This past Thursday, we had the opportunity to perform at the Niagara Falls New Year’s Eve party on the main stage. Though our set was cut short, it was a fantastic experience. We made it onto the Global TV national broadcast for about a minute, and I’ve stumbled upon some great photos taken by Ed McAskill (including some outstanding shots of me).
Last night, Victor Swift asked me to play a set at the first Hart House Open Stage event of the year at the U of T. As far as songwriting goes, I’ve been performing mostly solo lately, but last night was different: My good friend and co-writer, Alex Palmer, joined me. We used to play together in our band, Fishkiss, but we’ve been on indefinite hiatus since our last gig in June 2007.
Thursday night, I had a chance to speak at the government’s Copyright Consultation Toronto Townhall. I’ll post more detailed thoughts shortly, but in the meantime, Nick Dynice was kind enough to upload a video of my comments to YouTube.
I wasn’t expecting a chance to speak and hadn’t prepared much, but my name came up in the lottery in the last half hour or so. I’m not particularly happy with how I spoke — some parts felt awkward, and I had to cut other points due to time — but I’m glad could provide a different perspective compared to the ~80% of speakers who were folks from the music industry arguing for some combination of locks, levies and legislative responses to their business model problems.
I’m not usually a fan of any pro-life arguments that focus on potentiality, because it tends to obscure the fact that from the moment of conception we’re dealing with actual life (and just potential growth)… but that caveat aside, this new ad from CatholicVote.org is amazing (via AmP):
This is the second ad they’ve produced (here’s the first). Can’t wait to see what else they come up with.
Almost every month for the past four years, I’ve performed at the St. Michael’s College open mic. at the University of Toronto. It has an extremely friendly atmosphere courtesy of the supportive community of friends, musicians and music lovers. It’s a great place to try something new, or to goof around. For my last performance, I played two songs: one of my own (The Limit) and an Emilaise + JP Diddy medley.
Last week, I attended the February #Twuneup — Covers Edition. #Twuneup is basically a monthly listening party (this was the second) run by a group of people in the Toronto Twitter community who share a love of music. There’s also lots of music sharing that happens on Twitter.
I found out about it too late to get a spot at the first one (space is limited), but this time I was quick to sign up. I was happy to learn that live performances were encouraged, so I busted out the T-Qualizer (perfect event) and played my cover of The Patient (Tool):
There were a coupleother fun live performances too!
I had a great chat with @leilaboujnane (from Idée) and she gave me a Creative Commons sticker, before she even knew that I’m a CC BY-SA artist! I was going to put the sticker on my guitar case, but then I realized it had a clear background (black-on-black wouldn’t work to well). So… I put it on my guitar!
On January 17th, 2009, the heroic Mike Masnick (of Techdirt fame) descended into a lion’s den wielding a sword of flame to guide a lost people to salvation. Ok, well, it didn’t happen quite like that, but it was pretty close. Just think music business conference instead of lion’s den, 280 Powerpoint slides instead of a flaming sword, financial success instead of salvation and the record industry instead of… no, I guess that part is accurate. Masnick gave a presentation on Trent Reznor and the Formula for Future Music Business Models at MidemNet in Cannes, Frances and, at only 15 minutes long, it’s definitely a must watch for anyone remotely interested in a future in the music business.
It’s a case study on Reznor, whose provided countless examples of these business models in practice, but Mike abstracts the common pattern in them all:
Connection with Fans (CwF) + Reason to Buy (RtB) = The Business Model $$$
(And no, it’s not about royalties, micropayments or forcing people to buy stuff!)
My sister was kind enough to film my set at January’s Kelly’s Korner, a monthly open mic. at St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto. I played two covers. The first is a song written by a friend and inspiration of mine, Robyn Dell’Unto (a local singer/songwriter I usually accompany on violin). She didn’t know I was covering the song, but another friend texted her during the performance, so my secret didn’t last too long. I played her the video last Thursday and she didn’t hate it! The next video is the third acoustic Tool cover I’ve done, but the first to be recorded/filmed. There are a few rough spots as this was the debut of the cover, but it turned out fairly well.
