On the road again

So I feel like I was somewhat deceptive in my last post. I said I had played a bunch of shows, but in reality I only played 2 last week: Wednesday in Hamilton with The Runaway and Saturday in Maple with Critical Mass. Sorry; when you work full time, take courses and have a girlfriend, 2 shows seems like a billion.

Wednesday was straight up awesome. I always love playing shows with the Runaway, and even more so with the Runaway Jam, which is the full band consisting of myself on drums and backup vox, Josh McFadyen on bass, Andrew Karram on keys, my awesome girlfriend Krista on vocals, and of course the Runaway himself on rhymes.

We were playing something called The Artist’s Roundtable at the Freeway Café in Hamilton. The idea is that 5 bands each do a 15-20 minute set. At the end of the night all the bands sit down onstage in front of the crowd and break down each others’ sets, mention what they liked or thought needed improvement. Then there’s a Q and A period with the crowd.

I hope this doesn’t come off as arrogant, but it’s been a long long time since I played a show where I wasn’t in at least the second best band there (In my opinion). This is mostly a result of playing a lot of Christian shows, where bands tend to be a lot younger and therefore not as good. But my goodness, every single band was amazing. The first act was 2x The Mono, which is an experimental indie project consisting of one guy named Randell Neudorf working guitar, harmonica, keyboards, and percussion. He uses a Jam-Man like repeater to build sequences on each instrument until a song is there. He only had time to do two songs, but they were both really great and interesting. Not something you hear every day.

The second act was my favourite: Brielle Goheen. Brielle is a singer-songwriter on piano who is training in classical violin out at Trinity Western. She has this incredible dynamic range and her songs are very intricate and counter-intuitive, but never sacrifice melody for the sake of “newness”. You can hear a melding of pop, classical and theatre influences in her style. Alas, she has nothing recorded and is only in the province until the end of the summer, so I may have to run a show (and therefore lose money) to hear her again. She did say she’d be open to coming to Waterloo, so keep your eyes peeled.

Third up was Garner! I don’t know what I can say about Garner that hasn’t already been said: they write great pop songs, they have an amazing songwriting range, they’re super fun to watch, and they are all really amazingly nice guys. I’ve never wanted a band that I wasn’t in to succeed so much. They’ll be heading out on tour starting June 20, and the lovely Krista will be doing some backups for them at that show. More to come on that.

We went on fourth, so I’ll skip to fifth: McKenna. This is a brother duo who look very out of place with each other: their guitarist is kind of clean cut, not jocky but very much a “dude” you could have a beer with. I mistook their singer for a homeless man when I met him (to be fair, the Freeway is a downtown mission that always brings in member of the homeless community, but still). Like so many family duos they have rice, tight harmonies which are accented by some furious guitaring and an incredible knack for storytelling.

Wow, that was quite a preamble. Anyway, our set went really well, considering the five of us hadn’t been in a room together since we opened for Shad in October (seriously, we did this show without a practice). Because of the set length we only got to do five songs, but they all went well. I got an impromptu drum solo in the middle of “Soul Raise” that I felt like I flubbed, but people responded positively after which means it either a) went way better than I thought or b) went way worse than I thought, to the point that people needed to console me.

Saturday I drove solo to the thriving metropolis of Maple, ON. The day started off poorly: I had to be in Maple for 8 AM for soundcheck, so I hit the road around 7. The 401 was closed off in Milton, meaning all the traffic first backed up huge and then had to find alternate routes. I took the milk run to end all milk runs and wound up arriving around 9:30.

One thing I hate about Christian shows (especially those with lots of bands) is they usually tell you not to bring your own kit because they have one and want to keep changeover time down. Then they saddle you with a terrible kit. This one was a mirrored (!) Pearl Export kit from roughly 2000 with some of the worst hardware ever. I of course brought my own cymbals, kick and snare, but I couldn’t even unclip the hi-hat they had on because the clip was stripped. The hi-hat was awful, too, like two garbage can lids.

Enough whining. We were acting as the “senior band” at this contest for 14 other bands who were hoping to win. We did a short set off the top at 10:45, and then had to wait until 4:30 for our second set. The bands were all young and some were just starting to get a feel of what they like to do and what they’re capable of, so I won’t go into detail here as I think they’re all very much a work in progress. I thought he eventual winners were called the Mac Band, but I could be wrong, as I tried to find them on Google and the only Mac Band I found were R&B darlings from Flint, Michigan.

Our second set went well, too, although after a day of music no one really seemed in the mood to see us. We’re performing a mix of old stuff and stuff that’s coming up on the new Critical Mass album, some of which I recorded. It sounds like it’ll be an interesting disc – I’ll keep you posted.


IN OTHER NEWS!

Not much to report. I’m backing off of taking more shows in June, just because I’ve been really busy and am starting to wig out over my lost sleep. I’m gigging at the Burlington Music Festival next Sunday with My 2 Sense, so come check that out if you’re in the area.