Open Hearts is a Valentine's show at the El Mocambo in Toronto with all proceeds going to support Amnesty International. Should be a very cool gig! On the bill is Blurred Vision, Joel Lightman, Chris Bottomley & Brainfudge, and yours truly.
Tickets are $15 at the door / $10 with a can of food. Thursday, February 14th. Doors at 8pm.
Wow. Elvis Monday is a classic Toronto institution. The night's open-door policy leads to some pretty execrable bands hitting the stage though. Its sheer randomness is part of its charm, but sometimes finding good music takes on lottery-odds proportions.
Our end-of-night slot gave us a fine vantage point for the surreally inclined. Lindi Ortega opened things up, and she was great! Country-inflected honey-suckle pop in a very spare performance. Good stuff. Next up was the very eclectic Allie Hughes. Interesting, jazz-inflected art-rock, kind of like if Tori Amos had studied opera and was given to moments of periodic punk Tourette's.
From there it was a war of attrition as the bands did their best to clear the room. In short order, we ran an indie-art-punk gauntlet from People of Canada to K Controllers to Gangrene and Blue. People of Canada is a one-man oddity featuring Alexander Jarvis Squire chirping tunes about garbage day and getting your prostate checked, while strumming an out-of-tune processed ukulele. Cute and quirky, especially if your desire is to see the closest thing to Tiny Tim we'll have in our lifetime. K Controllers were a raw indie duo in semi Jack and Meg mode, except for a laptop providing programmed beats. They were okay for the four songs they played. Then came Gangrene and Blue (the other pic here). Words cannot do them justice. Picture a half-dozen college boys in the common room of their dorm, banging on bongos, hooting on a recorder, jangling teeth-jarring tuneless guitar chords as their self-appointed Jim Morrison in a Bill Cosby sweater guru mumbled incoherently into a mic. Astonishing - really, check their Myspace for a taste. Adam, the beleaguered sound tech, let the nightmare unspool for three grinding ten-minute dirges before cutting them off at the knees. But the damage was done.
We hauled our gear onstage for the bravest souls who somehow endured that ungodly barrage. We barreled through a tight set, made some new friends, and consoled ourselves that well, I think we're still trying to console ourselves.
You win your fans one at a time, they say. This time it was literal.
Over on Facebook you can find an interview Lindsay and I did on ThatRadio.com. The interview's from last September, just before we played the Great Canadian Band Challenge gig at the Hard Rock. It's amusing to hear the hosts say "you guys are gonna win for sure", seeing as we didn't, but hey, it's still a pretty good interview! Check it out on my Facebook Fan Page.
There's also a really raw demo of "The Prisoner" up there, that I recorded solo in Garageband. It's rough as fuck, but if you like hearing the genesis of an idea, that's as primordial as they come!
The album was a lot of work. Like nearly two years. I recorded it with Marc Koecher producing, out of his west end basement studio. We got into a great groove, working every couple of nights, getting together to lay down the bits and pieces that would take shape as All of Us Cities.
We first met when I was making a short film with Paul Thompson, a buddy from the Cinema Studies program at U of T. The flick was called Where the Wild Things Go. It was a sombre mood piece, a twenty-minute serial killer thriller about a bar infamous for its nefarious clientele of mass murderers. Marc approached us via an ad we'd posted on the internet calling for crew. He was interested in doing the soundtrack for the film, but we were nowhere near that stage. A year later, the film complete, we reconnected. Following Paul's suggestion of a score in the vein of Bernard Hermann (Psycho, Taxi Driver), Marc put together a fantastic string soundtrack that propelled the latter half of the film with an energy that was both spooky and convulsive. We also needed some background music for the bar scenes, something jukebox appropriate. I dug into my grab-bag of dusty demos and came up with a track called "Stay Too Long". Marc and I did a rushed collaboration to lay it down, but more important we set the stage for the album that would come.
With the film wrapped up, I sent Marc a mess of demos in the fall of 2005. Among them were the early demos for "The Prisoner", "Starstruck" and "Dallas", as well as a few others that fell by the wayside. As we began recording, I laid down most of the guitar tracks and the vocals. I enlisted Chris Osti of The Action Mob and The Hugh Dillon Redemption Choir to play bass. I knew Chris from previous Toronto bands, me in Mountain Mama and him in Audiobomb. Chris was great, happy to help out and a solid guy. The bassline that he and Marc put together for "Starstruck" is a testament to great, simple melodic playing. Chris moved on to other projects as Marc and I toiled away. In the end, Marc played bass for eight of the tracks that made All of Us Cities, as well as keys, synths, a few extra guitars here and there, and some incredibly realistic drum programming. Yeah. Those drums are programmed. Zack, my drummer now, was impressed when he found that out.
Recording was long, but deeply satisfying. Trudging through bitter winter, blustery thaws or the burnished heat of summer, there was a steady, cyclic rhythm to our work. Now it's done and there's a whole new slew of work to be done, putting a band together and gigging and spreading the word and letting the synchronicity of things just happen.
But as to that record, All of Us Cities, my deep gratitude to Marc for all his work in helping to realize such a solid album. Thanks to Chris for his help, to Tim Branton for his great mastering job at Joao Carvalho, to William Mokrynski for his brilliant photography that adorns the cover, and to Will Skol for a clean, understated CD design.
Now I'm just pushing the record, like a paper-boat on the water, waiting to see if this fragile craft catches the stream.
So my friends are always asking me, how do you spend your days anyway? (Stop squirming, KC!!) This is as good a response as any....
Sitting at my computer, making bizarre images for no reason. Which ultimately wend their way onto some site or other to help further the cause. You can see my office assistants Rocky (in red) and Arnie (in metropolitan black) are hard at it too. It's a demanding life, I tells ya.... Here we can safely say is my peaceful harbour as I throw the bricks around that might one day assemble a rockstar-ish edifice. Either that or I'm taking one hell of a long vacation!
