And it’s up on iTunes!!

ENGLISH LINK ~ CHINESE LINK

Also available in its physical form on My Website and through CD Baby,  I really hope you’ll check it out and make it part of your collection!

Now, I’ll step back into my storytelling/MC role, and give an elongated introduction for this project, just as I have done for all the albums in this blog series.

So as the drum roll starts to play its final few bars…

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11:11, 2011

After “Lentic” had been out for a year, I started to write again with my guitar and really wanted to go back out on the road. I approached Cheryl Reid about doing a duo tour with me that fall and we set off for a string of shows that took us throughout the Midwest and Central US states. At this point, I was experimenting with the house concert model and loving it. I also really loved the low-pressure energy of touring with just one other person. We had a great time.

What’s more, I had to pay back the debts incurred from the Australia tour (Jan 2010) and I simply wasn’t willing to continually put my business and myself in the red. I realized that I could perform several of the “Lentic” songs without a full band (several were impossible, but no biggie) and then, by adding some of my older material alongside some of my brand new material, the show was more than complete. Besides, it was fun to play some of the older material again after two years of not playing it!

I billed all of those shows as “Ember Swift” shows. The re-branding as a “Lentic” show hadn’t really worked. So, I didn’t force it. After all, I was myself. I am myself. And, as I mentioned, “Lentic” was more me than any other project had been to date. Reclaiming my given name and billing myself as myself just makes sense!

Also, in the spring of 2010, I finally met the right players in Beijing and we formed a band. The band features Zac Courtney of Australia on drums, Paplus Ntahombaye of Burundi on bass and Wang Ya Qi 王雅琪 of China on erhu. I took up the guitar and vocals, of course. We are a band representing four different countries but we all live in Beijing and are planning to stay. That summer, we had a great time performing in Beijing (and picking up some prominent festivals around the country as well!) and I was feeling like I was finally getting my feet in the music scene in China.

And this band was called Ember Swift or 子玉 (which is my Chinese name). Why fix what isn’t broken?

Because I had waited long enough to have a grasp on the Chinese language and culture before stepping back on stage in China, the shows were actually going well and I was connecting with the audience. When I first came to China in 2007, I did a few solo shows and had a good time, but I couldn’t communicate with the audience in Chinese and I found that my impact was invariably limited as a result. On the contrary, the new music that I created with my new band here in Beijing featured songs that had dual language versions. I sang primarily in Chinese in China and I planned to continue to sing primarily in English in North America. This approach was working.

So, when I came back to North America in the fall of 2010, I was full of new inspiration and confidence. This also helped to make the duo touring that fall more exciting, as well, and carried me into 2011 with new dreams for a new record.

Back in Beijing in early 2011, I started speaking to the band about recording our new songs. Everyone was really excited and my partner, Guo Jian, helped me to hook up with a good studio at a really reasonable rate. We scheduled a spring session and got to work shortly after China’s spring festival (or Chinese New Year) with three weeks of intensive rehearsals.

I approached Tim Rideout about producing this record again and he was on board. He was present for all of our pre-production sessions via Skype and gave us some great feedback about the arrangements. As always, I trust his opinions and perspective implicitly and he really helped us dramatically improve all of the songs.

Pic by Sof Courtney

We recorded over a ten-day period in the Hou Hai (pronounced: hoe high) region of Beijing in a cozy little studio where Guo Jian’s band, Long Shen Dao, had done their tracking back in the summer of 2009. I was familiar with the space and felt confident that the engineer there could help us get the sounds we needed for the record. Ying Peng (his name) didn’t let us down. Even though Ying Peng had a really hard time getting to work for 1 or 2 in the afternoon (seriously, he drinks a lot and preferred to start work at 3 or 4pm!), he still got the job done and charged us a really reasonable daily rate, as well.

Pic by Sof Courtney

In the end, Tim wasn’t able to take on the mixing and full production side of this project due to his crazy schedule. (He was incredibly gracious to help with authoring the CD, post mastering, however! Thanks, Tim!)  In fact, after a lot of back and forth with a second production team here in Beijing, I eventually took it on. I rediscovered my skills as a producer and, it turns out, I’ve learned a lot by watching producers like Graham and Tim! I’m really proud of this record and my role in the production of it. I think it sounds great and all of the extra additions really added but didn’t cloud the original band’s vibe.

Additional musicians who aren’t in the band included Dana Baitz of Toronto on keys for “Wash Water” and “Swallow.” Once again, Dana’s touch was just what the songs needed. Also, Zang Hong Fei 臧红飞 and Niu Mu 牛牧 on keys and atmospheric sounds  in “Blinding Light.” Niu Mu 牛牧 was also the rapper on “Laowai.” Both of these guys are members of my partner’s band, Long Shen Dao（龙神道).

 

Pic by Sof Courtney

The real magic in this project, however, sits with the Ambassadors. This is the first “fan funded” project that I have ever made. In December of 2010, I sent an email off to fans and asked them if they’d be interested in pre-purchasing a copy of the album to help support its production. This single question created a cascade of support from all over the world. Modelled after Community Supported Agriculture (see this blog), I made the case for supporting the artist in order to reap the harvest of the art. I also used the expression “Musical Barn Raising” and asked people if they’d be wiling to “help raise a beam.” In the end, there are nearly 200 Ambassadors who contributed to the production of “11:11,” all at various levels. I am forever grateful to every one of you.

Designed by Lynda Marie VandenElzen

I also had a lot of fun with the personal contact I had with this small group. I sent out separate updates to the Ambassadors with more of the back story, offered unreleased live video, sneak previews of the recording and/or possible inclusions on the album, etc. Right now, we’re also in the process of building an Ambassador-only portal on my website. Others will have the opportunity to become Ambassadors after the fact, as well, to secure access and help the music continue. Basically, it’s like a ‘members only’ region of my webpage and it’s the least I can do to continually offer separate insights, downloads, video blogging, etc. to a group of people whose generosity enabled this project to exist in the first place.

Throughout this process, too, I got to know so many of you in such a more intimate way, that I feel you’re more like friends than fans. Thank you for that. It means the world to me.

One of the Ambassadors was involved in the making of the record in an even fuller way: Richard Armer-Petrie. He was the producer of “Pek,” and he took our band’s recordings and added some electronic elements. Richard took the song up a notch into the atmospheric, alive, exciting production that it is now. It’s my absolute favourite rendition of the song and I am so grateful that he wanted to work on it. Richard also refused to be employed to do this task, despite my desire to compensate him, and I am still so moved by his generosity and kindness. It was not only his time and energy; he gave of his talent. And, the record is better off for it!

Again, in the design of this record, I worked with Suzy Malik. Suzy was also an Ambassador for the project and I was so touched when I saw the notification email for her pre-purchase roll through my inbox as well. After so many years of loaning her skills or working for less than her market value, she was still willing to help this record get off the ground!

When I approached her about doing the design, I told her that I really wanted to include one of her illustrations and so I asked her if she would create something that included a retro digital alarm clock and perhaps work off of one of the photos from my 11:11 photo shoot.

Her first concept blew me away. She had landed on it immediately. I used it for the cover of both CDs (see top of this post).

I also wanted to do different packages this time, but instead of creating separate units like I had with Lentic, I created a way to package the dual language CDs together into a “box set” (pictured left) that also included a full lyric booklet and a fabric patch with the “11:11” logo. Then, I made the CDs available separately in just a simple slip case for those who were just interested in purchasing the language version that they could understand. Having the option seemed to really suit people and I’ve found that I’ve sold almost an equal number of singles to box sets.

That being said, since I sell the language versions separately, I also wanted to make them representative of the live shows in their respective geographic areas. It’s for that reason that I included two Chinese songs on the English version. One was written for foreigners in Beijing in very simple Chinese, and so most of my non-Chinese fans in Beijing want to own this song! The other, “Jiayou,” is a song that I’ve been performing in North America to positive reviews. I wanted to make sure that English speakers at least got a taste of some of the Chinese songs, without overwhelming them with a whole record’s worth! Likewise, on the Chinese version, I included a popular English song that my Chinese fans enjoy, “Out of Air,” the cover of Jolie Rickman‘s song in a gypsy-jazz style. Since I play that song (in English) when I’m in China, it made sense to include it on the Chinese side.

Furthermore, I ordered the tracks differently. Again, this is because the audiences are different. Certain songs are more popular in North America and certain songs are more popular in China. It’s about cultural difference, tastes, and lyrical content. So far, the feedback about the order has been really positive from both sides. Seems that I narrowed in on which songs people wanted to hear right away. I guess 11 albums will give a person enough experience to determine song order with fairly good accuracy rates!

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the inclusion of my Grandmother’s songs on this record: “I Wish I May” and “I’ve Fallen In Love With You.” Equally popular on both sides of the world, these two songs provide the jazz component of the release. These are two of only three songs that my Grandmother wrote in her life (she’s 93 this month!) and I’m so thrilled to have finally recorded them professionally on her behalf. She never did anything with them and, even though she doesn’t love the arrangements (she is, after all, a strong woman in a line of strong women who has her strong opinions!), she is happy and touched that I recorded her music.

Pic by Beijing Daze (www.beijingdaze.com)

We released the record at a local venue here in Beijing called “Dos Kolegas” or 两个好朋友. The show was fun and alive and lots of people came. My drummer, Zac, created this promotional video (also posted at the bottom of this blog) for one of our songs that is only in Chinese. It’s a famous line by a contemporary Chinese comic and I’ve always liked the “street cred” it’s given me to insert it into conversation! When we sing it here, people laugh and sing along. This video was circulated thousands of times through the Chinese Twitter equivalent: Weibo.

Actually, the recording of the record was the last thing that I did before I got pregnant. All of the production and post-production happened while “Little Spark” was first taking up residence in my belly. Even the photos for the album are from when I was already 14 weeks along. At the release party, I was already six months along and definitely showing a little Humpty Dumpty bump. I then went on tour in North America to release the record (sadly, without the Beijing band, but I toured in duo format with US-based artist Kelly Zullo) and progressed in my pregnancy all the way to 7.5 months before heading back to Beijing, exhausted and much more egg-shaped than before I had left.

And now, here I sit, with an album that is launched into the world—a new baby—and another on the way in January.

I named the record “11:11” for several reasons, but here are the main ones:

• It’s my 11th record.
• It’s 2011.
• There’s a twin element in 11:11 – mirror images – which is modeled by the twin language versions in the dual discs available.
• I’ve been noticing “11:11” on clocks for years and it feels lucky, wishful, auspicious, just like this album feels.
• 11:11 is also the symbol for “twin spirits” and I think of my partnership in this light. It feels like everything in my life is exactly how it’s supposed to be. I think this record is exactly how it’s supposed to sound too. It feels right.
• 11, in numerology is considered a “Master Number.” If it comes up, it’s the single most important number in one’s chart. Colours associated with this number include green and jade is one of its gemstones. My Chinese name includes the name Jade (子玉：the second of the characters). I liked the symmetry.

I wrote a few days ago that “The Dirty Pulse” felt like a peak in my career. I realize now it was the culmination of musical collaboration with Lyndell Montgomery and our years as a trio. It was its own peak, like the pinnacle of an era.

This album, however, feels like a different kind of peak; it feels like my personal peak. I’m not saying that I’ll never make another record or that every record after this will go downhill (!), but I am saying that, once again, I feel a sense of peace when I look at this  CD in my hand. I know it’s good enough and representative enough. If it’s the last album I ever make, I’ll be content with what I’ve put out into the world. That contentment is golden. It’s the ultimate feeling.

But, then again, in a year or more, I may have a whole boatload of new material to record and then, who knows, maybe it will be time to make another CD?! Until then, I’ll concentrate on becoming a Mom for the first time and welcoming a new kind of baby into my world.

This human baby will arrive in the already infamous year 2012. It will be my 12th baby, in a way! So, everything is all aligned.

Numerology at its finest.

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Thank you so much for reading these blogs and taking part in the literary “drum roll” to advance the release of my “11:11” album. Knowing that you’re enjoying them has kept me at the task despite the sheer volume of writing that has been required. Thank you for your comments and your engagement, too. Reading your responses makes all the difference. It’s the fuel! It keeps me knowing that you’re out there and that you’re the ones who support independent artists.

Thank you.
For Your Support.
For Your Friendship.
For Your Belief.
谢谢！

Lentic, 2009

So, as some of you already know, China truly changed my life. When I arrived in China in the spring of 2007, I had this distinct feeling like I had been here before. The land and its vibration felt familiar, perhaps like a past life memory. Even though I had studied the language before, the more I re-learned it, the more it felt natural in my mouth—even more so than English sometimes.

In that first three months in China, I met a lot of amazing people and was introduced into the music scene here. I played some solo gigs for the first time in years and made great contacts and basically, felt renewed and revitalized and rested.

I returned to Canada with some dreams of making a different kind of music—something I had never made before. I had always loved electronic music like Moloko, Portishead, Tricky, Bjork, Nitin Sawhney, Morcheeba, Imogen Heap, etc. I found myself craving that kind of groove-based expression in my own work.

It just so happened that a friend taught me how to use Garageband one day and I was inspired to put loops with guitar riffs and build a bit of a small home studio. That summer of 2007, I bought an audio interface and began piecing together the riffs I had written with cool drum loops and samples from the Garageband collection. Another friend gave me some additional Jam Packs filled with more loops. People were so kind!

Once I had what felt to be the makings of a song, I’d insert lyrics that were more stream of consciousness than anything else I’d ever written. Nothing was pre-planned and I just let it all flow. It was the first time that I hadn’t started building a song with my guitar or a piano under my fingers. Instead, I had a mouse and headphones. The resulting music was totally new and different. It was exciting!

What’s more, I was employed that summer to translate an Uh Huh Her song’s chorus into Chinese. I enjoyed the job so much that I began to imagine parts of my new songs with Chinese lyrics. “Why couldn’t I sing in Chinese?,” I thought, “That way, at least if I go back to China then people will understand my lyrics!”

Thus began a whole new approach to lyric writing. I remember letting the band hear those first three songs: “So Nice,” “Hollowed Bones,” and another called “Shanghai” that I didn’t include in my final collection of “Lentic” material. The response was polite but seriously lacked lustre. After all, China was my private experience and they couldn’t relate to the messages in the songs, especially when I had to translate them, let alone my pointed attempt to use the 5-note Chinese scale, for instance. I distinctly remember being disappointed that they weren’t as excited about the new music as I was but I resolved to continue the creative streak with or without them.

In the fall of 2007, I journeyed back to China and, of course, met my current partner, Guo Jian. After a long story (that I’m recounting at length in this blog), my relationship with Lyndell finally and formally split up in December of 2007 and I was then standing at a serious crossroads. We still had six months of booking ahead of us, but after that we were planning to go our separate ways. I really wasn’t sure where I was going and what I was doing.

As a result, I clung to my new creation and decided to pursue production assistance, even before all the songs had been written. This new collection of work had blossomed into about six tracks altogether by then, many of which I had worked on during my second trip to China, especially. I approached a variety of producers whose work and style was recommended through my various musical contacts. One of those producers was Tim Rideout.

When I asked Tim what his first impression was of my music or of me in this industry, he wrote this:

“My first impressions of Ember Swift were from watching video footage of her interviews for a documentary film called ‘WHAT IS INDIE?‘ I was the editor on that project and had the pleasure of getting to know her philosophies in this “priviledged” fashion. I found her interesting because she seemed to straddle a line philosophically somewhere between DIY Road-Warrior and Hopeless Dreamer: someone not afraid to get shit done and do it herself, but also someone who never lost sight of core ideals that I hold dear: integrity, honesty and optimism. For me to be able to work with an artist, these qualities are even more important than the music itself, which is why I even considered doing an trans-Atlantic virtual collaboration with an artist I had never met.”

Even though Tim wasn’t the only producer on my radar, he was first one who readily agreed to do an audition mix and then promptly delivered. I sent him my Garageband tracks and he took them up a level into what I immediately felt to be professional territory. I liked his style of doing business and his style of doing production right away. After all, I had very little experience with building all the sounds in a mix, from the drums and bass right up through the atmospheric layers and then to the melody and the finally the vocals. It was a huge challenge for me to get it all out of my head via the computer as this was a methodology that I hadn’t spent years crafting. Tim heard my ideas, improved upon them, and then sent me a revision.

I loved it.

In fact, I listened to that audition mix of “So Nice” about fifty times on repeat because I loved it so much. (Because of the great hard drive crash of 2008, I don’t have it anymore, though, so if you still have that audition track, Tim, send it to me!) 

That was in early January, 2008. I remember showing friends who we met up with on the road in January and watching their faces shift from surprise to intrigue as they listened through headphones. It was new for everyone, not just me. It was like nothing I had ever done before.

One of the people I showed was Liz Kelly. I have spent these blogs chronicling the drummers that have come and (sometimes) gone over the years. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Liz whom we worked with on and off in those final two years and with whom I felt a musical kinship that I really enjoyed. Liz was touring with us that season (January-February, 2008) and her feedback about the track was especially open and positive, while still constructive and encouraging. We worked with Liz mostly when it was the most geographically convenient to have her with us for US-based travel. In a way, when Liz was along, I was reminded of the early days with Cheryl behind the kit. Three female voices and her curly, bouncy, blonde locks all felt like a flashback to those days pre-Y2K!

But, getting back to the “Lentic” album project, I also really loved the idea of Tim and I working together in a collaborative fashion, creatively. I didn’t have all of the ideas, for instance, and I wanted to work with someone who was as inspired by my ideas as I was by his. We just seemed to immediately be on the same page about the songs and this couldn’t have been better timing.

Lyndell and I had been musical comrades for years. Having just split up and in the midst of struggling through our last six months of pre-scheduled shows together, our bonds on all levels were severed. She didn’t want to play with me anymore (even though I would have happily continued a music relationship with her) and I was devastated to be looking down the path at the end of an era. I truly missed her (and still do, musically) and really couldn’t understand why she would choose to abandon over twelve years of musical collaboration. I’ve since come to understand her need to do so, but it was a hard time.

So, bonding with someone else, musically, at this time was, well, vital. Meeting Tim helped me to continue to want to make music, whereas I may just have hung up my hat.

What’s more, I had no one left to please except myself. I had no band on board. I had no partner. After the summer, I also had no more agency (as they wanted to work with Lyndell and I as a team or not at all). I had no more house to aspire to be home in (someone had to move out). In other words, I had absolutely nothing left to lose.

Tim and I began working on the project in earnest that winter and we worked slowly, stepping up the intensity in the fall when I was back in China full time. All in all, it took us over a year to complete it, but come spring of 2009, “Lentic” was born.

I asked Tim about the process of recording “Lentic” and whether or not he could cite the challenges:

“The biggest challenge of Lentic was the most fundamental: creative collaboration via communication. We did this record while being thousands of miles apart. Our options for communication were only asynchronous ones: either email or Skype – and Skype was mostly after-the-fact because of the time difference. So in order for me to even come close to being efficient, I had to come up with something that Ember would love the very first time she heard it. This is always desirable, but particularly so in this case since a typical creative exchange that would take minutes in person could take weeks over the Net.

The other learning curve was learning to work together creatively. Not so much in terms of the nuts and bolts of music and which chord should go where, but more how to communicate our differences. This is never easy in person – so imagine what it is over the internet: no body language, no context, no smiles, no reassurance. So if I need to communicate that “I don’t agree that the note you sang in the harmony on the B section is correct in bar 7,” it’s all the more difficult because I have to make an even better argument for my case since we’re communicating asynchronously. On more than one occasion, this was difficult for the two of us, for a number of reasons including distance and just the basic fact that we had never established a working rapport prior to this. Some exchanges were very trying for me as a producer who is genuinely trying to make the best music he hears. When an artist disagrees, I need to establish where the disagreement is coming from – the ears, the head or the heart. This is infinitely more difficult over the Internet and requires a great deal of time and patience on the part of both parties.”

As I’ve mentioned, I was going through some tough transitions in my life during the making of “Lentic,” and so I wasn’t always the most stable party. Tim taught me a lot about communication through the process. His kindness, respectfulness, and maturity exceeded my own and was humbling. For instance, I occasionally felt defensive with his choices (as this was even more of a stretch for me than working with Graham had been, since we were each contributing creatively to the arrangements and the specific musical parts) and I had to wrestle with my control issues throughout the experience. Don’t forget that I was all the way across the world and navigating a nasty, “divorce”-style break-up in one area of my life and so, as a result, I sometimes couldn’t distinguish the allies for the foes. My “trust barometer” was completely out of whack.

So, first of all, I credit Tim and his amazing patience in the making of “Lentic.” I also credit him for a set of ears that are among the most musical, knowledgeable, open-minded, and creative in the business. It’s no wonder he is now so in demand in the film and television world for not only his compositions, but also for his professionalism. (This is Tim’s studio’s site: FibiSonic.)

While I was writing the songs for Lentic, I realized there were a few that I wanted to include in the project even though they weren’t in the “folktronic” vibe. One of those songs was “What Were You Thinking?,” which had been written after Lyndell’s and my good friend committed suicide next door to our home in Dalkeith. It was a shocking experience and I still miss her very much. In fact, “Float” and “What Were You Thinking?” were both about my friend, Shannon, and I really wanted to include these two songs on the record, even though one was a reggae song and the other was a jazzy, pop, singer-songwriter piece.

Tim rolled with these songs beautifully and, in the end, I think “What Were You Thinking?” might be one of the strongest tracks on the record, despite it being the closest to the old “Ember Swift” material in vibe and energy. Most of the media outlets that reviewed the record agreed. It stood out on the album, perhaps even more so since it was set against the “folktronica” songs. What’s more, I think it was the one song that spoke to what people were expecting from an “Ember Swift” release. Of course, this wasn’t intended as an Ember Swift release…

I named the album “Lentic: the new project by Ember Swift” because I wanted to redefine. At the time, I was really sensitive to the fact that, for the first time since 1997 (12+ years!), Lyndell Montgomery’s musicianship was not present in one of my productions. After so many years of being a duo (despite Lyndell never wanting her name in the foreground), I was worried that people wouldn’t think it was appropriate of me the use of my own name for just my own use. I had used that name to represent (at minimum) two people for so long. I therefore began brainstorming how I could rename my new project something completely different and hopefully the opposite in meaning to “Ember Swift.” After all, I gone off in an opposite direction in so many ways in my life!

Lentic means “of or related to living in still waters.” Since “Ember” means fire and “Swift” means fast, it was the “slow water” equivalent to a reinvention. I also hoped that this combined naming (i.e. adding “the new project by Ember Swift”) would help the re-branding effort. It would be a transitional period down a path of this new musical direction with a new band name that people would hopefully follow separately to the “Ember Swift” material.

And the real truth is that I feared that my name wasn’t enough without Lyndell. That I wasn’t enough. Ironically, I engaged in the full composition of these songs from the bottom up (alongside of Tim, of course) and so was responsible for much more, musically, than I ever had been before. The fact that I went through any doubt as to my musical abilities and, by extension, my rights to use my own birth name associated with a project that I was spearheading now seems ludicrous. But, crazy times bring out the crazy in us.

I decided to release two versions of the album, as well. The first was a simple, cardboard package that I sourced from a manufacturing company out of Oregan state called Stumptown Printers. I wanted to use 100% post consumer recycled paper printed with vegetable inks and I was willing to pay a bit more for it. There was be no lyric booklet in this package, just the simple CD. It was affordably priced for the fans at only $10 a unit.

The fancy packaging, however, was a marketing experiment that was probably the smartest business move I have ever made, product-wise:

It is a silk-covered book in the traditional Chinese style (featuring three different silk patterns for those who wanted to collect the different ‘looks’). The CD was set into the back cover and the pages featured all the songs translated into both languages. So, if I were singing in Chinese, the lyrics would appear on the left in Chinese and on the right in English. If I were singing in English, vice versa. These books were priced at $40 each and I only made 500 of them. I signed and numbered them all (with the exception of about 20 units that were misplaced that I now call the “rogue copies”) and these beautiful pieces of art helped to finance the early “Lentic” tours.

Both designs were implemented by my dear friend and artist Suzy Malik, who was now doing graphic design in addition to photography and illustration work. I had never worked with Suzy in this full way, but she was wonderful and extremely easy to work with. Her ideas for a clean and classy design were absolutely beautiful and I am so glad that I engaged her on this project. I even submitted these books for the packaging component of The Junos but didn’t get a mention. It’s no worries, though, what matters is that I believed it deserved that level of recognition! In the end, we have to believe in what we do, right?

Conceptually, the books were my idea (thanks to the inspiration from some beautifully bound books that Guo Jian owned) and I trekked down to the wholesale fabric markets in the Southern section of Beijing and hand picked the silk patterns. I then hauled heavy bags of silk back home to my Northeastern Beijing apartment and delivered them to the manufacturing company myself, along with mock-ups of my design. Here in China, unusual designs are no problem. They’re used to not working off of templates and were more than willing to take my concept and make it into a reality. The quality and service were impressive.

Miraculously, I received funding for the project from the Canada Council of the Arts. Officially, it is the first recording project in my entire career history for which I received public funding. Keep in mind that I applied for funding for at least 75% of the other recording projects, but was never successful. I have been successful in the realm of tour funding, however, so I’m not complaining. I’ve been a recipient of assistance from various funding bodies, to be sure, but this particular grant was finally for a recording project. What’s more, it was a “Specialized Music” grant and thus supported Lentic’s musical ‘weirdness’.

Lentic features both English and Mandarin lyrics (in the same song, save one song that is entirely in Chinese) and traditional Chinese instrumentation set against modern, Western electronic music. It was obviously not geared for a commercial market and this is precisely what earned it its existence through Canada Council. Without this funding, it’s hard to say if the album would exist today.

After more than eight months off the stage, I contacted Adam Bowman back in Canada to see if he would be interested in helping me a assemble a band to replicate the music that Tim and I had created. To my delight, Adam really liked the finished project and got straight to work on helping me find the right players to bring it to life on stage. We became a five-piece band virtually overnight featuring me on guitar and vocals, Adam Bowman on drums and samples, Cheryl Reid on percussion and samples, Joni Nehrita on keys and backing vocals, and Matthew Lima on bass and backing vocals. (Later, Roger Williams replaced Matthew Lima due to a scheduling conflict).

I arrived back in Canada that spring and immediately took the band on the road for shows in various venues that I had always loved. I booked the tour myself, remotely, and decided to only play the venues I enjoyed playing and that would be appropriate for this new music. We did a release tour with dates in Ann Arbor and a few other Michigan locations, the Chicago area, a few dates in Wisconsin, then Connecticut, Montreal, and the Ottawa area (to name only a few of the stops as I can recall).  These dates also included a release performance in Toronto at Hugh’s Room, once again.

I was back in to North America in the summer of 2009 and we did a few more shows. Then I came back once again in the fall of 2009 for some choice performances before piling the six of us (including my partner Guo Jian who played the guzheng, a traditional Chinese instrument) onto a plane bound for Australia in January of 2010. I had a tour booked there for the first time in three years and it included the Woodford Folk Festival and Peat’s Ridge Music Festival as well as many other stops along the East Coast. I took a big risk on my return to the land down under with a six-piece band, a new sound, a new band name, and a fairly different world view.

Sadly, that tour in Australia wasn’t nearly as successful as I had hoped, I’m afraid. I came home in the red and full of bewilderment as to the reasons why. Had I waited too long between Australian tours? Was the music not what people wanted? Was there some sort of animosity towards China there that I didn’t understand? None of these questions could be answered adequately. They never will be answered.

Afterwards, the Lentic five-piece band and I did one more travelling engagement out to British Columbia in March of 2010 for a showcase event. That, too, didn’t go very well. I first went out with just Cheryl Reid and we did a duo show in Vancouver that I quite enjoyed. After the showcase, I stayed a bit longer, as well, and did a solo show on Bowen Island that I also really enjoyed, but the full band experience was becoming strained and financially illogical.

At the time, I was working with a new agent who was convinced that the Lentic project should enter into the theatre market in Canada. In fact, she specialized in these kinds of bookings. But, with our unsuccessful west-coast showcase, it turned out that the theatre program presenters weren’t as thrilled with the “Lentic” project as we were. After a year of working with Tammy Fox and her company The Collection Agency, she and I went our separate ways. Throughout that whole year, we didn’t do a single theatre performance.

The thing is, when “Lentic” was offiially released, I slowly began to understand that people either loved it or hated it. In fact, there were few who were ambivalent. I got some glowing reviews from fans swearing it was the best thing I had ever released. I also got a lot of silence from fans too and a lack of predicted sales that reflected a certain disdain for the electronic aspects, perhaps; or a disdain for Lyndell’s absence, perhaps; or a disdain for the presence of Chinese lyrics, perhaps.

But, it didn’t matter. I loved it. By this time, I was losing interest in analyzing the reasons why people didn’t feel the same way. I think “Lentic” helped me to finally stop caring what anyone else thought. I had nothing to prove to anyone.

When I asked Tim what his final impressions were of the project, he wrote:

“When the project was finally finished, I knew we had a winner. In my eyes and ears, it was quite possibly the best work Ember Swift had ever done. It was pristine, well-crafted, sonically deep and rich, lyrically clever and structurally sound. I was – and still am – deep satisfied with and proud of the project. It sits apart from her previous projects as being a true “studio album.” The difference being that her other projects are “song-writing” albums born of live performance and/or the true songwriting process. Lentic was much more of a laboratory process, making tracks from songs, and songs from beats and beats from bits and bits from parts, etc.”

He went on to say more about what I touched on above, but much more eloquently than I could have:

“Unfortunately, the great strength of Lentic is also its fatal flaw. The artistic leap of faith that Ember took was one of chasm-ic proportions – an artistic rift so great as to alienate this record from the rest of her catalogue, sonically speaking. It just sounds incredibly different from other records she’s done. To her marketing’s credit, she *did* call the project “Lentic” to differentiate it from the Ember Swift her fans know and love. But I think commercially, the album has been passed over and misunderstood.

Was this artistic evolution? Folly? A result of great changes in her personal life needing great change artistically? Perhaps all of the above. But was Lentic a mistake? An error in judgement? A shitty record? Not on your life – and I’ll tell you why: we had so much *fun* making this record and are truly so proud of it that none of that matters. The record can stand on its own as a truly great co-creation. It sounds amazing. It was done over the Internet. We did the impossible and made it sound like a million bucks. If the critics and fans don’t “get it” yet, that’s ok. Maybe they will eventually. Perhaps Lentic is destined to be the “Pet Sounds” release of Ember Swift: an amazing artistic and technological achievement to those in the know. It may take time for appreciation of Lentic to grow. Only time and “Still waters” will tell. All I know is that I’m extremely happy with the way it turned out and wouldn’t change a thing.”

And I second that.

The Dirty Pulse, 2006

So, at this point in the chronology, Lyndell and I had bought and moved into a home in rural Eastern Ontario in July of 2004, in the wee hamlet named Dalkeith. It was our dream home and we both fell in love with it immediately. On nearly an acre of property, it had beautiful garden plots and a greenhouse, a barn/garage, and was a two-story century home with a brand new electrical panel. It just needed some renovations and TLC and we set to work on it immediately.

We did renovations in between tours that were still quite plentiful, but by this point they had shifted focus away from Canada as a whole. We were playing more than 60% of our shows in the US, about 10% in Australia or New Caledonia (an island near Fiji where we toured twice in tropical paradise—rough life!) and the rest in Canada, but mostly in Ontario and Quebec with occasional trips out East or flights to Vancouver. This decision was mostly a result of working with our agency that was US-based and thus well connected south of the border, and was also influenced by Ram Management who wisely advised both shorter distance and shorter duration travel to keep expenditures down.

As I’ve been making references to our touring vans, I should also add that we were now in possession of the most fancy touring van in our long line of touring vans: the Fifth and Final named “Molar.” “Leopold” had had to be retired to the junk yard after replacing its entire transmission in one season only to have something else major happen to it in the next (I can’t remember what!) that was going to cost us another $2000. We decided it was time to put her out to pasture. We bought this white Ford diesel van from a rental company in Montreal that was refreshing its fleet after a year of use. While it was our most expensive vehicle to date, we needed something more reliable. This was also a vehicle that could run on biodiesel. To us, travelling more eco-consciously was more important than the stress of having to pay monthly van payments.

Since moving house, however, rehearsals were a pain. Picking up the drummers in Toronto (Cheryl) or Guelph (Adam) was increasingly frustrating, especially if we were just heading to the New England area. Since we were living in Eastern Ontario, it made no sense to drive 5 hours back West to the Toronto area before heading south into the US. Also, every time we had to work on new songs, we had to schedule extra days in Toronto and overnight visits. We were lucky to have some good friends who didn’t mind the house guests!

Still, as an extra option, we started working with another drummer in the area where we lived (another Adam, but this time Adam Lalonde) who filled in on a few gigs for us. Adam was only in his early twenties, but his playing and personality were mature beyond his years. He’s an extremely skilled player and a refreshingly laid-back guy. (He also looked so much like one of my ex-girlfriends that I immediately felt comfortable with him!) We all got along famously from the beginning and I really enjoyed working with Adam. Unfortunately, he didn’t do any recording with us, however.

By this time, we were almost wholly identified as a duo rather than a trio. As a result, it didn’t really matter who played the kit with us. This is partially because of our constant rotation of drummers over the years and partially because we had started to do more duo work after starting to work with the agency. Record sales were dropping off due to having fully entered the digital download era. We simply weren’t grossing enough to afford a drummer all the time. (Commissions to agencies and management combined cut into our income by as much as 40%, as well, so it was a slim period!) What’s more, some of the folk rooms where we were being programmed in were really not interested in having a drum kit rattle their silverware.

So, all of these changes—geography, homesteading, community, service providers, band members—all affected my songwriting and my goals for recording.

The first thing that changed for me was a clear desire to make a record that radio stations would want to play and that would stick in people’s minds. I wanted an accessible, melodically memorable (and dare I say “pop”?) record.

Richard Dermer of Ram Management suggested we work with his colleague and friend Graham Stairs in Toronto who was a producer and manager and an overall veteran of the industry. As an artist who had always done the production on her records herself, I made a very clear choice to work with someone else this time, mainly because I felt that after eight different recording projects (six, if you don’t count the live albums), I felt I had pretty much tapped all of my own studio expertise. It was time to work with someone who knew more than I did about making the best record possible.

When I asked Graham what his first impression was of me and the music, he wrote this:

“I guess my biggest impression of you was that the fact you were so willing to embrace change. In our conversations, my perspective to you was that there was no point in hiring me as a producer unless I could actually produce the songs. At that point you had recorded a number of albums that were, in essence, souvenirs of your live show as opposed to actual “albums”. So, my goal for the album, and you agreed, was to give your audience an album that they could sit down and listen to all the way through, and that it would be a journey. I felt that you had a strong set of eclectic songs and that they each deserved their own unique treatment. My first impression of your rhythm section was that, although they were both good musicians, they were used to playing way too much!”

I didn’t agree with everything that Graham felt about my previous releases. For instance, I didn’t agree (and still don’t) that previous records weren’t “albums” or weren’t thought out thematically as journeys, for instance. That being said, however, I was getting used to not agreeing with my advisors while still analyzing their criticisms or opinions for the possible truths hidden within. For instance, Richard Dermer (Grapham’s friend) and I were rarely on the same page politically and often disagreed on a business level, but I was in a stage in my career where I welcomed this kind of challenge. So, when Graham came in with a strong set of opinions, I respected them even if I didn’t always agree.

As I look back, following advice that didn’t always feel perfectly in-line with my own opinions was the next phase in my career. After all, I felt I had done as much and gone as far as I could go with my own beliefs, so perhaps another’s influence (or a few others’!) could push my career up a notch? It was worth the risk. I have a lot of respect for what both Richard and Graham and even Fleming Artists (my US agency) brought to my career in the way of opportunities, perspective, and challenge. I learned a lot from them all.

I particularly remember the pre-production rehearsals with Graham when we played the songs and he picked them apart, simplifying the many parts that I had a tendency to chuck into a song even though those parts never occurred a second time, for instance! He also pushed Adam and Lyndell to play less, something both of them were not naturally inclined to do! Having been only a trio for so long, often space got misinterpreted as “needing to be filled” when, in reality, a lot of our music really could have used more musical pauses and gaps, less intricacy, more breathing room. Now that I’ve gone through the learning process that “The Dirty Pulse” provided, the space in the music I write now sounds just as musical to my ears as the sound-filled sections.

Joe Dumphy & Ember Swift, setting up the mics for the guitar overdubs, Monumental Sound

We recorded at a studio called Monumental Sound, which was owned by Joe Dumphy, who also was our engineer in the sessions. (Joe now owns Revolution Recording in Toronto.) As I was paying both Graham and Joe for the studio time, it was officially the most expensive album project in the whole collection, which was exhausting, mentally, as I watched our line of credit explode at the seams with the costs of the project. I knew it was money well invested, however, but it didn’t make it easier on the artist who was also the business owner!

When I asked Graham about the recording process and any challenges we may have had in his memory, he wrote this:

“The recording of The Dirty Pulse was both a pleasure and a challenge. Monumental Sound was a big, funky studio with a lot of cool vintage gear at our disposal. The engineer/owner, Joe Dunphy, had and has great ears and I have worked with him often since then, being my engineer of choice for certain kinds of projects. As I said, you were willing to explore different arrangements for your songs and, as a result, I was able to bring in outside musicians to flavour the various tracks; the horns, the keyboard player and the background vocalists all adding creative touches to your songs. I felt that we got on a creative roll that sustained itself throughout the recording process and that we ended up with a great album. Of course, it helped that we had, what I felt, was your strongest set of songs to date.”

And, speaking of some of the musical friction that occurred after his pre-production sweep of the songs:

“There was somewhat of a learning curve for the rhythm section as they learned that simpler was sometimes better for the songs. My philosophy is that the playing and the arrangements have to serve the song and that everyone has to check their egos at the door in order to accomplish that. There were some challenges, mostly as a result of the long hours and the bunker mentality of being in close proximity with each other for long periods of time. I recall that the bass player had a difficult time with the reggae feel of one of the songs and, because you were in a relationship with her, it caused some tension at the time. Having said that, overall, I recall everyone rising to the occasion and the end result, I felt, was a career album for you.”

Adam Bowman setting up his drums, Monumental Sound

I remember feeling so grateful to Graham for taking the reigns in this regard. After working with people for so long, even as the songwriter and the voice of the project, because their opinions and artistry had always been honoured and showcased, if I pushed for something different or less natural from them, I had already found that I was often met with resistance, as though I was being critical. Of course, that resistance is magnified when you’re also life partners with someone! A lot of Graham’s suggestions for the rhythm section were things that I had wanted as well, and sometimes had directly asked for but had not been granted! Graham’s role as album producer and his outside position as an “expert” and non-member of the band, not to mention his age and experience, all generated a level of respect from Adam and Lyndell that I couldn’t have procured myself.

Don’t get me wrong, though, because I was not exempt from those revisions! My parts, too, needed a lot of clean up, as a guitar player especially. It took a lot of humility but I’m proud of what I learned in that studio experience and I have no regrets whatsoever.

Speaking of “No Regrets” (!), the first track on the record was a co-write with Lyndell, Brenley MacEachern and Lisa MacIsaac (of Madison Violet) and myself. We had a good time jamming regularly with those girls and somehow this song came together. We further developed it into a reggae song, however, and they further developed it into a country song. I love that! I don’t even think we settled on the same name for it!

Cheryl Reid, with her brand new short haircut, Monumental Sound

After co-writing with Lyndell in the very beginning of our musical connection, there was a long gap of several records where we barely did any co-writing at all. This album, however, includes several songs that we wrote together: “Some Fine Day,” “Bliss,” “Witness” and that final remake of our old song “Mental Breakdown” that originally appeared on the album “Can’t Corner Me.”

Each new one was co-written differently, too. Lyndell had written the chorus to “Some Fine Day” and I filled in the verses and arrangement. She had written some beautiful poetry that inspired “Bliss” and I re-worked the words, added some of my own, and wrote the music and arrangements. For “Witness,” she had this amazing bass line that I decided to try to play around and echo/compliment and then the song evolved from there. I wrote the lyrics but she was actively involved in the arrangement.

As a band, we worked on recording and mixing the record for a full three weeks, reserving the final week for the mixing. As he mentioned above, because Graham had his own contacts I was willing to give some players I had never met a chance in the studio. They were the following talents: Sarah McElcheran on trumpet, Colleen Allen on saxophone, Andrew “Shaggy” Ennals on Hammond and Rhodes organ and Mystic & Miranda on backing vocals (a sister team whose voices were like butter). We also invited Cheryl Reid on percussion and drum kit for the song “Thirteen” and “Reinforced Concrete,” and Janine Stoll on backing vocals for “Mental Breakdown” and “Ten Pin.” Graham also played some tambourine for us on “Intervention”! All of them were incredibly talented and added just enough and just the right feel to the songs. It was a winning gamble.

Ember, recording in the isolation "cubby," behind the stacks of beautiful vintage guitars, Monumental Sound

After we were finished the project, I also felt like I had a “career record.” It was the first time that I held one of my completed albums and felt content. So much so, in fact, that I found myself conscious that if it were to be the last record that I’d ever make, I would be happy and satisfied. It was a compelling feeling. After all, 9 albums and 1 DVD was quite possibly enough and I was sure that this record signified a peak, of sorts.

Post-release, the first problem was the fact that we had no more money to sink into promotion. We only had the human power of my label (which, by then, had shrunk in staff members to just me, and an occasional part-timer, April Boultbee, and occasionally Lyndell, although she had mostly stopped working in the office when we moved in 2004) and Ram Management, who were not skilled at promotion and took all their cues and instructions from me. That meant that any intentions for reaching the “right” ears were already compromised.

We did a small national campaign that included servicing digitally to mainstream radio for the first time. We even invested in a radio tracker for that job! Of the 75 mainstream stations across the country who received the music, only 2 expressed interest. One, based in Nova Scotia about two hours south of Halifax, placed us on high rotation and even had us on for an interview when we were out East on tour. The other, near Ottawa, placed us on low rotation and we heard nothing more from them. When I finished that particular angle—encouraged by my management—I was beyond frustrated. I had never had any faith in mainstream radio and here I had wasted several thousand dollars just to find out what I basically already knew: that air time is controlled by the major labels and that I didn’t have enough clout or money to buy any of that airtime out from under them.

By this point, as well, my relationship with my management company was becoming more and more strained due to differences in intended direction and overall politics. By the end of 2006, I negotiated my way out of the 5-year agreement and we went our separate ways. What I’ll always appreciate about Richard Dermer and Ram Management, however, is the encouragement to separate my businesses into a touring company and a record label (incorporating the latter for tax purposes) as well as the insistence on steady project budget balancing, or to hopefully never have to use one project to pay off the next, etc. I’ll surely grant that we both believe in ethical enterprise, but the relationship definitely ended when it should have.

Graham had thoughts on this as well that he shared when I interviewed him about this project. I was surprised to read them, as he was on the outside, but I was also relieved to know that my impressions weren’t isolated:

In retrospect, I’m not sure how you felt about what the album achieved, but I was frustrated that the team around you… didn’t deliver the record. I thought that the album had some commercial potential… My impression was that Richard, although very smart in a lot of areas, was not record label savvy and did not really know how to market and promote a record. So, it was a little frustrating for me to watch from the sidelines and see the album not get the attention I felt it deserved.

I named the album “The Dirty Pulse” because, thanks to living in the countryside and growing our own food, I felt a renewed connection to the earth and nature. We seemed to be tapping into the life source of the land the way a Chinese doctor will listen for one’s life source by placing two fingers on the inside of one’s wrist to seek a person’s various pulse rates.

All of the drawings were my own and graphic design was, once again, put together by Liane Blad. I was especially proud of the soil layers on the inside cover where all the credits were read because of how layers of earth are not unlike layers of sound. (I felt so clever!) I also drew the heart on the back and used it like a diagram where I was pointing out the regions of the heart with the song titles.

This latter idea was inspired by some original artwork by Suzy Malik that I had seen years before. In fact, I never properly credited Suzy for this inspiration and I always regretted that oversight. Her artwork was also of a heart with its various cavities, looking like it had come straight out of a textbook, but with each label, she had a line of poetry that then each line carried down throughout the piece. I always loved how it seemed the poem’s words were assigned to the regions of the heart that were hurting, making each line all the more holistically heartfelt. It was for this reason that I wanted to assign the song titles to the heart, to show that the record was a full-hearted expression. So, thank you, Suzy!!

(In fact, something I failed to mention in the “Stiltwalking” blog is that Suzy’s artwork had inspired me during the writing of “Boinked (the Bride)” as well. There’s a line in that song that comes straight from a piece of Suzy’s original artwork that is in my collection [pictured here on her website]. The original piece was a gift from Suzy that I have always treasured and is currently on the wall across from me here in Beijing. The line in the song is “Now I’ve come to your wedding in open-ended clothing” and the reference is, of course, to both the dress I was wearing and the fact that I don’t necessarily view femininity as defined via fashion! A little obscure until you check out the artwork and then you’ll get it!)

All the photos for this record were taken by Desdemona (Bunty) Burgin and the big background fingerprint on the cover and disc itself is hers (thanks B!) while the little ones are mine. I’ll never be cloaked from CSI agents ever again! In fact, I forgot they were mine until I noticed the picture of my hands holding the coffee cup in the liner notes. If you look carefully, not only can you see my acrylic nails that I used to have on my right hand to increase their strength and durability, but you can see the ink on my fingertips!

The tray card is a simple image of a skull and “bowling pin” cross bones. The song “Ten Pin” is a song that references bowling (and was meant to be a bit crude for those with good ears!) because this was the tail-end of a period in our lives when going bowling had been something very common on the road. In fact, back when we were working with Cheryl, we started a tradition of going bowling on our days off at least once or twice during a tour. Michelle came with us several times, as well, and then later we’d drag Adam into the bowling alleys. It was especially fun when we found an alley that was open all night and we could go after a particularly bad gig to release our negative energy onto the pins. This image comes from a small brewery in Colorado whose “Ten Pin Porter” beer we enjoyed on tour in 2006 and whose logo we were granted permission to use for the design: Ska Brewing Co (Durango, CO).

Overall, despite the fact that the album didn’t take me to some imaginary “higher level” in the industry, I was and am really happy with this recording. I believe that it’s an extremely strong collection of songs and I am still really proud to offer it to people to hear and/or purchase.

Graham agreed:

 “I felt that it was your first true album…The album was strong melodically, had some positive statements to make and was sonically interesting to listen to… the album had the potential for you to reach a new, larger audience without alienating your existing one… I felt that The Dirty Pulse was a game changer.”

And how did I really want the rest of the game to change? I already spoke about wanting a more accessible record and I accomplished that. But, I also wanted to be home more. I wanted to do more gardening and home renovations, for example. I wanted the album to generate more of a following so that I could play larger venues but fewer shows. I had hoped that my management would help me try to get more licensing opportunities for the songs so that I could stay off the road and just sell the use of the songs (but they weren’t skilled in this area). For once, I felt that these songs weren’t just about preserving the live show’s energy but were more able to stand on their own; I hoped that this record would prove that I could stand on my own as a recording artist rather than just a touring artist with recordings that were live show souvenirs.

About six months after the release of the album in April of 2006 (at The El Mocombo in Toronto), having gone through a painfully difficult year in my personal relationship with Lyndell (described much more fully in this blog), I knew that the desire to do less of what I had been doing (touring) was achievable with or without a successful record or an effective team around me. In other words, this album wasn’t my golden egg or my silver bullet; my own will was the only guaranteed force that would and could change my circumstances. As I’d learned many times throughout my career to-date, when you really want something to get done, you’ve got to make it happen yourself.

That’s when I decided to organize my first-ever trip to China. I started planning in the late summer of 2006 and by April of 2007, I was on a plane. It was to be my first international solo journey ever. A rest, a retreat, a mission, a vacation — it was all of those things. I knew no one in Beijing except for a few names associated with email addresses. I had no gigs booked for three months. That also meant that I had no one to pay for three months and enough money saved up or donated for the journey that I was enrolled in a language refresher course and had my housing covered. I had also been employed to blog about the experience (earliest blogs in the 3-month series located here), so I was able to take on even more of the financial responsibilities at home even though I wasn’t going to be there. Everything just aligned to make that trip happen, like my whole life was getting a chiropractic adjustment. As a result, the liberating relaxation that settled into my neck muscles on that flight was enough to counter any trepidation or anxiety I may have had about heading to a foreign country with no one to greet me when I landed…

Witness, Live in Australia 2005

Now, when counting my releases, I usually separate out the DVD since it’s so different from an audio recording. In this blog series, however, I decided to write about it separately. Since I combined the stories of “The Wage Is The Stage” and “Snapshots” (2000), I’m giving the DVD “Witness: Live in Australia, 2005” its own day for a blog. After all, it was its own process!

By this point, we had toured in Australia five times and had amassed a strong following there. We were represented by an Australian distributor, publicist and agent and our yearly tours to Oz were becoming an essential part of our annual business plan.

This DVD was shot when we were definitely at our prime in Australia. The rooms were packed and full of joy and dancing and support. We were in demand within the festival circuit. We were riding a serious wave.

I’m not sure how I met Max Bourke of Pigfish Productions, but somehow he circled into my life during the 2004 Australia tour and we started talking about filming a formal project with him on our spring tour in 2005. Before we knew it, it was actually happening.

This was the first project that was overseen by my then new management out of Montreal, Richard Dermer (Ram Management). Richard had expressed an interest in working with me after having seen the packaging and promotional kit associated with “Disarming” and investigating my career path to date. He was (and is) a strong businessperson and wanted to help me develop my business into more lucrative territory. Richard is also a lawyer and so it was certainly refreshing to work with someone who could draft contracts and negotiate terms with people like Max, the filmmaker.

We chose three shows to record on that tour, as well as some road footage and interview footage. The shows were in Sydney at the venue called @ Newtown, Tilley’s in Canberra, and The Northcote Social Club in Melbourne. The interviews were all filmed in the green room at The Northcote Social Club and the road footage was filmed between Sydney and Canberra, I believe.  Finally, we also did some filming of a night off when we went to a local girl bar event and hung out with friends in Melbourne.

Tacked at the end of the DVD is a section called “Talking Politics.” This was filmed the previous year in Katoomba, NSW by Blackmoon Media to augment a network pilot pitch for a potential TV series. Unfortunately, that TV series didn’t get picked up, but the footage still remained so I asked for permission to use it for this project. They readily agreed. After all, the topic of water, something very important to me, was the point of the interview and my release, “Disarming,” featured the song “H2O,” a song that borrowed from the 1999 “Water is the Cure-All” and built it further into what I believe to be one of my strongest political songs to date. (Posted here.)

There was a lot going on during this tour that was hard to navigate around cameras. Lyndell was falling in love with a woman there in Australia (see this blog for more details on that) and I was falling apart about it. On that tour, however, I simultaneously became friends with that woman’s partner at the time (who, by the way, was also struggling with her partner’s relationship with Lyndell) and while her influence in my life was brief, it was extremely powerful.

She was studying Chinese medicine and asked me about certain Chinese characters and certain aspects of Chinese culture. My studies were so rusty at the time that I embarrassingly admitted that I had abandoned my dreams, in a way. She balked at me, encouraging me to pick them up again. I knew she was right. When I returned home from that tour, I dusted off my Chinese textbooks and started dreaming again. Even though it was still two years before I’d finally go to China, I credit her with inspiring me to reconsider the rashness with which I had set aside my goal to become fluent in Mandarin and visit this country.

The other hard part of that 2005 tour in Australia was the (accurate) feeling that we were cresting a popularity wave in Australia. It’s true that waves all eventually crash into the sand and, though I tried as hard as I could, I was having a hard time not stressing out about that inevitable crash and just enjoying the view from that crest! I must say, though, that I’m really glad we captured that phase of our Australian adventures. It was the perfect time to film. Vibe caught at its zenith.

Brenley MaEachern and Lisa MacIsaac of Madison Violet opened a few of our shows on that tour, including the one in Melbourne. We invited them to be our guests on stage during “Some Fine Day” at the Canberra show and their extra vocals really helped that song come alive.

Mel Watson, of the band Fruit and her own solo project, was also a guest with us on trumpet during our show in Melbourne with the song “Reinforced Concrete.” During the outro, you can see how I’m blissing out to the jam between Lyndell and Mel, like I’ve forgotten that I’m even on the stage. Her musical ears have always blown me away. A truly gifted musician.

Some additional notes about the DVD:

* The first few songs were recorded in Sydney on the same day that we arrived in Australia. I’m amazed as I watch the show that we didn’t collapse of jet lag and exhaustion. Adrenaline is powerful, but those days of jumping off the plane and jumping onto a stage are long over, I’m afraid!

* “Listen” – This is the first song showcased on the DVD and it never got formally recorded beyond this. It’s not a bad song after all, but it was one of the casualties in the studio during the next recording project. (Click on song title for ripped version on Soundcloud.)

* Transitions – As I spoke about in the last blog, this DVD features those transitions that we worked so hard on and included in those ‘negative tracks’ on the Disarming album. It really works in a DVD format, for sure!

* Adam’s Drum Pads & our other various effects – This DVD is an excellent example of the ways that we employed other sounds through digital drum triggers, vocal effects, looping, etc. We were only a trio, so we needed some alternate sounds here and there. It was fun to watch this interplay of organic and digital and be reminded of those extra sounds so specific to that particular trio.

* “Include My Food” – I used to go off on food at my shows during this song and this is the only recording that showcases that whole speech about food, including the “say no to spray-on cheese” portion! Of course, that makes it a super long song, but that’s the reality of live performance!

* “Pek” – Until “11:11” this was the most popular recorded version of this song. It’s powerful to see the song in action, especially witnessing Lyndell bowing the acoustic guitar.

All in all, I’m glad we did this project. We did expect that it would be more successful than it was, however. It didn’t sell quickly and I found that people weren’t as interested in purchasing a DVD as they were in purchasing a CD. Funny enough, one of the most common questions that I was asked was, “Can I put it in my car stereo and still hear the audio?” When I told them they’d have to rip the audio through a special program and burn it on a separate CD first, they invariably chose to skip the DVD and purchase something they could pop into their car stereo as they drove away from the concert. After all, people buy albums at concerts to represent a souvenir of their experience. They listen to it right away to elongate that experience. What’s more, an audio product allows them to maintain their own visuals.

The DVD was designed by Liane Blad and features one of my dreadlock “buns” on the cover. That was “dreadie” season watching this DVD made me miss them! The back cover features an image of the three of us that was taken at the 2005 Toronto Pride festival just before we released the DVD in September. All photos were taken by Desdemona Burgin.

The last thing that I’ll say about this project is that we were TIGHT!  I am so impressed with the sharpness of our playing and it truly makes me want that again with a band. It was precision at its finest. I’m really impressed with us! Since it’s been six and a half years since this project was filmed, I feel I can write that with enough distance that it doesn’t feel cocky or arrogant. It’s just fact. We were tight, tight, TIGHT!

Go band!

Now that that’s off my chest… getting down to business… let’s talk about the 2004 release, shall we?

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Disarming, 2004

So, the summer of 2002 included several really amazing Canadian festivals with Michelle Josef. I particularly remember the Ness Creek Music Festival in Northern Saskatchewan and The Edge of the World Music Festival on the Queen Charlotte Islands of Northern, BC.

At the latter event, we were walking along the amazing beach of Haida Gwaii when Michelle told me that she was growing tired of the travel and needed to leave the band. We knew we would miss her, but we understood. Cheryl agreed to fill in for Michelle for our east-coast September tour, especially since this brought her out to see her family in Halifax, but she didn’t want to tour full-time again. We were in the lurch.

At our gig in Fredericton while touring with Cheryl, an old friend and drummer showed up to support our show: Adam Bowman. He was touring with another band and had the night off. We had known Adam for a few years by then as he had drummed with the now defunct Guelph (mostly) girl band Corduroy Leda several years earlier. At the time that we first met him, he was just a 20-year old kid starting out. There he was in Fredericton, 24 years old and with a few more years of experience under his belt. Lyndell and I, without even discussing it between us first, spontaneously asked him if he wanted a gig. Turns out he did!! Adam jumped onto our late fall tour with only a couple of weeks of rehearsals and a truckload of enthusiasm.

When we first started working with Adam, it was strange to work with a guy again after so many years of being an all-girl band. What’s more, Adam had grown up in a small town, had never travelled west of Ontario, and had never eaten sushi (for example). What he lacked in life experience, however, he made up for in heart. In that first year of working with us, he instantly got a crash course on feminism, queer culture, full-time touring, political activism, etc. He became a bit like our little brother.

Oh, and I’m proud to say that I’m one of the few who knew Adam when he had hair!

In early 2003, we returned to Australia twice, once in December-January and again in March-April. I believe Cheryl came with us on the first trip and Adam came with us on the second, simply because our working relationship with Adam was still a bit too fresh for what was becoming our most important performance market (Australia). Come March, however, Adam had taken over as the principal drummer and we were creating magic.

Adam brought with him an appreciation for funk and groove music that influenced our next collection of songs and truly brought the music into new territories. He played the show with an organic drum kit as well as an electronic drum pad on which we could program additional sounds and trigger sound effects. Songs that were featured on Disarming that show off this extra feature include “Tapped & Wired” (that 1980’s snare sound) and “Pek” (with the timpani sounds.)

When Adam came on board, I must admit, we were in a slump. Too many years of doing our own bookings, management, and promotion was getting us down and we were tired. The song “Boise” in the collection is a co-write with Lyndell that really speaks to this state of mind.

It seems that something always swooped in to lift our spirits in these times, however, because at the end of that first fall tour with Adam we had a spontaneous meeting with a prominent Booking Agency out of Ann Arbor, MI called Fleming & Associates. We had submitted our material to them a few years earlier with no response but here they were now pursuing us. They had become aware of our track record, one of their employees had seen us play at a festival, and they wanted to negotiate working with us.

It was like a gift from the heavens. They handled bookings in North America, exclusively, so we finally had a service provider that would give me a chance to not have to balance my laptop on my knees in the van all the time! Also, it turned out that they don’t take unsolicited packages and so they hadn’t even realized we had sent our material to them a few years earlier! We signed a contract with Fleming right then and there and continued to work with this company for five great years. They’re all fantastic people and I have a lot of respect for them.

“Disarming,” as a collection of songs, was mostly written after a particularly political phase in my life. Travelling around the US after September 11th, 2001 with Michelle Josef was an amazing experience for Lyndell and me. Michelle is particularly politically minded and she regularly brought with her great articles and magazines, and also picked up a different newspaper daily. As a result of this van dialogue, we became even more vocal at our gigs about what was happening with the US administration (i.e. what I call the “shrubbery years”) with their “war on terror,” not to mention what was happening concurrently in our own country regarding civil rights and natural resources.

On a personal front, after several years of being together in some context (first as friends, then as lovers, later as partners), Lyndell and I were finally living together in Toronto in an apartment on Bartlett Street on the west side of the city. It was this space that we showcased in the liner notes with an amazing art piece created by Misty Winter who was both the artist and the photographer for the graphic design.

For me, the title of the album was both about the notion of disarming a country and a movement—that call for real peace rather than the rhetoric of “bombing for peace”—as well as the need to disarm our own selves, open ourselves up, learn to be more honest and true and less defensive. I was on this journey in my own personal life and it was easily transferred to larger, global issues.

We approached a friend named Sean Gregory about recording this record. I had known Sean for years and knew of his studio called The Recording House, having done some demo work with him there in 2001. I finally felt it was time to work with him in a more formal manner.

When I asked Sean what he remembered about when we met, he wrote this:

“When I first opened my recording studio back in 1997, I was looking around for artists that I’d like to work with and I remember coming across a review of your 1997 release “Insect Inside” in a local Toronto indie music magazine.  The internet wasn’t as evolved as it is today obviously, so I couldn’t go online and listen to your music.  All I had to go on were the words in the review.  I found it quite intriguing, so I contacted you via snail mail and found out when you’d be playing a gig in the city so I could go check out a live show.

The very first time I met you in person was in a tiny little club in Toronto called Holy Joe’s.  My first impression of you was that you were very serious about what you were doing and when I heard you sing that night, I was blown away.  I was so impressed with your voice, it was just amazing and I found your music to be very refreshing as I was listening mostly to rock, metal and contemporary pop at the time.

Although it wasn’t anything like I had done before, I was very interested in working with you because I thought you were all so talented as musicians, singers and songwriters. And I was also very much attracted to the level of professionalism and most importantly, the passion and enthusiasm that you showed for your music. And of course, it was a great opportunity for me to learn and grow as a producer, engineer and musician and for that, I thank you!”

We started working on “Disarming” in August of 2003. Sean even remembered the exact date, which is awesome because my memory is not that good: Sunday August 10th , 2003. We worked straight through that week until Thursday, August  14th at around 4pm when the big blackout occurred in Toronto (and across the whole Eastern seaboard).

Photo by Sharon Ross: A casual pic of me and Lyndell in the studio (August 12, 03)

When we finally realized that the lights weren’t going to come back on, we ended the session and drove home (back west from Scarborough) to a transformed city. We enjoyed that black night in Toronto like no other we had ever enjoyed before. The city was alive with dancing on the streets. There were neighbourhood barbecues, telescopes and fire twirling in the park, and so much kindness and camaraderie between Torontonians. It was a beautiful evening to be remembered for always. Afterwards, we would regularly wish that the city would enforce blackouts regularly just for the sake of community togetherness (and energy savings)!

I asked Sean what challenges he remembers from the sessions and he wrote this:

“It was the largest off-the-floor session I had ever done and getting everything set up and working and getting all of you guys comfortable with your instruments and headphone mixes was no easy feat.

Adam Bowman had a full acoustic drum kit and a few lines of electric drums as well. We recorded the bulk of the album in two major off-the-floor sessions and he used a different kit for each session. For the first session he used a Yamaha kit and for the second he used an Ayotte kit. Lyndell was playing bass, electric violin and a bowed acoustic guitar, sometimes recording more than one instrument within a single take. And I found it challenging to mike your acoustic guitar and voice at the same time because of the bleeding of sound into all the microphones that occurs when you record two or more sources in such close proximity. It was a tough job to find the right mike placement to get a good balance. Once everything was set up and you guys started playing though, it was music to my ears!”

I liked hearing this with such clarity and detail (again, another kudos to Sean’s memory) because I hadn’t recalled that we had, once again, challenged our engineer with an off-the-floor session! We are crazy, aren’t we? I guess we were just so familiar with doing it this way that we continued in that vein with each recording. When I listen back to these recordings, though, I’m impressed with our ability to all play together without having to overdub our parts. That’s probably a credit to our tightness from the multitudes of live shows that we were doing at the time!

He also recalled that Cheryl joined us in the studio for one of the songs, thus making it three different drum kits that Sean had to deal with! Sorry Sean!!:

“Cheryl Reid also brought in a full acoustic drum kit to play a track called “Breath.” She was using brushes and making those soft swirly sounds on the snare drum and cymbals. Because she was supposed to play that song with such a soft dynamic, it was a challenge to get the levels just right on the kit without introducing too much noise.  I think that track came out great though and I absolutely love how she played the song!”

Those sessions stretched out over several months and took place between touring commitments. Our final recording date, including all the mixing, was December 18th, 2003.

Other guests in the studio included Brenley MacEachern and Lisa MacIsaac of Madison Violet who sang back-ups on “Tapped & Wired” as well as Sean Gregory, studio owner himself, who played electric guitar on one of our rock inserts.

Oh yes, the inserts. Who could forget about those? The goal of this album was to create a continuous play record from start to finish. We were all about smooth transitions and consistent set lists on stage at this time and almost each song had its own transition into the next. Using the “negative track” system (where a piece of music can be hidden in the space between one CD track and the next), we stuck these inserts in between each song so that people could hear little treats when they listened to the record from start to finish on a standard CD player.

What I didn’t take into consideration, however, was the rise in popularity of digitizing tracks. When these songs were ripped into a computer, the track’s transition into the next song would be tacked onto the end of each track, giving each song a feeling of never really being over and cutting off unceremoniously. This also happened to anyone who downloaded single tracks and to any radio station who played any individual tracks from the record. Because it all ran together, it was impossible to instruct the radio announcers to shut it off after a certain time code, for instance!

I don’t recommend this “bright” idea, I must say. Cool in concept, but not practical in today’s digital world.

On a technical level, Sean wrote the following and I must quote him because it’s not something I would have even known how to write:

“When we did ‘Disarming,’ we recorded to hard disc using Nuendo version 1.6. That was around the time I had just made the transition from ADATs to a DAW and I was still using the ADATs as I/O converters via their lightpipe technology with a Steinberg 96/52 Digital I/O card.”

All I know is that it was the first all computer-based recording that we did and I really enjoyed how visual it all became on the screen!! In fact, that was the recording that started my interest in the art of recording. I was so intrigued by the “sound clouds” and how seemingly easy it could be to create layers with this digital medium. It took me many years to actually put that curiosity into practice however, but at least I have the 2009 release, “Lentic,” to show for it!

Now, getting back to this album’s graphics, as I mentioned above, the insert features original artwork by Misty Winter who shot a series of photographs throughout the main floor of our apartment, pieced them together, painted in the missing parts, and then created a 5′X2′ large wall-mounted piece on canvas for us. I then got it photographed professionally and we reduced it to the length of the liner notes. I still have that original artwork, too, although it’s too large to bring to China and it really has no place for display. It’s in storage at my sister’s house. Misty’s is still hanging on her wall in Chicago, though. Oh that Misty Winter—what a talent!

Also, the graphic design layout was done by someone new this time. After working in conjunction with Suzy and David for so long, we all thought it was time for a change. We had met and become good friends with Liane Blad in New Hampshire and she had done some design work for us already, so I approached her about designing the album’s liner notes. We worked across distance and I proofed everything electronically. By then, too, film was no longer required by CD manufacturing houses, so everything had become easier. Liane’s ideas, as well, were fresh and clean. I really enjoyed working with her.

For the first time, too, I did not do a crazy fold, cut or origami riddle with this album. I did, however, invest a lot more in packaging and go with the (then new) fully cardboard design (i.e. no plastic). It was almost $4000 then to manufacture 1000 units, but we invested in the first run because it was so beautiful and special. The follow-up units were manufactured in the same plastic jewell cases as the previous albums, though, because we couldn’t afford it any other way. The first run made for a collector’s edition, if nothing else.

I recall some mastering woes on this record, however, and I re-mastered it to bring out the band more for the second pressing onwards. I felt that the vocals were too far forward overall and the re-mastering definitely helped, I remember.

Sean ended his interview with these thoughts:

“And in addition to all of the above, I’d like to say that my favourite track on “Disarming” is FAQ. I really loved the idea behind that song, having all the most popular questions you’ve heard from fans on the road at the beginning and all the answers to those questions at the end… It definitely gives people a sense of what it would be like for a touring musician like yourself out on the road going through all kinds of different places and meeting all kinds of different people. And it’s just a fun song! Brilliant!”

I concur that that’s definitely one of the more fun songs on this record. It’s fun in concept and it’s also interactive because the questions and answers are delivered in the exact same order; so, questions 1-15 are followed by answers 1-15, for example. If a person were to count the questions as they’re asked and remember the number of the one they’re really curious about, then they just have to count the answers as they’re delivered and their curiosity will be quenched! I’ve posted that song here for your listening (and counting) pleasure!

All in all, I almost kept my promise. I released this record in April of 2004, three months shy of two years after the release of “Stiltwalking.” I have absolutely no memory of where we did the release party, however. I really can’t remember! I’m thinking it may have been Hugh’s Room again, but that’s because I can’t recall how many records we’ve released there since “Stiltwalking”!

After that record came out, though, everything started to shift. We had continued to tour in Australia and throughout North America, but were becoming more and more disillusioned with living in Toronto and renting an expensive place with its separate office space in which our employees spent more time than we did! I was considering moving to Montreal as a result of new business associations there. Lyndell didn’t know what she wanted. We just knew that Toronto was no longer making us happy and something had to change in our lives. After all, “Saint Eddie” had been stolen from our street corner that past December and we now had “Leopold, the 4th,” a Chrysler maroon van in its place. In our discontent with Toronto and the pace of our lives, we nearly split up once again, but instead chose to buy a home together in the countryside about an hour West of Montreal and East of Ottawa. Our employees continued to work for Few’ll Ignite Sound, but now from home. It was a whole new lifestyle change that, once more, sparked a whole new round of songs.

But, I’ll talk about those tomorrow.

Stiltwalking, 2002

So, you may have noticed that I was releasing an album per year from 1996 until the year 2000. In fact, when you count the two simultaneous releases in 2000, I released exactly 6 different products (with barcodes) in four and a half years.

What, was I on speed or something? Or, was I just cursed with this surname?

Between late 2000 (the release of the live albums “The Wage Is The Stage” & “Snapshots”) and late 2001, we spent most of our time on the road. We had a new van (the third van in the lineage of tour vans whose name was “Saint Eddie” after the guy who’d helped us retrieve our gear from the burning wreck) and we were trucking all over the US and Canada. It was tour after tour and we had perfected a pretty good system with a functioning Few’ll Ignite Sound office staff working regular hours back in Canada and a steady rhythm of advance bookings and tour organization that had me balancing my laptop on my knees while Lyndel did most of the driving to the next gigs.

The other big thing that happened for us in 2001 was our first journey to Australia. It was the redeeming feature of our tough time in late 2000 with the van fire and Cheryl’s departure from the band. Lyndell and I were also having our personal problems in our relationship at this point in the story and we weren’t sure if any of it was really worth it anymore. The journey to Australia was a career and perspective shifter in so many ways. It brought us back from the brink of throwing in the towel.

We had been invited to play at Sydney’s Mardi Gras celebration, the largest GLBTQ festival  in the world. After we got that invitation, we starting contacting other festivals and bands and started to line-up gigs that would buffer the enormous costs of the flights. We were planning to go as a duo, as well, something we hadn’t done in years, because that was all we could afford. Eventually, we had a few worthwhile other gigs and more on the way when the Mardi Gras committee emailed to say that they had had to cut their budget and wouldn’t be able to afford to host us after all. For the first time in my life, I wrote an events committee and told them they were crazy not to have us, that we would be there anyway, and that we weren’t expecting our travel costs to be covered in the first place. I appealed their decision! To my delight, they changed their mind and re-invited us!!

We travelled to the East Coast of Australia and stayed for seven weeks from late February until early April (just shy of our on-the-road time limit), but had a more reasonable pace of shows than usual. By this I mean that we didn’t do six shows a week like we were used to doing back in North America; there were a few beach days and some well-needed sightseeing. Thankfully, we encountered an enormous amount of generosity and were offered places to stay nearly everywhere we went. We also spent six of the seven weeks using public transportation exclusively, something that sparked the song “Tram #86.”

This particular tour strategy was also really effective: we spent three weeks in the Melbourne area, three weeks in Sydney area and then had a week of coastal journeying towards Brisbane before flying home. In that time, we did several small (mostly unpaid) shows that were either showcases, featured acts at events, or opening slots with other bands. These eventually culminated into one of our own shows in those two main centers at the end of each three-week period. We had made up flyers to advertise the “main” show and we constantly gave them out to people who expressed interest. While these final, “main” shows were in small venues, I’m thrilled to say that they were fully attended by the end of each three-week block and the ticket sales were ours to collect. Our hard work paid off and people actually came to see the Canadians!

What made that trip so important was its bolstering effect. We had become a bit dragged down with the constant touring of North America. We didn’t feel “new” there anymore and our hope was sagging. But when we went to this international destination, it was like new wind in our career sails. We came home feeling marvelous, with a small profit of something around $800 (to split between us!) and a lot of smiles. (Lyndell, unlike pasty me, also had a really nice tan.)

We continued our North American travels and our regular rehearsals with Michelle Josef throughout 2001 and by late that year, we had enough material to start thinking of recording again. We really wanted to capture both what Michelle had brought to the band and what Australia had brought to our spirits.

Michelle introduced us to Rogue Studios and its talented owner James Paul. Michelle, skilled with her hands on more than just drums, had helped James design and construct some of the studio in its previous location in Toronto and she had wonderful things to say about James’ abilities as an engineer.

When we met, I liked him immediately. I asked James in an email recently what his first impression was of the music. He wrote this:

“My first experience with your music were from a demo you had done of Tram, The Underwear Song, Lik Yer Lips and Include Yer Food (as they were titled on the disc). I had already heard your music compared to that of Ani DiFranco but I felt that comparison was overly dismissive and mainly based on gender and political content and largely missed the point of what you were striving for. I liked that you displayed both a technical virtuosity and deep understanding of traditional musical forms and a willingness, and sense of play, to throw those to the winds and adapt new techniques and structure to your needs.”

Gotta love an engineer who appreciates the quirkiness!

Because the Rogue’s calendar was packed–a good sign!–we scheduled an early spring session.

We then returned to Australia in early 2002. We couldn’t stay away! This time, we brought Cheryl Reid with us as she had been filling in on occasion as a sub drummer–I guess she missed us! Cheryl was willing to travel to Australia (her dream destination) for almost no wages and absentee hotel accommodations. What’s more, she was also available for the whole tour’s duration. Michelle would have been our first choice, but her schedule and her fees weren’t compatible with our plans or budget. I remember the awkwardness of having to make this decision, and it’s still a touchy subject between us. (And, Michelle, if you’re reading this: we really did miss you on stage in Australia! Not that Cheryl wasn’t talented, but we missed your powerful presence!!)

Incidentally, I happen to find this article that was printed on an Australian website around this exact time. The interview features quotes from all three of us: me, Lyndell & Michelle. Sadly, the picture is of the trio when Cheryl was with us–a picture from the 1999 release “Permanent Marker”! Still, it’s interesting to read this blast from the past.

In Australia, we did several amazing festivals and were introduced to a colourful and enticing circus culture. We came home to Canada with juggling balls tucked in our luggage and promptly bought a unicycle. I walked on stilts for the first time in Australia (Lyndell was already quite good at it!) and I found myself totally inspired by the playfulness, so much so that we did the whole photo shot for the album on stilts!

The album title (and essence) of the record, “Stiltwalking,” is about recovering the fun that we had so carelessly set aside for the strong work ethic of touring endlessly and pushing our independent careers. I wrote the title track on a back staircase at a friend’s house in Brisbane having recycled some over-the-neck, hammer-on licks from the song “Glue” that appeared on the album “InsectInside.” Michelle’s and Lyndell’s playing really brought the piece to life, too, even though it was short-lived on our set list. It was the newest track on the album and one that really begins my lament for a slower-paced, healthier life–a lament that lasted for another five + years!

Some of the song’s lyrics that speak to this idea:

“how? why? what makes you do it?
we are asked, we are cast as those who get through it
has to be more fun than fatigue, more of a joy than a chore, from the soul, from a need
cuz after all, what are we breathing for?”

Back at home in Toronto after the second Australian tour, the sessions began.

James and I each remember doing roughly five days of tracking followed by five days of mixing. Michelle was in the studio with us for the first three days to lay the bed tracks, but the three of us (Lyndell, me, and James) continued with the tracking and overdubbing after that.

We also had the privilege of working with several additional players who truly added to the recording in ways that I couldn’t have imagined were possible:

Dana Baitz came in and played on “Include My Food” and “Ten Feet Tall.” To me, her parts really bring these songs to life and every time I hear them, I love them! It was for this reason that those two songs made it to the #1 and #2 position in the track order. As usual, we didn’t rehearse with Dana at all before she came to the studio and she wowed us with her creativity and intuition. She was a joy to work with.

Also featured on the album is Bob Egan of Blue Rodeo (and his own solo and production career) who added pedal steel to “Lick Your Lips.” I love the spooky sound and he was such a gentleman. A true pro in all ways.

Finally, and the most special of the studio guests, were my Mother and Grandmother. At the time, my Grandmother (Nana) was 82 years old and doing great. (She’ll be 93 at the end of this month, November 2011!) I covered a song on that record, “When A Gypsy Makes Her Violin Cry,” and it was a song that I had learned from one of my Nana’s old organ books and had always really loved. She, of course, knew the song and so I asked both of them to add their harmonies to the track, my Mother doing the high harmonies and my Nana taking over the low ones. They’re both such great singers and this was how we used to sing while doing the dishes, so I figured those parts would be no problem for them. And I was right!

My Grandmother was so cute in the studio. She couldn’t figure out where the sound of the talk back mic was coming from and got a bit confused about the headphones and how to wear them, but we laughed a lot and I stood beside her listening along and directing her when she got lost during her session. My Mom was a champion and pulled off her parts in record time. (Haha, pun not intended, but I’m leaving it in!)

It’s the only recording we have of all three generations singing together and, since they’ve both been such big influences on my music, I’m so glad that they were able to come and lend their voices and energy to the project. It was truly a joy. (I’ve posted the song here for your listening pleasure!)

Technically, the album was recorded first on second hand two-inch tape and then transferred to digital and overdubbed digitally. James preferred to do the initial capture in analog and I think the overall warmth of this record is testimony to that choice having been a good one!

When I asked him if there were any challenges he remembered about the recording process, he wrote this:

“I think the biggest challenge was learning how to balance the weight of each instrument in a trio where all instruments had to be equal and a trio where instruments also switched functions and reversed their roles. I have always and still find it difficult to balance the midrange instruments and melody with percussion when there is no clear or traditional bass section. I know that some tunes had bass and most had something filling the bass role but the approach could rarely be named traditional.”

James added these words about the album:

“I was, and still am, proud of the work we did. I like that the music challenges and draws in the listener and I think you make rewarding music to listen to. It presents an engaging blend of protest, politics, humour and the personal with a sound at times angular and abrasive, without relying on volume and onslaught, at times gentle and melodic and at times both.

One of my favourite stories from the sessions revolves around the decision that we should all strip to our skivvies for the bedtracking of The Underwear Song. During one of the takes, Jenn, who was managing the studio at the time, came into the control room to find me sitting at the console with my pants around my ankles. She completely forgot the question she had to ask me and quickly retreated back to the office when informed that she would also have to strip if she wanted to sit in on the recording.”

The truth is that I completely forgot about that. I remember now that he’s mentioned it, though, and who would have thought that modest me would have stripped down in the studio! I guess a person forgets the things that make us shy!!

Speaking of shy, the song “Boinked (the Bride)” was truly a memorable track on this record and one that I still get comments and emails about almost a decade later. It’s the story of attended an ex-lover’s wedding and watching a woman that I had been with (albeit, just briefly) getting married to a man.

Now, years later, here I am having fallen in love with a man and, lo and behold, I married him! A few of my listeners have pointed out the irony of this song against my life’s path. I’d like to state for the record, however, that no ex-lovers at all (and certainly none that were sworn to secrecy!) attended my wedding and, as you all know, my identity is out in the open for all to see (and read about in my blogs!) and so the context was a little different!

Still, I hadn’t listened to this song in eons. As I was listening to the record (as I do whenever I write these), when it came on I stopped writing and I found myself laughing out loud. It’s really funny!! I’m serious! I know I wrote it, but I had forgotten how funny it is and how many jokes sit couched in the lyrics. I also forgot to mention that we had a “Boinked The Bride” choir come into the studio. A handful of supporters in the Toronto area showed up one night and sang their hearts out. The laughter caught on tape during that session makes me smile. I’ve posted that song as well, so for those of you who have never heard it: click here.

Of course, I can’t write this blog without commenting on the album design. Once again, I worked with David Adshade, but for the first time in five album projects, I was able to pay him outright for his graphic design services. Hurrah!  Also, this design was the simplest of all to-date and only featured a little flap on the inside cover that folded inwards to simulate the open flap on a circus tent. To be honest, most people didn’t get it. It wasn’t the most brilliant of unique design schemes, but geez, I was running out of ideas! What I will say for it is this: it was not a big assembly project and that made it WAY easier on everyone!

The disc image features our juggling balls on one of David’s clocks. I love the effect. The inside tray card picture is by Gerry Mantha and is a live shot that I particularly like from The Ottawa Folk Festival in the summer of 2001. (Both of these are pictured above.) And, as I mentioned, the photos (taken by Suzy Malik) are of Lyndell and I walking on stilts. They were photographed both outdoors at the University of Toronto campus and indoors in the same venue (Buddies) where I released my very first record six years earlier! Finally, the back cover features a picture of me on the beach at the Apollo Bay Music Festival in Victoria in Australia. I was in the midst of doing a cartwheel. In my opinion, the album design is light and fun, full of sunshine and humour, and definitely fits the vibe of the music.

My only regret about the design is the cowboy hat. Do you know how many people ask me still if this is my country record? I really liked that hat and here I thought it was just stylish! I had no idea that one random fashion choice would result in my having to explain hundreds of times that, no, it wasn’t full of country songs!!

The album was released in July of 2002 at the then fairly new venue in Toronto called Hugh’s Room. I have since released several records there including “11:11” just this year. It’s a beautiful space. I remember the night well because my Nana and Mother came up for the last song and sang it with me just like they had in the studio. The audience melted. It was a beautiful and pristine moment that I’ll never forget.

So, it took me a year and a half to get a new record out and so I think my pace was slowing down a little. I was glad of that, personally, because the road work was growing more and more intense. I resolved then to wait at least another two full years before another album project.

And those two years truly flew by…

The Wage Is The Stage, 2000

At this point in the story, all other part-time jobs were no longer in the picture and music was my full-time career. That meant that we were spending more time on the road than we were in Toronto and working like maniacs. I mean, no one said that being a full-time musician is anything like any other full-time job! Instead, it’s like having two full-time jobs or working double shifts all the time!

In the summer of 1999, we did the longest tour that I’ve ever done. It was 7.5 weeks long and stretched from Ontario to Vancouver, south into the US as far as Santa Cruz, CA and then diagonally Northeast across the US and back up to Toronto. In fact, after that tour, we decided to try to always keep tours around the 6-week marker. Live and learn!

With Cheryl Reid and Lyndell Montgomery as an all-girl trio, I remember that tour well because I had my 25^th birthday on the road that summer, in Santa Cruz, CA in July. That night, we slept in a tent illegally (and unknowingly) set-up in a Brussels sprout patch only to be awakened the next morning by the truck of migrant workers that had come to pick the crops! I spoke about this memory in this CBC interview from last year when I was asked about strange sleeping experiences on the road. I’d have to say that it wasn’t my fondest birthday memory, but it makes for a good story!

Throughout the fall of 1999, we continued more regional touring of upstate NY and New England states, Ontario, Quebec, East Coast Canada, etc.  Y2K had everyone scared in the corporate sector, but we were just booking more and more shows for 2000 without a care in the world. We had no time to worry!

We were so busy, in fact, that we didn’t have a space in our schedule to do another studio recording despite the fact that we had many new songs that our audience members wanted recorded copies of at the shows.

That was why we decided to do a live recording. Most bands record a live album when they don’t have new material to offer. We had lots of new material (I have never suffered from writer’s block—quite the opposite, in fact; I’ve suffered from writing too many songs and regularly having to abandon songs in the studio!) and we were also becoming really sharp live. So, we combined both needs into one (touring and recording) and scheduled live recordings at three different concerts that summer throughout Canada: one in Edmonton, AB; one in Victoria, BC; and one in Toronto, ON.

All three recordings happened with different remote recording crews and it was a lot to organize, but it worked out! We steered our way back to Toronto after that summer with many boxes full of various master tapes to sort through in order to choose the songs (and the takes) we were going to showcase on the album.

Somehow we were introduced to John Switzer and approached him about mixing the project. I asked him how we met and he wrote this:

“I know the first time I saw you was one of your very early gigs, opening for someone at the Free Times Cafe [in Toronto]. Your parents were in the audience. I know that after that I followed your career and was very interested in how you grew as an artist and built your following. I don’t recall how it came to be that you asked me to mix your album; was it through Andrea Florian (I produced and mixed an album for her around that time)? Anyway I was definitely excited to work with you, because I liked the energy of your music and, basically, just thought you were really cool…”

John, with the better technical memory, also wrote this about the project:

“I remember that the material was recorded using Tascam DA-88 machines (8 tracks per machine, linkable for extra tracks, recorded on Hi-8 video cassettes). I don’t remember how many tracks there were.”

And when I asked him about whether he remembered any particular hurdles during the project, he wrote:

“I enjoyed the technical problem-solving challenge of mixing live recordings, of trying to bring in the clarity and finesse of the studio while at the same time retaining, even enhancing, the excitement of the live show.”

While I was listening to this album (my habit now when writing these blogs), I discovered that these are the things that I really like about the recording (as I’m trying to be positive rather than overly critical!):

• The recording of “Elbows” & “5$”– These were both taken from our Toronto show and feature the addition of Virginia West’s backing vocals, Cheryl partner at the time. A great vocalist, she added so much to the song with just one performance. What’s more, there’s a gentleness to my vocal delivery in this song and I think that’s because it was recorded at the end of the tour and I was tired! Still, what many of the other songs lack in relaxed vocals, this song has.

• The “Humility” track at the end makes me laugh still to this day because Cheryl, who was never one to swear, had a burst of profane energy before we did a re-start of $5. She took over the microphone in Victoria with some feisty instructions for the audience and we captured it for all the world to hear. I think she still cringes when she hears it, but I laugh every time!

• Lyndell’s violin on “Show Up Outside” is hauntingly beautiful. This was the last time that we recorded this song (three times a charm!) but I think it was truly a beautiful rendition here thanks to those swells on her strings.

• The outro to “Corporate Daddy” still makes me giggle too. This was the song about working other jobs rather than following our passions, which I really believe is one of the main paths to true happiness. A lot of people related to this song! The extended live outro talked about petty theft from corporations in the way of sticky notes and stationery and photocopying that many independent artists engage in when they have (paying) corporate jobs but still need to promote their independent (non-paying) careers. In this, I date myself terribly by mentioning “floppy discs”! If you listen carefully, you can hear that we scaled back the volume of the backing vocals of Lyndell and Cheryl singing “fuck the man wherever you can.” We figured we probably didn’t need to have that so loud in the mix!

• Cheryl’s prowess on the hand drum for “Pek” – the original recording of this song with Cheryl playing a dumbek. That original recording captures a certain freshness that the song had back then.

Snapshots, 2000

When we were gathering up the tracks to put on the record, it became clear to us very early on that we wouldn’t have enough space on the CD to put all the songs that we wanted to showcase. We had such elaborate arrangements of some of the older songs, as well, and they had become long tracks that took up too much space. We wanted to release these long tracks, but we didn’t have the option then to just release them digitally as extra ‘bonus’ tracks like we would have today.

We decided to simultaneously release an EP that included some of the older songs so that we could use this EP as a promotional tool. We put “Mental Breakdown,” “There, In Me,” and “Fatty Fatty” on the EP and then tacked on another new song at the end that was more of a fun, folk, sing-along piece called “My Personal Anthem.” It was the only non-live song on the album and I recorded it with just guitar and voice at John Switzer’s studio in Toronto. Anyway, I had never had an EP before and I wanted to have something smaller and lighter to mail to the media.

What I didn’t take into consideration, however, was the fact that the media viewed EPs as demos and generally wanted to hear the new material anyway. An EP is what young bands usually start out with and this was our fifth recording project! We also started to see this little EP as a non-representative body of work considering it mostly featured older songs. So, we merely sent it to a handful of media outlets before abandoning that plan. They sold alright live because people wanted the whole collection, and so we eventually manufactured them a second time, but the second pressing was a bit much and I still have about 200 of these suckers in storage!

This EP is the only audio release that didn’t get uploaded to iTunes, so I figure it’s pretty special and worth collecting. You can still order it through my website, but that’s the only place it’s available anymore.

We released both “The Wage Is The Stage” and “Snapshots” simultaneously at the now defunct Ted’s Wrecking Yard in December of 2000. A US artist named “Gooselove” was the opening act. That release was bittersweet in many ways because Cheryl had left the band as a result of The Great Van Fire of 2000. That’s a topic for a whole other blog, but suffice it to say that the experience of losing our precious “Coco” (the van) in a blazing fire in upstate New York left us all scarred and scared. Cheryl’s response was to quit the band. In her defense, it was a traumatic experience!

That happened in early October and between that event and the release date in December there was a one-month tour that was booked and expecting us. We did that fall tour with the very talented Michelle Josef who we had engaged to replace Cheryl and so, at the album launch concert, while Cheryl did most of the show, Michelle was featured on a few songs as well as a way to introduce her to our home audience.

All in all, the shows had to go on and the bookings were already in place. So, with or without Cheryl, the road life continued. We missed her, but we had a good time with Michelle too. As always, new players bring new inspirations and our journey was just starting anew with Michelle Josef whose musical touch influenced a whole new round of material.

Which of course sparked another album… that I’ll talk about tomorrow…

Permanent Marker, 1999

We started working on this project in the spring of 1999 and, by this time, Lyndell and I had been working with Cheryl Reid since the fall of 1998.

I remember that I was living in a basement apartment in the Toronto neighbourhood called Parkdale. I had moved into it in the fall of 1998 after having given up my previous apartment so that I could do the spring and summer tours of 1998 without having to worry about rent. Frankly, I couldn’t have done those tours if I had also had to pay housing costs. Those were the days of black and white choices: a place to live OR touring with my music. I chose the latter.

By this point, we had established ourselves as a trio that worked occasionally with various other instrumentalists included two rotating trombone players, John Jowatt and Danny Paradise. The trombone and the violin often did unison or harmony lines and the effects were really huanting and beautiful, especially live.

The other instrumentalist that we had the chance to work with in the studio was Dana Baitz, a keyboard and piano player who also had her own solo career in Toronto. Dana wasn’t a member of the band but she did perform at a few local shows with us after our release. Her additions to the tracks “Quickly” and “Voodoo” really made those tracks come alive on the record. As many of you know, I have worked with Dana on two other album projects: “Stiltwalking” (2002) and “11:11” (2011). I’m a huge fan of her playing style and overall musical touch.

We rehearsed regularly in that basement apartment, building the many intricate parts to the songs that make up this collection. As I listen to the album, I’m amazed at all of the key changes and odd tempos we programmed into the songs. It was like each song was a classical piece whose time and key signatures changed from line to line. In some cases, it really worked and created a lack of predictability that kept each song exciting. Of course, the fact that each song generally had a tempo or key change was, in fact, a form of predictability that I hadn’t noticed at the time!

Performing live, this approach was really effective. Our shows were not stale or boring in the least. We kept our audiences on the edge of their seats because no song was safe from the schizophrenic changes that had become part of my signature sound.

With my mature ears now, however, I have to admit that not all of the changes were, let’s just say, musically enjoyable. Some are jarring and disappointing. Since I’m so removed from these songs now, as I listen to this album today while I write this, I’ve already felt on a few occasions that the melody I was enjoying shouldn’t have been cut off and discarded so casually by my younger self!

One notable track is #13, or the hidden track on the album called “Rules.” It was a remake of the same song that appeared on the album “Can’t Corner Me,” although on that previous album, it was a slower, more acoustic duo piece and hadn’t yet been fully developed. This hidden track, on the contrary, was fully developed with the band and got a lot of attention from media and listeners. It probably could have been placed in the second or third position on the album as it stood out as one of the catchiest, most memorable and fun tracks in the collection.

Why did I hide it? I know exactly why:

I wrote the song to poke fun at pop songs. I knew what it took, in terms of structure, to write a formulaic pop song. It had the “right” changes, the “right” placement of melodic licks (thanks to the violin & trombone), and enough groove to make people dance. The thing is, however, that I really resented this simplicity in pop music and was firmly (and I dare say, detrimentally) opposed to showcasing what I deemed to be a simple, common denominator approach to songwriting. I was so committed to pushing unconventional song structures and/or challenging lyrics that I couldn’t stomach the idea of giving this track a ‘visible’ presence on the record.

Funny, though, that when I listen back to it, the wacky jam and spoken word clip stuffed into the middle of the song, as well as the final key changes at the end, were all ways that I purposely aimed at puncturing its pop perfection. The band even added one of their own punctures in the second verse when they switched to 3/4 time over top of two 4/4 bars after I sang the lyrics “no more than three chords and no less.” After these irreverent little touches, it was so far from a pop song that it could very well have stood up against the other songs and wouldn’t have appeared out of place in the least!!

Over the years, I’m glad to report that I’ve developed greater openness to all forms of music and an appreciation for the intricacies that can exist in simplicity. I also grew tired of being deemed an “inaccessible” songwriter. It took me until around 2006, with the release of “The Dirty Pulse,” to really, actively and consciously approach an album with the aim of accessibility and radio attention. And ever since then, as well, I’ve wanted to write songs that stay in people’s heads and take a listener where they want to go. I guess you could say that I’ve become more pop over the years, which has been a radical choice considering the source!

Once again, I worked with David Adshade and Suzy Malik on the album design. For the photo shoot, the four of us walked over central Toronto where we got great imagery of our city’s urban art and feel. The back cover photo shows a streetcar in motion behind us, a typical Toronto sight.

My Mother, especially, hated the front cover of this record. I had made a face at the camera and the photo was so fun that I jumped on it as the cover shot. I wanted the album to have a light, silly feel. My hair, at that time, rotated between many different “Tank Girl” styles and, on this day, I was sporting my “Alphalpha” look (From “The Little Rascals”) with a single spike pointing to the sky. Just like my rejection of pop music at that time, I also rejected the notion that I should appear done up and beautiful on the cover of an album. I wanted to reject “branding” in the way of my image, just as much as I resisted being branded as a specific genre artist.

Yes, this was all about resistance, it seems.

I called the album “Permanent Marker” in the spirit of graffiti artists who were making their permanent mark on the city in all kinds of radical ways. I thought of independent music as having a similar ability to impact people. My friend Adam Slayer contributed the CD and tray card graphics with the graffiti writing. (Incidentally, Adam has been my friend for years and he was the person who designed my very first website!) Also, the watermark image on the black & white side of the liner notes that contain the lyrics is a photograph of me pretending to kiss the cheek of a graffiti face on an alley wall just off of Queen Street West in Toronto. This face was there for years and may even still be there!

The album was recorded, once again, in the “live-off-the-floor” style with Karen Kane, but this time there were some overdubs with the other players that I mentioned. I recall that we had one day off in between tracking the main parts and laying the overdubs. Since those overdubs included my harmonies, I remember standing in my basement apartment with a dictaphone in one hand and the remote control for the stereo in the other while I listened and sang harmonies along to the lead lyrics. I recorded them as I practiced and then dutifully copied down all of the corresponding time codes on the dictaphone. I came to the studio the next day with my recorded reminder of what to sing tucked safely in my pocket.

In terms of payment for this record, Karen agreed to a partial points system on the gross sales because our budget wasn’t broad enough to afford her services this time. It was 3% deal but I was foggy as to the details. I asked her if she remembered any more clearly and this is what she wrote:

“In regards to the royalty you paid me, here’s what happened. The first album, I was paid for my work with no royalty. For the second album, I believe I worked for a smaller fee and we agreed to 2 payments a year (one in May and one in December) based on sales. In 2001, I came to a gig and in the envelope you gave me was a check for the royalty payment AND also a letter asking me if I felt comfortable with stopping the payments. What you didn’t know at the time, was that I came to your gig that night SPECIFICALLY to inform you that I would be letting you off the hook for anymore payments. I felt I was appropriately compensated for my work. So we were both on the same wavelength and didn’t even know it!”

So, I owe Karen a lot of gratitude for taking only what she felt she had earned and not extending us further. When I signed our contract, I hadn’t thought about setting a term and I learned the hard way that this is an important feature to all royalty agreements!

And, of course, in regards to the liner notes, I had now set myself up for having to do an interesting or weird fold with my album graphics. The fans expected it and I had trapped myself into those expectations with my own creativity in the packaging department to date.

I chose the “Mad Magazine” approach for this one and just did vertically folded strips on the inside cover.

They all created a picture and then the picture would fan outwards like an accordian when stretched, revealing other images tucked behind. The folding technique had nothing to do with the album concept, but what could I do? It was impossible to equate the appropriateness of folding in the corners for “Can’t Corner Me”!

I’ll add one more note about a song on this record that is worth mentioning: “Water Is The Cure-All.”

This was a co-write with a friend of Adam Slayer’s named Matt Hall. Matt was an avid composer of beats and grooves on the computer and, even then, I had a keen interest in electronic music that I had not yet explored (and didn’t explore until “Lentic,” 2009). He wrote this piece and asked me if I had any ideas as to what to do with it. Lyndell also came to his place and laid down some electric violin and I added some guitar parts. Together, we tailored the arrangement and I took it home and wrote the lyrics.

When I listen back to the piece, I’m a little spooked by it. Speaking of the days of black and white choices, I had finished my university education and had distinctly chosen music over China as though there was no option for both, as though the colour “grey” didn’t exist. Yet, this piece is a calling to China in so many ways as though I’m willing that part of myself to not be forgotten–by me! Seems that I was already doubting my own self-imposed dichotomies.

I start the song with an attempt at an archaic Chinese sentence (I now know that you can’t mix classical Chinese with contemporary Chinese and that this made it grammatically indecipherable, by the way!) and then go on to talk about the notion of being jaded, but through the image of jade as a stone, washed up “upon an Eastern shore.”

The first verse:

cannot be so different
be so different from you
cannot be the same
what is real is showing through
like a worn out piece of cloth
worn smooth on skin like stone
this is jaded sense of self when left alone

Seems to me like I was hiding behind poetry to lament my desire to be in China. I think I was trying to say that I wanted to be like everyone else and be happy in Canada, but I had this calling to go somewhere else (China) and, even though it was contradictory to everything I was doing, I had to admit it, especially to myself in the alone times.

How could I have known that in exactly 11 years I would be writing this blog from Beijing having just released a bilingual record on “Eastern shores” and having since chosen a name that contains the character for “jade”?  [子玉: the second character means "jade"] Not to mention the fact that when I first came to China, I was truly jaded and tired and felt beaten down by the industry. This song’s second verse is all about challenging the “powers that be” regarding their support or lack thereof for the arts industry.  So, when I came to China for the first time, I truly needed to get away from it all and recover. China offered me that. I called my first release after coming to China “Lentic,” which means “of or related to still waters.” At this time (2009), I was aware of all the healing I needed to do. “Water is the Cure-All” as a song title, therefore, seems eerily connected to what came a decade later.

Sometimes stones that wash up on the shore are all the more smooth and precious because of their having been worn down over the miles of ocean…

The final lyrics of the song are the most powerful to me. And again, there was something about these lyrics even then that made me never willingly analyze them. I wrote them, I sang them, I released them, and then we never performed this song because there was no DJ in the band! Perhaps because I could just write it and forget about it, I opened a door to some prophetic insight about my future:

jaded art, clean and divinely shiny green
washed smooth upon an Eastern shore
i will soon be like a stone, difference owned
looking for more and not the same, difference claimed

“Soon” is relative. I’d say that letting another 8 years go by before I finally got up the nerve to go to China and then taking 11 years to figure out what I was talking about in some 1999 lyrics is “soon” when you consider the breadth of a lifetime!

“Permanent Marker” was released at the Toronto Dance Theatre in September of 1999 on the Downtown East Side just off of Parliament Street. The space was a beautiful theatre and we did two nights of performances that were both well attended. Karen Kane came and graciously did our sound that night, but I also remember that Jerry Tupis, the studio owner at “Sound Around Studios” was there. He was the studio engineer/assistant on this record and also the previous one, “Can’t Corner Me.” I’m guessing that Jerry may have provided some of the equipment and may have been assisting Karen that night too. I also recall that I wore a dress—a white slip—along with big black boots sporting strips of safety tape and lumberjack socks!! My last random memory of this show is that Lyndell, Cheryl and I rotated instruments for the “anti-pop” song I spoke about above: “Rules.” I played drums, Cheryl played violin, and Lyndell played guitar. Rough but fun!

Good memories. Good times.

And tomorrow, we hit the road…

****************************************************************************************************************************

Can’t Corner Me, 1998

InsectInside had been out for just under a year when my feet started to itch to record again. It was early spring when I started to look around for a studio and some options that would accommodate my new band.

My introduction to a full-band vibe when I played with Lyndell and a drummer at the 2007 release party (whose name was Ange Holmes but who only worked with us for a couple of gigs) had expanded into a fuller band that now featured two brothers, one on drums and one on trumpet (Russ and Chris Stadey, respectively), Lyndell on violin (that she often ran through an octave pedal and plucked like a bass) and me on guitar and voice. All of us are photographed on the back cover of the album: bald-headed Chris behind me, Lyndell crouched down with her hair scooped back making it look like she had a flat top, and Russell leaning against the wall.

We had been performing around Toronto and also had travelled out East in Canada as our first official tour in the fall of 1997. Around this time, we were gearing up for a big tour in the summer of 1998—the first tour of Central and Western Canada that featured two major festivals!—and so I knew it was time to make sure we had a recording that reflected the band’s sound.

I’m not sure how I was introduced to Karen Kane “Mix Mama” as a possible engineer/co-producer on my album project, but I liked her immediately. I was thrilled at the idea of working with a fellow (non-hetero-identified) woman, too, especially one with her level of experience and knowledge. I asked Karen what her impression of me was when she first met me and she wrote this:

“My immediate impression of you when we first met was the fact that you were NOT a typical singer/songwriter. You did not follow the rules in ‘standard’ songwriting. You were a breath of fresh air. I saw your passion and commitment to making music the way YOU wanted to. The first gig I saw, you could hear a pin drop, the audience was mesmerized.”

Karen knew of a small studio on the edge of Mississauga that would accommodate our low budget and we went about organizing a spring recording session. I remember it well. I was going through a major breakup at the time and remember feeling weary and unsteady. Lyndell was a good friend who kept encouraging me to eat and keep my focus on the project rather than the sadness that was at my heels.

We both recorded and mixed the project in a marathon three days, all ‘live-off-the-floor’ with only the vocals and guitar isolated. I sang and played at the same time, though, and so they bled into each other and couldn’t be overdubbed if there were mistakes. All the other instruments were in the same room: drums, trumpet, violin. The trumpet player, Chris, sang many of his harmonies through the trumpet mic! The album was recorded to ADAT and then mixed to DAT tapes.

This album features a re-make of “Show Up Outside” that originally appeared as the first track on my “Self-Titled” release. It’s also the first track on this album and is an epic stream-of-consciousness piece that we all loved to play and continued to develop for the next several years. It also features a really raw song called “Nesting” that I wrote over a period of fifteen minutes just a few days before the sessions began. I knew it needed to be included and I performed it only once in the studio and used that first and only take. I’d argue that “Nesting” was the strongest song on the record, but people also really loved “Mental Breakdown” and “Ridiculous.”

Speaking of “Mental Breakdown,” I was never happy with the recording of this song on “Can’t Corner Me,” which may explain why we re-recorded it two more times! We played it too slow that day and our performance in the studio didn’t seem to capture the song’s energy. It wasn’t until it was re-released for the third time on the 2006 release “The Dirty Pulse,” that I felt this song finally found its rightful sound. I guess sometimes songs need to mature into themselves just like we do! Besides, they say “the third time’s a charm”!

The funny thing is, when I was planning that first tour across Central and Western Canada, it hadn’t occurred to me that trying to get gigs and media attention with “InsectInside” wasn’t exactly the smartest of plans. Like usual, my focus was on the fans and I knew we needed a new album that reflected the band’s sound to sell when we were touring, but the planning stages for the tour didn’t register as equally important.

Therefore, I had sent out copies of “InsectInside” to every major festival and recognized music venue that I could locate across the country. (My student loans were depleting as a result!) When we arrived in these places that summer, however, the music had evolved so quickly from the music that they had received in the mail that we regularly confused people. What’s more, the “bedroom-style recording” (a quote I’ll always remember from one of the less flattering reviews of InsectInside,) not to mention its young songwriting, did nothing to help my reputation in Canada. Many presenters heard this as representative of what I had to offer, period, and locked it in.  In other words, it took years to open their ears again to how my sound and music was evolving and maturing.

First impressions are powerful and, if I were to go back and do it again, I would not have blitzed the music community with my sophomore release that way. I would have waited a few years before aiming for such high heights. Being organized and business savvy was essential, to be sure, and went on to frame my whole ethic around this independent industry, but giving the music a chance to develop into itself before implementing those business skills—at least so comprehensively—would have been a better choice. At the time, however, I was anxious and eager and unable to see the forest for the trees. Live and learn!

The release party was at The Rivoli in Toronto—a venue that is still going strong on Queen Street West. It was in June, just after my convocation ceremony when I was officially a graduate of the University of Toronto. The opening act was a young artist from Ottawa who was just starting out her career named Kathleen Edwards. She hadn’t done much travelling and I still remember her rushing across Queen Street to catch up to us when we were off to get dinner, breathlessly thanking us for having her in Toronto and excited about the show that night. She was fantastic, too, doing a brand of aggressive folk that she later set aside for a more country-blues approach to songwriting. We didn’t really stay in touch after that but I switched on a hotel room television in some random city after a show many years later and there she was on “Late Night with David Letterman.” (Google tells me that was in 2003.) You just never know where people will end up when you cross their paths! I was really happy for her and watched her whole performance.

So, now I had three albums: a cassette and two CDs. All of them had weird folds and time-consuming assembly, although “Can’t Corner Me” was a little better than the rest. I manufactured an odd-shaped square design with the CD insert (sourcing that strange square design had to happen through a different printing house!) and then folded all the corners in as a reflection of the album’s title, one that I came up with to express my rejection of being boxed into style categories. .

The “unkempt” that is written on the t-shirt on the album’s back cover (see pic above) was photoshopped in, by the way. I’ve always wanted a t-shirt that said that. On a whim, I asked David Adshade (my graphic designer) to put that on my shirt and he agreed. I made me happy! I also felt like this was the toughest possible photo I had ever taken. I felt totally righteous and street savvy just looking at it. To me, the picture positively growls. Of course, at that time in my angsty life, that made me happy! Don’t forget that I was nursing a broken heart and so my defenses were at their max. In fact, you’ll also catch the “Oscar The Grouch” t-shirt that I was wearing that shows its decal on the folded-corner liner notes as well as the backwards, topless, warrior-like stance I’m holding in the image on the disc itself, with my guitar strapped to my (then not-yet-tattooed skin) like a shield of armour.

Suzy Malik, once again, was the photographer for this project. She also drew a fantastic cartoon that she called the “screaming guitar baby.” I loved it and we placed it in the montage on the tray card, right against the only image of me on that record in which I am laughing. I was (and am) a huge Joni Mitchell fan and so every time I view that combination of the screaming guitar baby with its puddle of tears set against my laughing image, I get Joni’s lyrics in my head: “laughing and crying, you know it’s the same release.”

By this time, David and I had worked out a deal on the graphic design. I never had enough money to pay him up front, but every year I would tally my sales and give him 2% of the gross. We actually worked with this system right up until 2007 when he agreed to stop collecting yearly royalties. I was grateful because in the early planning stages, I hadn’t thought to set a term. It could have lasted forever!

Interesting fact about this record is that we never could get the blue green of the paper to match the blue green of the disc. The first run was slightly off and the second run was terribly off. Eventually, we gave up and made the CD itself red. So, if you have a blue-green disc, then you have one of the first or second runs of the project. If you have the red disc, you have any runs that came after it.

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InsectInside, 1997

It was mid autumn when I got back in touch with Chris Leonard and asked him if he’d be interested in working on album #2. He was. We began again, in the same style as before with weekly evening sessions, but this time there were occasional guests in the studio.

Besides, Lyndell Montgomery, I had been playing with a few other players throughout the previous six months including Kieron Daly on percussion (who also worked with Kevin Watson with whom he later formed the band “Brazen Angelz“) and Felix Deak (who went on to play with an internationally successful baroque ensemble called “I Furiosi“).

The studio was too small for a full band, but with overdubs we were able to get everyone’s additional parts recorded. I also played piano (well, keyboards) on the second album and, even though piano is my first instrument, I hadn’t been performing on it and so recording my piano songs felt new and exciting. The piano songs featured on this record include “Little Girl” (a song that isn’t about my relationship with my parents, but was meant as a general call to parents to accept and love their children no matter what!) and “Awkward Lover.”

I had a lot of fun recording this record. I remember a lot of laughter in Chris’s little basement studio. When we recorded “Swooshi, Swooshi” —the song that became the “hit” off that record because it was a humorous, catchy song about female shaving habits—Chris turned on the hose in his laundry tub in the adjoining basement laundry room and we recorded an ambient track of running water to simulate a bathtub. Lyndell was there for that recording too, which made it possible to feel a sense of camaraderie while singing live. You can hear the fun we had–the giggling and laughter–reflected in the vocal tone. The “Chips” track at the end of that record truly proves that we were goofing around!

Lyndell and I were becoming fast friends. (Even though we eventually were partners, we were good friends for a couple of years first!) She was the additional musician who was most featured on that record and we even had a co-written song called “Fly” on which she is featured singing harmonies and playing violin. It was a joy to travel uptown so regularly with someone else to talk to and I started to feel the early pangs of wanting musical companionship in a more permanent way. She even came with me several times when she wasn’t playing, just to keep me company.

Lyndell was the first musician I ever worked with who asked me the magic question: “When’s the next show?” I’ll never forget the first time she asked it, too. Finally, I felt I had found someone to share in this journey who was as eager to work with me as I was to work with her! It was a true gift.

Chris, once again, was flexible with studio fees. When the album was released, I kept half of the sales income for him and put half aside for what I knew would be future band costs (and eventually became the costs of album #3). I paid him in small installments once again and eventually he told me that if I had more to pay him, that I should simply make a donation to a local charity instead. His generosity and kindness and support during this period on my professional journey truly enabled me to build the early foundations of my career. Without these two albums to sell, I would have had no way to earn capital for the third project, “Can’t Corner Me,” which was accompanied by a lot of touring as well. I truly owe my start to Mr.Chris Leonard!

“InsectInside” was to become my first CD. To be honest, I didn’t imagine that there would be another CD. When I was making it, I thought of it as just “making a CD” the way that I had “made a cassette” a year earlier. For this reason, I approached the project as an archive of everything that I had written since the release of my “Self-Titled” cassette and had no sense of building a theme or a style into the body of work.  It was simply a musical collection not unlike a personal diary.

I’ll admit that it lacked focus!

But yes, it was a CD. In just one year, the attitude towards independent artists making CDs had changed and it was now possible to manufacture one through the same company that had printed my cassette tapes. The cost, however, was about $2300—more expensive than it is today! The printing process wasn’t digital either and all the liner notes needed to be exported to film first with its many colour layers through a separate company. It was quite a process!

“InsectInside” was so named because I felt (and feel) a kinship with bugs; I wondered regularly if I might not have a bug spirit trapped inside my human body. I have always hated to kill them and especially hate the use of insecticide to do it. I was living in a small bachelor apartment that had been preemptively sprayed for roaches without my knowledge one day by the landlord and, forever afterwards, I felt sickened by the fumes as though I, too, had been poisoned.

Of course, this title had nothing to do with a single song on the record (and “Fly” is a stretch!). It made little sense to anyone. The notion of bugs was only reflected in the design of the liner notes that feature a winged bug drawn by Tali Bourdeau on one side and an enhanced picture of me looking like a winged bug fanned out on the other, all held together with the type of pin that clips pages together but still allows them to spin.

And yes, I’ll admit it, this design was even more of a pain in the butt to assemble as “Self-Titled”!! The design was implemented, patiently, by David Adshade of Toronto, photos by Suzy Malik. David I worked together for many years and Suzy and I continue to work together, having just completed the design of “11:11″!

When the album was completed, I had to manually cut the liner notes into three squares, punch a hole in the top corner, insert the pin and then affix a sparkly sticker on the pin head. This was because I wanted to match the pin head with the spines. The CD’s spines on both front and back featured two sparkly stickers framing the album’s title. To me, it was an effect to both mimic insect wings and make the CDs jump off the shelf at people when they were looking for it because it would catch the light differently than all the others. It was my marketing mastermind.

These stickers came from pinstripe for cars and I bought a huge roll of it in bulk and felt proud of my innovation. Of course, because each CD tray card featured two spines, one on each side, each required two one-inch strips to be placed carefully on the paper tray card on either side of the album title. Then, once the four stickers were affixed, the tray card needed to be put back into the case, the case reassembled, and the liner notes also inserted after they had been cut and clipped together with the sparkly pin…

Needless to say, after the first 1000 of these units, I decided that all re-prints should just have yellow strips on the spine. Yellow and black, I figured, was insect-like enough! Innovative or not, it was exhausting! So, if you have one of these CDs with sparkly stickers on the spines, you have one of the first manufacturing run copies! (I still have a few back in Canada, but unfortunately I couldn’t photograph them all the way over here in Beijing! Here’s a picture of the yellow-spine version.)

That was the beginning of my “assembly parties,” which were gatherings of my friends for pizza and beer and big vats of veggie chili in exchange for the collective “worker bee” assembly model. My friends were amazing about this, and after taking part in my crazy projects, I’m shocked that many of them are still my friends! For years,  many of them would follow up any of my party invitations with the clarifying question: “Is it a party party, or is it a CD assembly party?” Ha! After this CD, I can’t blame them!

A couple of additional notes about the design:

Tucked in the bottom right-hand corner of the tray card, is a picture of me posed in front of one of my many LPs by Joni Mitchell that I used to display on my wall as art. At that time, I was fairly sure I could have been her “Little Green,” as I’d heard she’d given up a child for adoption and I was thinking that maybe, just maybe, my parents hadn’t been fully honest with me about my origins! Since that time, of course, Joni was reunited with her daughter and it turns out that she isn’t me. Alas!

Also in the liner notes, tucked in the top corners where the pin sits–in the white space that was necessary to create the spinning images–is both a picture of my neck tattoo, the only one I had at that time that features some stylized Chinese characters at the bottom, and the Chinese characters for my previous Chinese name. This was the name that my university professor gave me in first-year university. I’ve since changed it because it was such a boring foreigner’s name (in meaning) and I wanted something more poetic and ‘Chinese.’

In any case, I find it interesting that I hid these in those hard-to-see places on my CD, as though I was saying subconsciously (or graphically!) that this Chinese part of my personality was still present, just hidden, much like that bug inside of me. And, to pummel the analogy even more, I definitely had ‘the bug’ to go to China back then. I was studying Chinese when I was recording this album and the dream to use my studies and travel to China one day was definitely palpable.

The CD was released at The Music Gallery (old location on Front Street) in the summer of 1997. I decided to make the show a full-scale event that featured dance, skits, film, a full-band (my first ever attempt at playing with a drummer), an MC, a stage manager and a lighting technician. It was a beautiful theatre space and so all of this was possible there. I enlisted the help of my community and, I’m amazed to say, they all came together and volunteered to help me make it happen. It was a huge production that even needed a dress rehearsal, but it came off beautifully.

After all, I figured it was the only CD I’d ever make and I might as well make a big production out of it.

Little did I know!