Category: Music

ah, the 70’s

It may come as a complete shock to some of you, but I am A HUGE FAN of a lot of 70’s popular music both hits and soundtracks.

I like Bert Kaempfert.  I love the Sandpipers.  I enjoy Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass (also Al Hirt).  I’m a big fan (as I’ve mentioned earlier) of Burt Bacharach; also John Barry; also Henry Mancini.

Thus it is with no further ado that I post a new (old) song.  I wrote it, but if you go “Ooh, the seventies!” or “Ick, the seventies!” then I have accomplished my aim.  Think: 70’s TV show theme.

70s tv show theme

Nepalese food, a change in venue, a beautiful sunset

I got off the plane and went straight to Jan and Soon’s.  Jan blinked at me and said, “Weren’t you supposed to phone me?”

uh.

I had forgotten how beautiful the underlit sunsets are in this town.

Anyway, life in her household was sufficient for a cuppa, but not really for crash space, as she had hella work to do (I still hung out and we flapped our ears for a couple of hours and she had lots of news, good bad and odd).

So I called Catherine, and we had a very pleasant evening catching up (oooo, gossip about exes, I loves me some of that!) and eating at the Mt. Everest which has berloody awesome food and I had my first Kingfisher in ages.  Then we came back here and shot some more s*(t and then I crashed.  The wireless here works very nicely.  At some point I’m going to ask Catherine for another drum solo.  She has a really intense Chinese cymbal that sounds like part of the soundtrack for The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires.

While ScaryClown was sending me a link to This I was showing Colin a picture of him stretched out on HP Lovecraft’s cenotaph.

Ain’t the internet grand?

last Jericho of the 15th season

The season closer, which I attended with Paul, Paul’s boon companion Mike J, Keith and Mike, was a barnburnin’, kickass, upsidethehead HOWL of an evening.  Three professional musicians on tour (two of them being the Undesirables, a very amazing Canadian duo who TRANSFIXED the audience and the other being David Ross MacDonald, an Aussie who blinked at us when we wouldn’t sing the chorus of his rubato version of Waltzing Matilda because he wasn’t singing) joined the open stage, and the Galley stayed open long enough to serve beer at the break, may it be blessed among restaurants, and apart from it being ass freezing cold it was a splendid evening.  Banjo! Mandola! Social Justice songs! a song by Stompin’ Tom Connors about the Iron Workers’ Memorial Bridge collapse! Ashokan Farewell played during the jam session by four fiddles (one of whom played with polish and precision by a ten year old boy), one bodhran, one pennywhistle, two guitars and two mandolins! No fewer than two Bob Dylan songs (nobody plays Dylan at Jericho, it’s odd)!

When Fraser Union, the ‘headliner’, finally made it to the stage, one of them remarked that the headliners had already come and gone.  But you don’t go to Jericho thinking you’ll never be upstaged; on any given evening the quality of the musicianship is enough to give you severe pause.

Thanks to Mike J for giving me the musical term rubato and explaining it (he’s a second tenor with Chor Leoni and knows his shizz); thanks to Mike for the lift home; thanks to Paul for lining up for beers for us and loaning me the entrance money because as usual I forgot to get cash.

Bright blessings for the gift of being in that room, where sixty voices, in three and four part harmony, lifted the beams and raised the dust.  I didn’t want to perform that night, and I’m glad I didn’t try!

Freshly written down

But more than ten years old.  Now, in all it’s disgusterpating glory, is one of the songs I am very very proudest of.  Company dump.  I wrote this for a coworker named Jamie with whom I worked at SR Telecom in Montréal.

Company Dump midi.  Sprightly, ain’t it?

Company Dump pdf of sheet music.  Mit Lyrics.

PLEASE PLEASE WIDELY REPOST THIS.  I want this to be the unofficial anthem of the Canadian Working Stiff by Christmas.

Anybody who wants to sing this  – even at a paying gig – doesn’t owe me a dime.  If you want to record it (a likely story) please talk to me; the moral right of my ownership is thus asserted.

In my wildest dreams, a ludicrously talented art school student decides to turn this song into a three minute video… I suspect it could be very, very amusing.

To my joy and astonishment

Keith and Mike accompanied me to the Jericho Beach Folk Club last night, where we saw Lauren Sheehan.  As always, I can’t recommend who I saw there highly enough.  She played a Guild.  A couple of times I closed my eyes and I could hear John playing.  Here’s a taste…. although she was solo, no bass or harmonica last night.  Also, she played one kick ass banjo.

Lynn sang Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah (we all joined in on the choruses) and I was crying by the end of it.  I saw my first resonator ukelele last night; the man playing it was UNBELIEVABLE.  All in all an amazing evening.  I didn’t get to play, and I don’t care.

I have world class heartburn

People over 50 who eat hot wings after 8 pm deserve world class heartburn.  I ask for no sympathy and it’s a good thing I expect none.

It is with flaming heart, therefore, that I announce the following horrific news.  I decided to clean off the memo portion of my cell phone as I recollected just now that I had sung a number of tunes into it.  Well, a number turns out to be seven, all but one without lyrics and me with no clue what key they are in or what to call any of them.  Thank you o great muse for your immense bounty, but I JUST SAID on my blog that I had 39 percent of them written down, so I’m down to 36 percent instantaneously.  Now, this is a fine, a stupendous problem to have, and I’d be six kinds of fool to even hint at wishing for a shutoff valve, but I refuse to do anything but acknowledge the fact that I have yet more work, as sleep beckons.

I got to meet Mike’s new inamorata Vilma.  (While Keith played Rock Band non stop).  She can sit on her hair.  I know personal remarks is rude, but her hair is stupendous, and comes entirely unregulated or mishandled by professionals in cascading rippling waves of honey blonde that terminate just above the backs of her knees.  The full effect is enhanced by her petiteness, and of course if she wasn’t a lovely, smart and good-natured woman the personal remarks would be even ruder.  Mike has horseshoes clanking around in his sitz platz.

Oh, and me and Mike and Keith played darts.  Mike won with a dazzling “come through in the choke” maneuvre.

56 out of 144 songs are now written out

That’s 39 percent.  I may actually get this project DONE by the end of my year off!

Of course it would help if I quit writing songs, but not a chance of that.  When I sit down to noodle these days I cut to the chase pretty fast.  Then, boom, another song to write down.  What can I say, it is so much fun to be me these days I can scarcely credit it.

I am going to head off to the Royal City Farmer’s Market this afternoon.  Time I did some bike shopping, and I have a hankering for some organic piggy hacks.

More tunes…

Walls of my heart is written down (forgive the title, I was oozing a neurasthenic and self-absorbed romanticism at the time I wrote it).

Aiee!  I am back in the swing of things with church, what with the potential move and the satellite service, so I invited myself to the growth committee meeting.    Actually, I hosted it last night.  Keith made himself known to everybody (feeling safe to come out if Peggy and I are in the room) and I (scandalously, for a Unitarian) didn’t feed snacks afterwards because one of our number is fasting for a genuine health reason and I figured we could all get by on clear fluids rather than force her to watch us eat.  That is the first time I ever had a committee or small group ministry meeting at my house without food – and my Mennonite foremothers are rotating like cylinder records in their graves at the very thought.

In the old days, visitors would be fed ‘faspa’ which is the Mennonite equivalent of tiffin, and consists of something lighter than a meal and heavier than a snack, if you know what I mean.  It’s so much part of the culture that it’s a major faux pas not to provide it.  Even though I had a sound reason, I still felt guilty.  Ah, it’s so good to be back in church!

Why the hell does an atheist do church?

Continue reading More tunes…