Recordings

Things old, things new, sometimes demos...this is a rotating page of my recorded music.

Carried Away

Here, I am just a child
Making arrangements with the wind
Sights set on going somewhere
Not visible around the bend
A smile hints 
Of things to come
And feelings that will never go away

Calm waiting in the stillness
Understanding of all things
Awake, wander through the morning
With dandelions on a string
They float away
On the wind
The days follow them astray
A smile hints 
Of things to come
And feelings that might drift away
My life has begun
​
Time, curious and awkward
Soaking in a bitter brine
Can make a perfect stranger
Into a lover over time
Carried away, on the wind
The moments influence the days
A beautiful and crooked path
When you take the pain away

Here, I am just a child
Making arrangements with the wind

Turbulent Flow

This is a track written by myself and one of the amazing young musicians that I work with. Baeden Shendebray is 16 and he and I were invited to present at a symposium about the performing arts ​in rural Ontario in October of 2016 as well as perform an original set of music for the Gala event. This track was our encore! A song improvised in the moment, then re-written quickly, and then re-recorded recently with the help of our great and talented freind Serena Eades on the Fiddle.  Truly one of my favourite songs I've been a part of, and I love singing this one. Feels like truth the whole way through and that; for me, is the goal if there is one.  Snow hands made during our trip to Halliburton, Ontario.

Lucinda (Acoustic Demo)

This was a song I wrote as a dare. I was arguing with a freind that I felt I could write a song like Lucinda Williams and sing with that kind of a drawl....this is what I came up with, and I got rid of the drawl and made it my own. This acoustic version was recorded for a band to learn the song when we had a few gigs booked. 

Manifestion is a mighty thing!

Asterisk*

A song written on my beloved 1960 Yamaha ukulele. It was lifted from the woods during a performance last summer. Pretty sure someone just thought it was a lost kids toy. This was a song written in a backyard in Surrey with planes flying overhead and me asking my brother-in-law about golf references. What, like a "dirty birdie?" he said. Yep, like that, and I would put it in the song. The title refers to reading the small print.

                                                                                           Andy Kaufman returns  

I work with kids and improvise songs with them everyday. This is one from a few years back I recently found. Coulter had been coming to me for guitar lessons for about a year. I always throw kids right into the fire of recording as soon as they can 
play a few chords. This was Coulter's first time playing guitar using a delay pedal. There was a story in the news that day about Andy Kaufman's daughter announcing he was not really dead. Stuff like that floats around in my head and comes out in random song lyrics. Me bashing on the drums while singing on this one!

Pontiac

Pontiac. The hit! This song was written for the 2011 Rainforest Circus event. I played all the instruments on this, and then took out the main Ukulele (played through a delay pedal) and vocal, and then sang and played along to the backing track live in the woods, while hoping around in-between the characters here. More music over at the Rainforest Circus site HERE.

It's too late

I run the Sound Studio on the Sunshine Coast which affords me the great experience of mentoring and collaborating with young people on all kinds of things. Sessions move very quickly and I work with 25 kids a week, so there's often not time to work on things too much. We make a decision and live by it. This is a track based on a great open tuning riff by Teagan Marshall, and I made up some words during the demo recording.

I later went back, listened to the track and wrote down the words I had made up,  asking Teagan to write a verse. We worked on an outro and tried it a few times, and that was it.
We recorded it on a Saturday afternoon - drums, vocals and guitar live off the floor and then Tea put some more guitar on, a piano line and e-bow. 
I added bass and more vocals, and tada! 
Super proud of this one. 
There are lots more improvised collaborations over at the Soundspace website.

Put forth a dream

A track from the remix I did of my good friend Marlin's CD called "Happy Face Math." Again, I set up a few things such as a synth, casio keyboard, sampler (with horse sounds) vinyl, and the VHS film "When we were kings." Also an iPod with the great Italian Violinist Silvia Mandolini, and a tape cassette of me calling into a radio show when I was in my 20's. What you hear here, is exactly what I heard when I was flying things around. It was exciting.Listening to music for the first time but being in the middle of it. Later, $45 in 1954 Canadian bills fell out of a "stories of the bible" vinyl record I was using. Some of the accidental timing on this was just crazy. There's no way I could make this stuff up.