You wake to a familiar morning chime. It’s the Great Deals chime that every Earnest Citizen awaits. The sound swells in your dreams like peach flavour crystals until your eyes pop wide, bright, and ready for various possibilities. You gaze into the ceiling-mounted Selfscreen and affirm that you are Ready and aware of the possibilities — that you are prepared to...

My summer started with a day trip to pretty St. Catharines, Ontario. I had offered to help my friend and booking agent, Joe, prepare his pool for the season. We spent all day in the sun, scraping caked-on paint off of tiny pool tiles — one stubborn square a grueling time. It was super satisfying, as you’d expect, to peel away every spec of the faded, tacky...

It’s the last night of this winding tour. I have finished all of the music and I am sitting in a dim-lit bar in Sudbury as the remaining guests slowly filter out. It is done. I am exhausted and nearly busted open with visceral memories of faces, places and heartfelt conversations. I reconnected with more friends than I knew I had. I entangled with many astounding...

Let me provide a brief tour update for you. I just finished eating a delicious, greeezy breakfast here at Broken City in Calgary and am now enjoying the jazzy dub style songs they are pumping. Through the mirror behind the bar I see 11th ave. It’s slick with rain reminding me I’ve nowhere better to be. We had a lot of fun last night. New palls Shiv...

Neat news. I’m zooming westward in August. Some good time has passed since I’ve done the long trans-Canada thing — two summers I think. I had the fortune of shooting out to several festivals during the warm season last year, but a full road tour is a different beast entirely. With only one month until I leave, I find myself paralyzed at times by...

Those bleak days at year’s end — they are composed of cloying, grinding hours, the crinklefoil, stale berry and fish bits. The year on its deathbed is attended by disinterested loved ones, making idle conversation until stopping mid-sentence. Mid-breath. It takes the all-encompassing, saccharine pageantry of Xmastime to shatter the Western World year after...

A blue and red truck dug its way out of an underground passage. So many people had forgotten about trucks that when they threw stones at the truck they didn’t know that the stones wouldn’t even leave a dent. Then, when the moon blinked its crappy, half-seeing eye, the people were distracted. “What is this up above… Watching us… Judging and maybe...

The summer is great. It is a summer of festivals. I want to tell you something about my summer of festivals! Every road-weary music person craves a day when he or she can throw it all down on a Summer of Festivals. There has always been a glimmer; the glimmer is some future day when one needn’t drive through the wastes to find Every Nice Night. The glimmer is a...

My son was given a book about volcanoes and we have been reading a bit of it each night. Now we both like volcanoes a lot. They are powerful and unpredictable. They are usually sleeping.  Mount Tambora in Indonesia is set to go any time, destroying everything. Japan’s Mount Fujiyama has a perfect conical shape with Gods that live at its top, peacefully… for now....

Yes, I am leaving for the west in mid July. I’m excited and nervous. Though in recent weeks and months I’ve been westward for a few festivals, it’s hard to believe that two years have passed since my last scrappy, sofa-hopping, red-eye road tour that way. As you must know, for some time I have been working like a hungry tiger on my new record. When I started...