Song #1: Weather Hold (2015 52-song project)

Welcome to my 2015 52-song project! 

I'm going to post a previously-unrecorded song to YouTube every Sunday for a year and some of the songs will have corresponding blog posts telling a little something about the origin of the song.

I invite you to subscribe to my YouTube channel and request that you please comment or give thumbs up to the songs you particularly like. I'm going to use feedback I receive to decide what to record on my next album, which I'll hopefully record toward the end of 2015 or in 2016.

I will be including some new songs and some songs from my archives. It seems only right to kick off with one of my most-recently written songs, so here goes.

Song #1: Weather Hold

I wrote this song in November 2014 while I was in Happy Valley-Goose Bay for the Labrador Creative Arts Festival. On the first day of the festival, I was scheduled to fly up to Nain to do some workshops with the kids there. But everything in Labrador is weather dependent and the wind did not co-operate. So, I sat in the airport, along with a number of other LCAF visiting artists, for about seven-eight hours, each hour bringing another update saying that we were on weather hold and there would be another update in an hour or an hour and a half or an hour and 15 minutes.

While having fun getting to know the other artists, my mind was also thinking about waiting, and ceasing to wait (taking the bull by the horns, as we say in my family). The next morning I had nothing scheduled (because I was supposed to still be in Nain) so I sat down at wrote this song. It was a wonderful way to transform my disappointment about not being able to travel up the coast into something positive.

I hope you enjoy it.

(If you'd like to read the lyrics, they are posted on You Tube with the song.)

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...)