in the 2-dimensional heroes they found on hockey cards, resonated with me. 

I had known the Malvina Reynolds song, "Little Boxes", since childhood. I felt like my generation was living in the fallout from that generation of hollow, middle class expectations. Cardboard Heroes is like the bastard child of Little Boxes. 

Song Note Sunday #2: The Minnie Pearl (or How Art Breeds Art)

The story behind this song is a story about how art cross-pollinates.

Lunch in Hall's Harbour, NS

One summer's day more than 17 years ago, when I was just beginning to write songs, my mom, my nana and I went to Hall's Harbour to get lobsters for lunch. Hall's Harbour is just a hop, skip and a jump from my nana's cottage in Harbourville* (sense a theme here with the harbour thing? We have a lot of harbours in Nova Scotia.)

It was a beautiful day, perfect for driving across the North Mountain of the Annapolis Valley and seeing the sights. Hall's Harbour has been more tourist-y than Harbourville (at least for the past 20 years or so). In addition to the lobsters, we knew there would be a couple of shops to go into. It would be the perfect outing for a fine day.

While our lobsters boiled and the seagulls wheeled and cried overhead (looking forward to the lobster shells, no doubt), we went into John Neville's studio**. The studio was full of amazing wood block prints. John Neville's wife was there and she avidly told us the stories behind the prints in her authoritative British accent.

Art breeds art

I remember one print showing a bunch of local women pushing a rum-runner's shack off a cliff in retribution for providing their sons and husbands with liquor. But the print that really caught my eye told the story of a man who bought a boat that sank. He raised her up and fixed her up and took her out fishing again. She sank again. So, he raised her up, dragged her up on the beach, doused her with gasoline and set her on fire.

The print was entitled, So I Burned the Bitch.

I loved the story. The bloody-mindedness of that fisherman caught at my heart. I loved him. I loved that he would go to all that trouble to destroy something that had broken his heart. (I am prone to doing those sorts of vindictive things myself – or at least fantasizing about doing them.)

The story haunted me, but I didn't even try to write the song for another 8 or 9 years. When I did try, the lyrics came fairly easily, but the tune and accompaniment bogged it down. About 5 years ago, I workshopped it with my voice coach, Deanna Yerichuk, who told me to sing it as if I felt each emotion as it came up in the song: ambition, pride, devastation, triumph, despair and vindication. That helped a lot. It brought my passion for the song's subject to the fore. But it wasn't until I ditched the guitar and sang the song a cappella that it truly came to life.

There is was: bare and sparse. The sort of song you might sing into the wind while something that has betrayed you burns to wreckage behind you on the beach.

You can listen to The Minnie Pearl here.

*My nana's cottage is still in the family and I still spend time there every summer. For more information about Harbourville, visit the Harbourville Restoration Society Web site.
**John Neville no longer has a studio in Hall's Harbour. The last I heard, he was living and working in Maine.

Song Note Sundays #1: Jimmy Dean

Written: ~2007

Recorded: 2012, Blackbirds
Click here to listen to Jimmy Dean

Back in 2006, I went on a road trip from Toronto to Tennessee with my good friend, Momo. 

At the time, and unbeknownst to Momo, the 12-year relationship I was in was secretly staggering to its slow and painful death. And that's what I saw as we drove through the American mid-west, too. Crumbling infrastructure, depression and hopelessness. (And Waffle Houses. Lots and lots of delicious, delicious Waffle Houses.)

Mmmm, Waffle House...

Momo, a phenomenal photographer, particularly likes to stop and shoot pictures of roadside attractions (among many other things). She is the perfect travel companion: she researches and plans cool things on every leg of a trip. I just go along for the ride. I've seen a lot of interesting things with Momo.

Another Roadside Attraction, Photo credit: heymomo

This song, though, is about something we didn't see

Partway through Indiana, Momo's itinerary informed us that we were passing close to the birthplace of actor and American icon, James Dean. We veered off the main drag, hot on the trail, but we couldn't find it. 

We wound up in the downtown of a mid-sized town whose main feature seemed to be a couple of giant (at least for the size of town) warehouses, boarded up and abandoned. I guess because Canada doesn't have the same kind of commercial past as the U.S., it isn't very common to see abandoned warehouses in small towns up here. The only place I'd ever seen something similar was in London, Ontario, and that's a much bigger city where the abandoned warehouses didn't seem as out of place. 

The downtown was deserted

Maybe because it was Labour Day, or maybe because it was always deserted, I don't know. We headed out of town, continuing to search for a sign or any indication of James Dean's birthplace. No luck. All we found was a trailer park and a busy big box mall. 

A few miles down the road in Gas City we stopped at the historical museum. I went in to ask for directions and got a beautiful, long-winded and extremely friendly response from the local history buffs. We had totally missed James Dean's birthplace, but all we had to do to see his family's homestead and his grave was to go back a couple of miles and hang a left. 

Momo and I thought about it. But somehow, there was no going back.

The End of Month Album Review #1: January 2013

Preamble

Pretty much the only thing I love more than writing and playing music is listening to music and going to live music shows. Fortunately, I live in a hotbed of house concerts and summer festivals. And I buy as many CDs at those events as I can afford.

Since I have access to a wealth of music, much of it extremely good but unfortunately relatively obscure Canadiana, I have decided to add reviews to my blog to share some of my live show and CD experiences with more people. 

I'm tempted to choose this review each month based on the CD that's in my car stereo. That is certainly the case this month, but I don't think I'll keep that as a hard and fast rule. 

1929 by Sheesham, Lotus & Son (2012)

I've seen this Kingston, Ontario-based band several times, both at the Lunenburg Folk Harbour Festival and at an intimate barn concert just across the river from my home (where I bought this CD).

SL&S are tons of fun: quirky, unique and fully-alive in their music. Their stage set-up makes me think of turn-of-the-20th-Century-hawkers mashed-up with Dr. Seuss. With a sousaphone holding down the bass end, this band rollicks out old-time tunes with fiddle, banjo, harmonica, whistling, kazoo, voices and a fascinating contraption that amplifies and distorts and looks like an old ear trumpet. Maybe there's a name for that thing, but I don't know what it is.

This record does a good job at capturing the juice and personality of a live Sheesham, Lotus and Son show. Recorded "In pleasing MONO" and "live off the floor with one North of Princess G7 microphone" as the cover notes brag, the recording is sparse and truly old timey.

The songs are either traditional or covers of songs by jazz and blues songwriters from the early part of the last century. There's a fabulous version of Frankie and Johnny. And the whistling on Lazy, Lazy River will melt your heart. My favourite song of all has got to be "Drunken Nights" about a man coming home drunk to his lover and having her try to explain away the presence of another man in his bed. The song is delivered in character: the slurred and staggering husband and the prim and patronizing wife. It makes me laugh every time.

A great record for fans of old time music or for anyone looking for something a little different: raw, direct songs presented with stellar musicianship, showmanship and verve.