So I've been neglecting this blog obviously, been pretty busy.  So it goes.  Right now I'm in Freddy with Justin Upshall watching It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and drinking some beer.  We're driving to Halifax tomorrow and I'm playing a show at Gus's with Motherhood, Owen Steel and Year of Glad and I'm really excited about it.  Haven't seen AP (YOG) since I left Montreal after our short Secular Winds tour.  Good times that was.

The montreal show was the highlight of the few, at Le Cagibi, decent turnout, good food.  Touring with AP and his brother Nick was a highlight of the past year of my life.  Laughs, good friend, oh the laughs.  Also very much enjoyed the Spill in Peterborough (the town where Tom Connors became Stompin Tom).  The Spill is one of the better venues that I've played and I highly recommend it.  We drank copious amounts of beer and played weird sets to a very minimal crowd.  I was a bit too talkative I would say, loose with the tongue, talkin shit.  We also went pretty buckwild on the wall in the apartment above the venue.

Toronto was weird.  We showed up at the venue and a different show was going on.  When we asked what the deal was, we were directed across the hall to a small stageless room, and a busted ass PA, and no staff.  AP played the bus set of the tour, and I played the worst.  It was a terrible balance.  But, we rocked out to some Punkorama and Ma$e and made it back to Montreal in style, where we proceeded to drink a lot, have  a thanksgiving dinner and shoot a Back & Forth interview that has yet to be posted.  We also recorded an EP as our post-doom side project, DIVIDER, featuring the wonder that is Nick Laugher.  What a dude that dude is.

Took a kijiji ride back to Halifax, where I'd been recording my new album prior to heading down to Quebec.  It was produced by Mike Trask and engineered by Charles Austen, featuring Adam Mowery on bass and vocals, Marc Doucet and Trask on guitar, and Tynan Dunfield on drums.  Very excited about this project.  Don't have a title yet, but there's still quite some time before it'll be released.  Probably January.  Gotta master it, title it, shoot the album cover.

Meeting Mike Trask is perhaps the best thing that's happened to my career in a very longtime.  If you don't know the dude, I would look him up.  Great bluesplayer and songwriter, made the songs much better, and then produced them into awesomeness.  I've played some shows around the maritimes with Trask and I'm very much looking forward to going on the road with him in March.

Trask was in SJ with Owen Steel on their tour recently to play a few sets for the Folk Awards.  They played good sets, we drank booze, and I traveled with them up to Parkindale for a very good show at maybe the best venue in the maritimes.  \I got to go up and play a song between sets, and I very much look forward to playing that show in the future.

Very excited to see Owen and Mike tomorrow along with a whole shitload of bucks that I haven't seen in some time.  Then it's back to SJ.  Gonna play a CFMH Christmas special on Tuesday that I'm very much looking forward to.  Then it's buckledown, get a job and live a boring and terrible life.

Well, not terrible necessarily.

A New Day, Changing Weather

So, it would appear that I have lost my apartment.

This doesn't came as a huge shock, as I haven't had any solid income to speak of since the end of February.  That's okay though, I'm sacrificing my comfort for my music.  Still doing the tour in June, still putting out the album hopefully in time for that, still doin other stuff as the summer drags on, and at the moment, I don't particularly need an apartment anyway, just the guitar and my bookbag.

My old man and JJ and I moved all of my shit into my parents basement today.  It wasn't as bad as I'd anticipated but here I am, and that's weird.  Only gonna be here for a day or two anyway, then it's time to hit the road.  I'm very much looking forward to that, I can't fucking wait to get the album done and the tour planned and stop worrying about it.  I don't wanna have to be responsible to anything but David R this summer, and that's what Ima gonna do.

I'm tired as fuck.  Drank some beer and whiskey with JJ last night and popped awake at 9am bright eyed and bushy tailed, been on the move since, cleaning and moving.  Tomorrow I'm goin back into town to clean the apartment and get rid of the last of the shit in it.  Then it's hang times with the bros.  Then hopefully I can get up to freddy and get some shit recorded.  Gotta finish the album in Fred, I think, and I'd also like to get to Hali with some folk, since that might be fuuuuun.

Talk more soon.

Back In the Port City

It's been an extreme gap since I've last posted, but in an effort to be more active an artist online, I'm going to attempt to return to this blog somewhat frequently. A lot has happened since those Stephen Hero shows I mentioned in the last post.

Those shows went extremely well, particularly in Fredericton. For some reason Cousins opened and SexWolf closed (actually the latter thing makes sense) so it was an odd lineup, but it was very well-attended, especially for it having been the on stage debut of both Stephen Hero and Whale Skin. Whale Skin is a poppy and awesome electronic band with live instruments led by my good friend Willow Bell, with the classic rhythm section of JuHang Sin on bass and Dan Tweedie on drums. That's a rhythm section you can't really beat (nudge, nudge...get it? Har Har!) Actually all three members of that band were at one point in my band, David R. Elliott & the Novellas, the halifax edition.

I played the Stephen Hero set with Willow Bell standing at his laptop hitting play, essentially, as we were unable to put together anything better in time for the shows. Regardless, it was an awesome show, and people seemed to legitimately love it. On top of the fact that the shows went well and were a lot of fun, it was great to spend a weekend playing shows and hanging out with those guys for the first time in a while, their incarnation of the Novellas was a very fun and solid band to be in, and I was very sad for it to end as abruptly as it did.

I brought a lot of people on stage during my set, and there was a lot of 'Swag' chanting, championed most enthusiastically by Brydon Crain, which brings me toward the current state of affairs.

Saint John was a good time as well, mostly because I got to see an excellent group of Hip Hop performers from my hometown, and also got to perform my brand of hip hop or them and my best friend and fellow hip hop obsessee Jeremy Smith. But of course attendance wasn't stupendous for two nameless acts in our fair port city. After the shows, and the completion of the Stephen Hero mixtape, and album (although I still haven't released this album online) my enthusiasm for the Stephen Hero project waned, with the coming of the fall, and I began to return to country music once again, and pick up the guitar for the first time in almost a year.

It was a little slow at first, of course, but I began writing again and getting into more country music I hadn't heard, while further exploring things I had heard, such as Woody Guthrie, whom I experienced a slight obsession with just in time for my slight involvement in Occupy Halifax.

I experienced some frustration attempting to explore new music that wasn't hip hop, which I've mostly given up on now, aside from some tracks here and there that were pretty decent. I wrote a new album, which I've yet to record (the plan at this point is to record it with Clinton Charlton in his home studio, which I'll hopefully start doing soon) called 'Just Down the Tracks,' which is about my family. I also started recording a three-song ep with Tynan Dunfield, which is also not finished, but I do plan on releasing a song from those sessions as a single with a music video I'm planning on doing with Dan Culberson, currently brainstorming for a treatment.

One thing I particularly appreciate about this past fall was my growing musical relationship with Jordan Doucet, who became my dude to trade songs with this year. We spent a lot of time talking about records, playing songs to each other, getting drunk, etc. This is something I sorely need in my life, creatively. I hope to record his album in the March-April era this year, and hopefully release a short run of them for shows. Slinky (as he prefers to be called) and I got drunk and walked to a park in Halifax to pass a guitar back and forth and drink a colt 45, sometime before it got too cold for that kind of thing, and I think that was one of the best nights of my 2011.

I started getting to know Motherhood this year, a band from Fredericton formerly known as the Elephant who've been involved with foodclothingshelter for some time now. We ended up playing the same mini-festival and getting drunk together a number of times, which led to Brydon and Kaylee contributing harmonies on the Tynan sessions (along with Jordan Doucet). This led to the idea of having Brydon, Kaylee and Motherhood's drummer Adam Sipkema perform as my backing band. This seemed like an awesome idea to me, so we played The Capital on New Year's Eve, and it was excellent.

We had to cram a bit, leading up to it, but it was worth it, and I hope to continue that lineup for some more shows in 2012. I moved to Saint John, which was something I decided I needed to do earlier this year, and so far it's been excellent. I like the music dudes who live here, and I like the record stores, and I fucking love this city, and I feel peaceful and creative here, in a way I haven't in quite some time.

Since I moved here I recorded an EP called 'Blue Sky Country Gold,' which is available for name your price (no minimum) on the bandcamp, and I'm working on a new ep which I hope to get some collaboration happening on, which I'm calling 'Sam Hill.' I'm planning some shows with Motherhood and Jordan Doucet hopefully by March, and I have an instore at Backstreet coming up, among a few other things I can't really mention yet, as they are not yet set in stone. I plan on starting three bands this year; a noise band, a three-piece akin to a band I was in years ago with a 90's drunkrock sorta thing, and I plan on drumming for Jordan Doucet in his band. I plan on doing all of this with the involvement of one of my favourite musicians to work with, Cameron Evans, who also just so happens to be in the port city.

I'm excited about music right now, excited about rock bands, listening to a lot of punk and noise, and also rocking the shit out of classic Saint John releases, among which are Hospital Grade, Babs, The Organizers, Clinton, and of course, the incredible Adam Mowery, who just released an excellent album. I feel right, being here. I'm home.