I decided to start a new series as part of this blog, giving advice on surviving life as an ultra indie musician, based on my experiences with The Miss Bennets and based on my 10ish years (OMG) of obsessively following and supporting independent Canadian musicians. I hope someone out there finds this useful or at least entertaining. Lets Begin!
Chapter one: Finding sweet musician digs
Our lovely 100 and something year old apartment in Halifax
Finding the perfect pad is hard enough for a regular person, but if you're a musician its even more of an uphill battle. First of all, you have no money. This makes it difficult to put down first and last months rent on an apartment and generally being poor limits how nice a place you're going to find in any city.
I didn't watch the Grammy's. I definitely can not sit through the several hours of ego parading, self- congratulating, and god- thanking "musician" acceptance speeches. But I did watch clips afterwards, so YAY to Adele, in my opinion the one of the only true artists at that level of fame. Also yay to Bon Iver and haha to all the ignorant masses who didn't know who he is and called him "Bonny Bear," really?! There were actually some good performances, although wtf to Niki Minaj, that girl is terrifying, what was that shit show? How can you call something a song when there is no melody?
Seeing the Beach Boys perform was super endearing. Brian Wilson looked confused about being on stage again but also really excited. The overall lead up to their performance with Maroon 5 and Foster the People was pretty cool. Mike Foster definitely didn't do his best vocal performance ever, which is too bad because he has a great falsetto, but I think he was affected by stage- fright because he had somewhat of a terrified expression on his face.
The Beach Boys in their hay day were a magnificent group and Brian Wilson is one of the greatest songwriters in pop music ever. Their harmonies are unreal, and have influenced our music to a degree, particularly in our song "I'm too young to have your baby, baby." I love love love female pop harmonies, but I reallllllyyy love man- harmonies. It is my not so secret dream to one day have a all-man backing choir, bearded and dressed in PLAID. yessssss! So in that spirit I thought I'd share a selection of my favourite Man- choirs (for lack of a better term).
Bon Iver manages to consistently create new and wonderful ways of performing this beautiful song. This example is so simple yet wonderful. When we went to Claire's parents oceanside cottage and recorded "Ballads from the Boudoir," after a long day of hard work, we would relax in the evenings listening to "For Emma, forever ago" light the fire, and sit in the rocking chairs reading. Just thinking about it now makes me feel sooo relaxed and cozy, siiigghh.
Speaking of a cabin on the sea, I love this video of Stan Rogers. Stan Rogers is one of the greatest Canadian songwriters and his rich baritone is swoon-worthy. Stan tragically died in a plane crash in 1983 at the age of 33. I love this video, because these guys look like they're just getting drunk and having a time! Sea shanty's are the freaking best! This maritime tradition inspired our song "Sailor," which also has probably my most favourite fiddle part that Claire has ever written.
Ahh The Band, my greatest love of all time. Levon Helm is an incredible songwriter who is still going strong. His album "Ramble at the Ryman" just won at the grammy's. His voice is just delectable, and personally I think he was quite the babe in his day. Here is a clip of "The night they drove old dixie down" from the masterpiece film "The Last Waltz" directed by Martin Scorsese.
And for good measure, here are the Beach Boys in their prime. Just listen to all those vocal layers, bom bom bom, oooo, help me Rhonda etc.
Yesterday I went to see my friend Erica aka Tess D'urb-Evil, play with her team Chicks Ahoy! in the Toronto Roller Derby season opener, against the Gore Gore Roller Girls. It was a killer game, fast paced, high scoring, lots of hits, spills, curse words, and penalties. The Chicks prevailed in the end, woo hoo!
The halftime show featured the Cowgirl Choir. Unfortunately, I missed their whole set waiting in the bathroom line and then the beer line.
If you've never seen a roller derby game you NEED to go. Tickets are only $12 if you purchase in advance at an outlet (I recommend this rather than buying online bc if you have a paper ticket you don't have to wait in the super long line) There's beer and pizza for sale at the games, and you can bring your own chair or get there early and grab a seat on the bleachers.
I'd been on the lookout for a good quiz night for sometime when we decided to check out the trivia at Clinton's Tavern in Korea Town back at the beginning of January. While we had a really good time, due to a rather publicly embarrassing incident we had to wait several weeks before returning to the bar, in the hopes that they would forget us.
It all began when Claire was at the ROM doing work for her internship. She was digitally cataloguing items from the Greek and Roman collection. On this particular day, she was handling male fertility amulets. This included various small metal items such as men with big shlongs that some ancient dude would have carried around with him in the hopes of fertilizing his ancient wife's eggy. Fun times! One of the amulets was actually just a set of bronze testicles you could hang as a pendant on a necklace.
Flash forward to Monday night trivia and we were all discussing the possibility of bringing back this ancient genitalia jewelry. (I mean really, the hipsters would jump ALL OVER this trend) We started brainstorming names for our new gonad jewelry line and eventually settled on "Scrotumulet" a combo of scrotum + amulet. A short while later we had to write down a name for our trivia team so we put down Scrotumulet, figuring there was no way we would win that night anyways so it didn't matter what our team name was. Little did we know that part of the Pub Quiz includes reading aloud all the team names (each team cheers when their name is called). We weren't sure how the host would pronounce Scrotumulet, but we thought it would just sound like a gibberish word so we'd be fine. Unfortunately, the host read Scrotumulet as "SCROTUM MULLET" to which he added, "Presumably a bad experience one of you ladies had..." !!!! Not surprisingly we didn't cheer for our team name.
Pub quiz is every Monday night at 8pm (doors at 7) It fills up really fast (last week ppl were turned away at the door) so get there early! We are currently recruiting for our team, we need someone who knows sports and someone who was alive in the 80s.
A little while ago I got to go to a really cool event for the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario at 10 Adelaide St. East. The building, constructed for the Canadian Birkbeck Investments and Savings Company, is now the headquarters for the Ontario Heritage Trust. It's always exciting to get a peak inside some of these old buildings downtown. We even got to take a ride in one of the last manually operated elevators in Toronto! (sidebar: Queen's alum- remember that weird Irish elevator operator at that old department store in downtown Kingston?)
If you're interested in heritage issues in Toronto and Ontario check out ACONextGen on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pages/ACO-NextGen/183725051715480 . I forgot to bring my camera but you can see pictures from the event on their page.
Also- recommended reading if you're interested in Toronto architecture:
