52-song project for 2015

Dear Friends and Folks,

I've been on a performance sabbatical for the past year, which you already knew if you read this blog (I would say read regularly, but as I haven't been posting very regularly, that would be impossible). 

It's been a bit of a rough year for me. I've been struggling with peri-menopausal symptoms and depression. It's been the kind of year where I never knew if, on any given day, going up on stage would be a delightful experience or a torturous one. That made it pretty daunting to book gigs months in advance.

I decided that life is too short to put myself through that kind of uncertainty and difficulty. I decided it was okay to give myself a break.

And I'm thinking about letting that break continue for a while longer. I have only one show booked in 2015 so far, and if that's the only one, that's fine with me.

However, I'm still (always) writing and I want to continue to share my songs. In addition to writing new songs, I have hundreds of songs that I've written in the past and have never recorded – some of which I've forgotten I ever wrote!

(Like this one that I posted to YouTube many years ago – I came across it a few weeks ago when I was posting another song to YouTube and realized I had totally forgotten that I had ever written, recorded or posted it! And it's a pretty good song.)

Sooooo, I've decided that in 2015, I'm going to create a 52-song project. Every Sunday, I'm going to post a video to YouTube. In some cases, there will be a corresponding blog post talking a bit about the Song of the Week. I'll be sharing a mix of brand new songs and songs from the near and distant past.

I would be delighted if you cared to give your "Thumbs up" to songs or comment on them. I'll use your feedback to help me select which songs to record on my next album — which will hopefully get made toward the end of 2015 or in 2016!

To join in on this project, please subscribe to my YouTube Channel (or "Like" me on Facebook if you prefer) and get ready to listen to (and vote on) an original, interesting song every week.

Labrador Creative Arts Festival Wrap-up

I arrived home yesterday after participating as one of the visiting artists at the 39th Annual Labrador Creative Arts Festival in Happy Valley-Goose Bay and environs. I posted one blog entry during the festival. Re-reading it just now, I can "hear" how breathless I was!

My secret source of power for the festival: trail mix with
added pralined nuts and Reese's Pieces

The festival continued at an intense pace: workshops, plays, soirées! It is a phenomenally rich week, but one that requires a great deal of flexibility and stamina. Before I left, I was worried that I wasn't going to be able to make it through gracefully. Fortunately, I feel like I did. I maintained my equanimity in the face of withdrawn high school kids and rambunctious middle school kids. Every class that was willing wrote a song or two. And the less willing did some breathing and stretching and thinking about their own rib cage and diaphragm and how our voices are produced. And most of the students sang along on a chorus or two. Voice can be a very vulnerable place and I hope I presented in a way that held that vulnerability with care and consideration.

I talked with various classes about story songs, metaphors, high sounds and low, quiet and loud and how melody is a way to communicate more meaning in a song that with words alone. (Communication was the theme of the Festival this year).

Some of the students at Sheshatshiu Innu School shared some great beats with me.

We did a benefit concert for Libra House (a women's shelter) on Sunday afternoon at the Birch Brook Chalet. That was lots of fun - my favourite kind of concert: intimate, relaxed. And the setting was so beautiful:

The view from Birch Brook Chalet, home of our Sunday concert

I felt sad to leave on Wednesday morning, but I am also glad to come back to the quiet and solitude of my home life. It was a very stimulating week for me, full of new people and ideas. I did lots of thinking on the fly to try to make my workshops more accessible and engaging. I expended a lot of energy!

Boarding our flight home

It was a bit of an endurance test, but a happy and successful one. I slept for eleven hours last night - so glad to be in my own bed with my sweet cat.

My rest and relaxation guru, Salinger

I will definitely be absorbing this trip and the things I learned for a long time to come. I extend my heartfelt thanks to the Labrador Creative Arts Festival for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!

Labrador Creative Arts Festival update

I'm almost halfway through my time here at the Labrador Creative Arts Festival. It's been super-interesting so far. 

Of course, everything at the festival is weather dependent! We arrived without difficulty on Tuesday night, but most of the day Wednesday I spent (with about seven other visiting artists), waiting at the Goose Bay airport hoping that the weather hold would lift and that we'd be able to fly up the coast to the north. 

I was scheduled to be in Nain overnight, but alas, the weather remained windy and we were unable to fly. That meant having the morning off yesterday and I used the time to write a song called "Weather Hold". (Stay tuned for that, I'll try to get it up on YouTube one day soon).

Yesterday afternoon I had a workshop with an adult basic education class. Today was full-on: six half hour workshops with kids from K-3 in the morning and this afternoon, an hour-long workshop with some of the students visiting from the coastal schools.

Here is a picture of one of the flip chart pages from my morning sessions:

We wrote TWO songs together in just a  half hour! Amazing!

I've been trying to get a little rest this afternoon. This evening, we'll go out to see two more plays - we've seen four so far and all of them have been funny and/or moving! The student actors/playwrights really put their hearts and courage into their work.

So far, so wonderful! Our billeting families, our drivers and the festival organizers are taking really good care of us! 

I'm looking forward to the rest of the Fest! (Hey, that rhymes! Maybe I should write a song about it...)

Labrador Creative Arts Festival 2014

I haven't been writing much here because I've been on a performance sabbatical this year for wellness reasons. I'm happy to report that I'm feeling quite a lot better than I have been – and just in time!

In four days, I'll board a plane to Happy Valley-Goose Bay, NL to be one of the artists at the 2014 Labrador Creative Arts Festival.

The LCAF is a drama festival for students in Labrador. I'm going to be facilitating some voice workshops and singing some songs.

It is an amazing opportunity. I didn't ever expect that in my lifetime I might get an opportunity to go so far into Canada's north.

I've got some new merino wool long underwear and new warm socks.
Thirty-eight cm of snow fell in Happy Valley-Goose Bay last Saturday
and it's been below freezing since then. For me, it's going to be
a sudden infusion of wintery-ness!

I am very excited. I'll be posting about my experiences here and on Twitter – whenever I get a chance.

And when I get back, I have some other exciting projects planned for 2015 that I'm looking forward to sharing with you!

Community Songwriting

It's been a long time since I've posted here. I've been taking a sabbatical this summer, concentrating on community events, the Pennybrook Festival, setting up my tiny house, and writing about that and other life experiences on my personal blog.

It's been good to have a break. And then, this week, I had a noteworthy songwriting experience that I feel like sharing.

A few weeks ago, I was invited by my friend, Leif Helmer, to sing a song at the launch of the Petite Riviere Community Park. Petite Riviere is just five minutes down the road from West Dublin, where I live. There are a number of songs that I've written about our area that I could have sung at this event.

But, about two days ago, I had the idea that I should write a song specifically for this event, a song about the Petite River and about the park and the community there.

I felt that I didn't know enough to write that song, so, I went on Facebook and invited people to share their stories about the river. I was given a bounty of experiences, memories and perceptions. I felt very blessed to be trusted with people's thoughts and feelings about their home. Several people said, the river is my backyard.

I did my best to capture many of the ways that people interact with the river and the animals who live in and around it. Of course, I had to leave out a bunch of things! The amount of information I received would have filled a 45-minute saga! I felt it was better to go for a more typical four-to-five minute song.

It was a little nerve-wracking to perform such a new song, but I was pleased with the way it had turned out and felt honoured to have the chance to share it. And I was very pleased to hear from many of the people at the opening ceremonies that they were moved to tears and laughter. That's my favourite part of being a songwriter and it was an additional pleasure today to help celebrate the hard work of all the people who helped to create a new park in our community.

Bravo, everyone! Thank you for inviting me to help mark this event!

Spring Shows: Rose & Kettle and West Dublin Hall

This spring, I'm performing at my two favourite Nova Scotian venues.

I'll be performing on Thursday, April 10 at the Rose and Kettle Tea Room at the Cole Harbour Heritage Farm Museum (471 Poplar Dr, Cole Harbour, NS B2W 4L2). I'm looking forward to this immensely and I'm excited to be sharing the stage with Shawna Caspi.

Next, I'm performing Saturday, April 26, 8pm at the West Dublin Hall: an unplugged and uncensored evening of music to raise funds for some solar panels to install at my new tiny home. The WDH is at 10 Huey Lake Road, West Dublin, NS. Doors open at 7:30; show starts promptly.

After these two shows, I'll be taking a sabbatical for an undetermined length of time.

Interview: Chris Kay Fraser of Firefly Creative Writing on the Importance of Taking Creative Breaks

Welcome to this interview with one of my favourite creative friends and colleagues, Chris Kay Fraser of Firefly Creative Writing.

Originally broadcast at 7pm EST on February 12, 2014. We hope you'll tune in – LIVE or LATER!

Inside Llewyn Davis OR The Tragic Story of the Misunderstood Folk Musician

PLEASE NOTE: In the discussion of the content of the film Inside Llewyn Davis, this blog post contains SPOILERS.

I went to see Inside Llewyn Davis last week at the Oxford Theatre in Halifax; an old school theatre without stadium seating and with a balcony (my fellow and I sat in the balcony).

For those of you who haven't heard of this film, it is a Coen Brothers film. For those of you who haven't heard of the Coen Brothers, Joel and Ethan Coen, I recommend you look them up and watch a few of their finest: Miller's Crossing, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou.

The Coen Brothers excel at making movies about people going on quests, about people searching for something, a MacGuffin, often with unexpected results. As the blind prophet says in O Brother Where Art Thou: "The treasure you seek shall not be the treasure you find."

In Inside Llewyn Davis, I couldn't decide if Llewyn Davis was seeking success, or seeking to gain the love or admiration of another human being. I think he ultimately fails at both quests and at the end of the movie, he has given up in despair and is looking forward to a lifetime of drudgery and a lonely, miserable death.

Watching this movie was an intense experience for me.

You see, Llewyn Davis is a folksinger. As the film follows him through a week in 1961 in Greenwich Village, with a detour to Chicago, we see him fail to connect with Jean, a woman he has impregnated, with a cat, some fans, his friends, his sister, another cat and his fellow musicians.

He fails to connect with them in a variety of ways, through cynicism, neglect, rage, contempt, crudeness, selfishness, abandonment and insult.

The only thing he seems to do right is sing and play. Yet he fails to find success as a musician, too. He plays to enthusiastic applause at the Gaslight, but he gets no money or respect from his world-weary, disinterested music publisher/agent. When he auditions for a club owner in Chicago, the response is: "I don't see any money here." When he's invited to play at a session, where his contempt for the bubble-gummy song he must play and sing oozes from his every pore, he takes the quick cash as a session player rather than go through his publisher for a piece of the royalties. He needs the money right away to pay for the abortion Jean is demanding.

All of this misery and failure rests on something that happened before the movie opens: the suicide of Llewyn's former musical partner, Mike, who jumped off the George Washington bridge. Did he jump, I couldn't help but wonder, because he couldn't bear to spend another day in the company of Llewyn Davis?

And, at the same time, Llewyn is somehow a sympathetic character. I identified with him and felt for him. He sang with his whole heart and had a beautiful voice and fine skills on the guitar. But he was missing the diplomatic skills one needs to succeed in The Business. I could relate to that.

The final scene at the Gaslight shows musicians who are obviously meant to be The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem and Bob Dylan, musicians who went on to be stars of the 60s folk revival. Llewyn goes on to get punched in the face in the alley behind the Gaslight and to sit there, staring into his future of shipping out as a merchant marine.

I can't help but think that Llewyn's main problem was that he seemed to think that he was the only folksinger in the world who was sincere and singing from the heart. He didn't realize that many of the people around him were equally earnest and equally worthy as humans.

Essentially, Llewyn was embittered by the lack of recognition and love in his life.

I came away from the movie feeling that I never want that to happen to me. I offer up this plea now: "May I never be bitter and always accept with equanimity the amount of recognition I do or do not receive in this world." And "Please may I always remember that I'll take connection, love and kindness over recognition every single time".

PS: Just a word to say that while I loved this film, I was very away of how it totally failed the Bechdel Test. Perhaps that was intentional, reflectly the misogynist time and culture in which it is set. One scene that particularly stuck out to me is the scene where Llewyn is talking with the slimy owner of The Gaslight. This guy reveals that he has slept with Jean. "If you want to play at the Gaslight..." he says. Though presumably that only applies to women. No wonder Jean is so angry and hostile. She lives in a world that makes her do something disgusting to receive the same privilege that a man can get just by playing and singing half-decently.