2007 In Retrospect, Part 1: Next Time We Take December Off!

We've been busy.

No, really busy.

Our activity sheet for this month:

December 1: recorded an alternative version of 12 Days Of Christmas for a corporate event. Then did a two-hour gig at the Richmond bicycle club's Christmas dinner.
December 2: did a lunchtime gig at the over-40s ski club in Dunbar. In the evening, Sleeping Beauty singthrough.
December 3: Chroma gospel choir rehearsal in the evening.
December 4: Broadway Chorus rehearsal.
December 5: High Spirits choir rehearsal.
December 6: retirement home gig with My Lady's Chamber.
December 7: FREE!
December 8: Saw Seussical: The Musical at the Waterfront Theatre.
December 9: Sarah went to see Beauty And The Beast: The Musical with Kim.
December 10: Broadway Chorus singing rehearsal.
December 11: Broadway Chorus dress rehearsal.
December 12: Broadway Chorus tech and dress rehearsal at the theatre.
December 13: Broadway Chorus show: Anne Murray Of Green Gables, opening night.
December 14: Broadway Chorus show, second night.
December 15: Singing carols on a street corner in aid of a women's shelter. Then Broadway Chorus show.
December 16: Sarah to a cast get-together for The Vagina Monologues. Then open mic in the evening at Urban Rush Cafe.
December 17: Chroma concert.
December 18: carlyle.4 singing at VanDusen Garden.
December 19: High Spirits Christmas singalong with carlyle.4 guest spot.
December 20: carlyle.4 singing at VanDusen Garden.
December 21: FREE!
December 22: carlyle.4 (or .3 as it turned out) singing at the Oppenheimer Park homeless benefit. Then singing at a private Christmas party.
December 23 onwards: FREE!

This list is largely a public reminder to me that we do too much. So: next year we're scaling back...

• We've left Chroma, at least for now (we might return, who knows)
• We're going to rely on Susan to manage us as Chilli & Sage; she'll make sure we get paid a sensible rate for our singing gigs, which, while not necessarily reducing our workload, will mean we feel better about devoting time to it.
• Broadway Chorus's summer show sounds like it'll be fun, and Kim / Susan / James might join up for it, which will be fun, but we'll try to skip the Christmas show.
• High Spirits is pretty much bulletproof because we like drinking with them so much, and the music is good and varied.

That list doesn't include two things which stretched over several days:

1) The presence in our apartment for seven days of Jacqui and Alexis Twine, on a super-short-notice trip to Vancouver. It was like having kids, listening to the sounds of Ambient Twineage in the spare room. We showed them the sights, took them to Kalypso, introduced them to the mob here, got them into Anne Murray Of Green Gables, and waved goodbye very unhappily after an extremely packed week. It was a thoroughly excellent time.

2) Filming the Take December Off video. I'd had the mad idea that we could do this in the last week of November, but we got swamped, and it dragged into the second week of December, and then took several days to edit (only a few hours of actual editing time, but it was finding those hours...) and so the video debuted on YouTube about the 16th. We've put it on several other sites as well, and across all of them, it's collected over a thousand views. Of course this isn't many compared to the stuff on the front page of YouTube, and, hope springing eternal in my breast, it's less than I'd kinda hoped for, but I'm not grumbling, as it's far, far more than we've ever achieved with anything else we've done, and we've learned plenty from that one experience which will inform our videos next year. Yes, more videos! Panda and Henry need videos! And we have plans, oh yes, many plans...

Shock apartment update: we have new furniture! And we're tidy! Slightly grumpy over being constantly referred to as bohemian, and aware that we had to redeem our second room for the Twines to use, we performed a mammoth act of springcleaning, and have kept the place somewhat neat since they left. We then went to IKEA on the 27th and bought two side tables, a bookcase, a TV stand, and a desk unit. I then spent most of the 27th and 28th building these things, with help from Sarah on drawers, and we now have lots of surfaces and places to hide things. And fewer boxes standing in as tables. And the place is still tidy! We're hosting a flatwarming party tomorrow night (because, er, we didn't have it ten months ago, because we didn't know anyone then), and we'll see how the unforewarned jaws drop at the sight.

Culture update: Seussical The Musical was brilliant - I was in tears for most of it because it was so satisfyingly innocent and ineffably bouncy and fun. They'd cut it a little as it's the child-friendly version - a little annoying, as it means The Military has gone - which includes Green Eggs And Ham played as a platoon-marching tune - but it was still excellent - one of the best things we've seen in our year here.

Further culture update: we finally got round to watching some TV and movies. The Bionic Woman was dreadful from the first episode, and no wonder it's been cancelled during the writers' strike. Fantastic Four 2 was utterly lamentable (as were we for watching it). I watched Irreversible, an uplifting French film about violence and rape (... OK, not really uplifting). We watched Mr & Mrs Smith, which we thoroughly enjoyed although it was a bit random. And I finally got Sarah to watch The Sting, but unfortunately the history of caper movies since then has rendered it somewhat predictable - I hadn't seen it in, like, twenty-five years, and I was occasionally wincing at the pace, but it's still very stylish. In a very, very slow-paced way. Point is, though, we've finally succeeded in making time for ourselves if we think we have time to watch TV and movies.

And today we finished off three new songs, because as Sarah said to Kim on the phone earlier, "We've got a party tomorrow and we suddenly realized we didn't have anything new to perform. Disaster!" We hadn't written anything since Take December Off a month ago, so three new songs feels about right. And, for once, these have mostly come from our 'song graveyard' document, rather than being conceived and written on the spot. Of course we've had a dozen new ideas which have gone into the graveyard in the meantime, so as with all true graveyards, this one is expanding.

My musical challenge for the New Year is to write an ironic hard-rock musical accompaniment for the depraved lyrics I've written under the title I Wanna Be Your Lawyer, Baby - a very raunchy big-hair-rock spoof about a lawyer who goes too far in appreciating a female client. Sarah's eyes nearly popped out as she read the lyrics. Muhahahahaha.

Tomorrow, more end-of-year rounding-up type stuff.

Triumph Of A Bunny

Let us talk of the Triumph Of The Day: Sarah's musical, Sleeping Beauty, which got its first ever readthrough/singthrough this evening at Ieva's house. After handpicking a cast from the members of High Spirits, Sarah has been drilling them over the past few weeks, and tonight we gathered to spend a couple of hours trying it all on for size.

And it was an absolute blast. Sarah is still bouncing (well, almost bouncing, what with her hopped-out ankle).

A little background: Sarah wrote the first version of this musical as part of her music degree, thirteen years ago. It's the fairy tale rejigged for a feisty, independent princess who dismisses the Prince as the prat he is and ends up agreeing to go out with his servant who performs the actual rescue / rescuscitation. Along the way we meet a nutjob barbarian who gives up his bloodthirsty day job in favour of horticulture, a concerned fairy (renamed and rebranded as Wish Order Fulfilment Agents, or WOFAs), several unconcerned WOFAs, and a villainess with an even more villainous henchman. Add about twenty of Sarah's most gorgeous songs, and there you are: Sleeping Beauty.

She's kicked this around a bit over the years, fiddling with it, tweaking it, and letting me work on it a bit with her, but we never got around to doing much with it in England... we performed a couple of the songs with the Posse, and sneaked one of them into the Aladdin pantomine she MD'ed for LMCS in 2005, but aside from that... nuffin. But earlier this year, she performed one of the songs, Look, in a solo spot at a choir concert, and people fell in love with it - her take on love songs is always spectacularly offbeat and involving. After numerous questions and a lot of cheerleading from some particularly keen friends, she agreed to organize a readthrough... and here we are.

It's difficult to single people out for their performances tonight as everyone rose to the occasion with stellar focus and clearly a lot of hard work beforehand. So I'll list the cast:

Ieva - the Queen
Martin - the King
Susan - Ruby the evil WOFA
James - Prince Conceitus, and Conan the Barbarian / Agrarian
Barney - Burch the henchman
Catherine - Princess Frederica
Heather - Sapphire the WOFA
Kim - Opal the WOFA
Patti - Diamond the WOFA, and Narrator
Tara - Emerald the WOFA (and our flautist!)
Sara - Harriet the good WOFA
Me - Justin the servant

And candidly, we were all legends, although I think everyone would agree that particular mention must be given to James's incredibly camp Elmer-Fudd-a-like Conan, Barney's perfect overacting, and Sara's outraged Harriet.

But it was SO MUCH FUN!

Now we have to schedule a repeat performance, but this time with some VIPs in attendance, as there's clearly possibilities here.


In other news: Take December Off moves to its second day, and we've sold a copy of the song online! We've made $0.74! We're rich! Our first sale-by-download! We've been very naughty and asked friends and family to spam everyone with the link. Next task: a video, even if it's just of me sitting there pretending to be on the phone to my hypothetical gullible boss. Videos can go places where simple songs can't.

We also decided today was the day to go digital for our album sales. So look, here is how you can buy our singles:



And here is how you can buy our album:


Thrilling isn't it? So go buy something now.

That's us for the night - checkin' out. Much love.

Take December Off is go!

Our Christmas song of great luxury and relaxation, Take December Off, is now all systems go. We have a daily blog, the opportunity to listen to and buy the song itself, and other goodies lined up for inclusion at, wait for it, wait for it...

The Take December Off Experience

So go now there and click things and buy things. Because you can. Because we're worth it. And it'll be updated every day, so keep going there. Make it part of your morning routine. But clean your teeth first. Actually, no, go to that site first, and clean your teeth while listening to the song.

Also tell all your friends, because if we make enough money from this to take not just December but the rest of our lives off (hope springs eternal) then you're bound to be invited to our Vancouver mansion at some point, for your part in helping us out. Go on. Be a devil. Forward the link to everyone you know. We know you hate doing that normally, but just for us, be a sport.

In other news, last night we had great fun at a benefit for a local charity called PAWS which helps dogs and children all at once - so having a song called I'll Rescue You which was originally written for a dog rescue charity in England was kinda convenient - and we tried out Other People's Business - the anteater / anti-Bush protest song - which got plenty of applause. Which was nice. Needless to say, I Want To Be A Panda went down a storm. Sarah also sang as part of My Lady's Chamber for the night owing to a localised alto shortage. We couldn't stay too late because of the whirlwind weekend we had lined up, but it was fun. Some nice poetry, some of which Sue Turner had set to music. And Artie (drummer / guitarist whom we met at Sorrento) was there too, doing an amusing song about having an Extreme Sports Christmas up at Whistler Mountain.

And tonight we performed at an over-40s Bicycle Club in Richmond. This was a bit of a trek, and it's been snowing all day, so while Bunny was happy at the concept of snow on December 1st (it swirls upwards while you're watching it from the twentieth floor, which is tremendously cool) she was also stressed at the thought of trogging that far on the buses with our keyboard, and worse, she nearly fell over while hopping gleefully around in the snow, so she's now hopping all the time, on a slightly twisted ankle. Pauvre lapin! And her pedal foot, at that. However, the gig went well, we performed for about an hour and a half, and they appreciated it a lot. And it's a bit of money in the bank. More tomorrow as we provide background for the Christmas lunch of a skiing club on 37th Street.

We also now have a manager! Susan has despaired of our incompetence and is taking pity on us and will organise our career. We love you, Susan, for we are rubbish!

JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!

JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!

Jacqui's bringing Alexis with her!!!!!!

JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!

JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!! (November 28)

JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!

Jacqui Twine is coming to visit us in Vancouver for a week in December!!!

JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!

The trouble with women (November 27)

Wotcher. News from Tuesday:

Rehearsals for One Million Things Happening In December proceed apace. I'll put up a list for your awed admiration once I can bear to look at it. It's going to be a Very Busy Month. Last night we were rehearsing for the gospel choir, chroma (which owing to time considerations, viz. we have none, is going to be the main casualty when we hit the new year and clean house a bit). Tonight we were polishing and then running the Broadway Chorus show, Anne Murray Of Green Gables.

It turns out that Dani from Broadway Chorus, who plays my hapless starcrossed lover Jenny, works in video game law and is one of the authors of the Video Game Law Blog. Quite the coinkidink.

Adam from BC pointed us at the world's most boring game, Desert Bus. LOL.

In fantastic news, Mystery Case Files: Madame Fate is brilliant: I've completed it once and am now trogging through it a second time. I haven't even looked at the new Sam And Max despite buying it the instant it went live. Might get a chance to play it this weekend.

I didn't get any sleep Sunday night but as a result at four thirty in the morning I wrote lyrics for a gorgeous piece of music which Sarah had likewise composed in a time of insomnia. The result is something quite unusual for us, far more poetic than I normally try for, and hopefully nice.

For Chilli & Sage fans, there's new music at our MySpace page.

We've also set up the blog page for Take December Off, which is our latest cunning project. We had intended to have fun making a video for I Want To Be A Panda - and indeed we will, early next year - but instead we're going to push our seasonal song, Take December Off, which is, as the title might suggest, a comedy song about getting the whole of the month off work. We were hoping to make a quick video in time for December 1st, but we're so swamped that we're going to have to settle for a sound file and a comedy blog and photos, with a video to come after a few days. The upshot is, remember that link and take a look at it on December 1st, and then send it to all your friends. It's how to skive off work for 31 days, set to a samba beat. You want it.

We go now to collapse...

CAVE People Get Jobs! (November 15)

Tonight's subject line is taken from an ad on the SkyTrain wall. It depicts a group of people who all look extremely Indian. I feel that whichever organization has this acronym CAVE (I can't remember what else the poster said), they were perhaps ill-advised to word their slogan like that. Or, I'm racist and so the racist interpretation sprang to mind faster than it might to a nice person's. Either way, amusing in the way that those Western Union ads back in England are amusing. (If you've never seen them, they basically say: "Don't trust a member of your family to take money back to Pakistan to give to your poor needy mother! Send it via Western Union instead!" Because, that's right, if you're from Pakistan you can't trust your own family! Why, they're practically niggers! ... *sigh*)

Some more random highlights of the past couple of months which we've dredged from our "schmoozing" diary...

• We helped Kim write a song for her father's 60th birthday. It had started off sounding suspiciously like Billy Joel's Piano Man, but Sarah fixed that. I helped with a couple of lyrics, then Kim recorded it, I mixed it, and she put together a Powerpoint slideshow. Apparently it went down a treat and we were heroes. Hurrah!
• We've sold about $160 of our CDs, mostly at $10 a pop, occasionally cheaper where our nerve faltered or we were part-exchanging for another CD. Not bad. But still legally a hobby, defined as something you do where you don't make as much as you spend.
• James' ensemble, My Lady's Chamber, has not only worked on Sarah's choral piece The Blackbird Of Derrycairn, but has taken on our surreal jazz piece Air Conditioning. We joined them in performing it at the party the weekend before last and it was an absolute hoot to hear it with nearly a dozen voices powering it. As for Blackbird, Sarah is extremely pleased. It's been thirteen years since she composed it, and this is the first she's heard it performed (by anyone outside of a slightly incompetent panda multitracking his voice as a Christmas present a few years ago).
• And on the subject of things Sarah wrote thirteen years ago... Sleeping Beauty: The Musical is finally moving forward! This version of the traditional story is decidedly untraditional - the princess is a feminist and the prince is a prat, as one lyric observes - and after a couple of years of teasing people with songs taken from it, Sarah was at last persuaded to take the plunge and organize a singthrough/readthrough. People from High Spirits have leapt at the chance to take part, and no doubt (he says enthusiastically) you'll hear something about how it went on here at the start of December.
• We've bought some art! Two pictures from a great shop called Kimprint down in Gastown. One is from a series of scenes from Alice In Wonderland... the artist has a great command of perspective and the series is pretty striking, so we may slowly accumulate it. The other is a small but equally striking long-range picture of a fantasy city. Buying art made us feel grown-up. All this art plus my Medieval gold CD and our A New Brain framed poster on the walls... the apartment is starting to look like we live, rather than squat, here...

We went to the open mic at the Myles Of Beans cafe in Burnaby again tonight, but it was the least appreciative audience yet... no-one applauded much for anything by anyone. Feh. On the plus side, I sat behind the drums for an hour and drummed along in numerous jams. Sarah says I looked very cute, particularly when I looked sheepish whenever I tried something adventurous and it didn't quite work. But I did enjoy it.

Getting up to date!

Look, only one month behind in the TARDIS! I felt smug as I posted that. And then, it occurred to me that even as the Blog TARDIS whirls around in the wake of the timestream, I could... post something else! Covering today!

So: today I had physio. I have a trapped nerve in my back, which is causing neck pain and occasional streaks of unpleasantness down my left arm. I had my first session last Tuesday and this one was at the same time: 7:10am! Argh! Ultrasound, electrical pulses, and neck-stretching in a machine which looked suspiciously like a James Bond villain might reprogramme it to rip my head off at any moment - and all happening two hours before I normally even consider waking up. Argh argh! This will also be our first experience of claiming on medical insurance. (Hopefully. It won't be very nice if it turns out to be our first experience of failing to claim on medical insurance.)

Sarah spent today doing Voiceprint and working on the music for our new Christmas song, Take December Off. This is a bonkers samba-themed Christmas rave based on the idea of encouraging an overly-politically-correct (and uninformed) boss to give you plenty of days off for cultural reasons. At the moment it clocks in at something like eight minutes. But I don't want to edit it because it's all very funny, so the plan is to switch the drum rhythm and do something else exciting to make the verses stay fresh. We still haven't sorted out samples of the new songs, but these will crop up soon, my pretties, soon...

Tonight, we had Broadway Chorus. Have I mentioned this before? Their website is here. They call it community theatre over here; it's basically like English amateur theatre, but this specific company is interesting in that they perform what are essentially revue shows with a plot, and the chorus has a lot to do. The musical selection is pretty up-to-date too; the last show had Sailing from A New Brain and some stuff from The Light In The Piazza, and this time round it's clear the director has just seen The Drowsy Chaperone. He also enjoys ridiculing pretentious songs; I get to sing the dismal I Believe My Heart (from The Woman In White) in a yokel accent, with the chorus adding overly-hysterical backing vocals.
It's a bit of a hoot, all told. We've been going there for a couple of months, and the new show, Anne Murray Of Green Gables is four weeks away.

If I haven't been posting regular entries here then that means I haven't had a chance to complain about our self-inflicted schedule of death. You could ignore my pleas for sympathy on the basis that this is all our own fault. But please don't, as you're supposed to be our friends, you bastards ;)

• Mondays: "chroma", Brian Tate's gospel choir
• Tuesdays: Broadway Chorus
• Wednesdays: Sarah's had another acting course, and I've had High Spirits choir, but as of tomorrow Sarah will be back at High Spirits too
• Thursdays: open mic at Myles Of Beans every other week, alternating with a songwriting night
• Fridays: "carlyle.4", our extremely pretentiously-named quartet (it's the only way to fly!), currently rehearsing stuff
• Saturdays: often free, but then we see shows in the evenings
• Sundays: often free in the daytime, with an open mic at Urban Rush Cafe every other week

We both look just a bit tired these days...

What else can I tell you? On Monday we discovered a brand of chocolate called Toffifee, for people who can't stop spelling toffee. We also discovered yet another destination which we can reach on the 22 bus. That bus goes everywhere! (And soon we'll have a song to prove it...)

And there's a new Mystery Case Files game!

And a new season of Sam And Max!

Life is good!

Blog TARDIS: "Everything's Better With Monkeys" (September 2007)

We came back from Swing Jazz Camp all energised and enthused with the spirit of music... particularly ours. Sarah wrote the music and most of the lyrics for our slow-dance song, Just A Moment. We played some gigs, gave CDs to various people, and sent MP3s to people. Sarah continued to do voiceover work for VoicePrint, reading the news and magazine articles on Canadian radio (here's an example of her in action). On August 25th we had a High Spirits performance party, and Panda became a singalong!

It's worth mentioning one of our best songs up to this point: If We'd Never Met. This is the uplifting and fun-packed tale of a young woman widowed by a drunk driver. I know exactly whence the idea for this came, strange as the story may sound; I was in my bathroom, brushing my teeth and looking in the mirror, knowing Sarah was in her bathroom doing the same thing, and I thought, "I wonder how I would feel if I went into the main room and there was no Sarah." A couple of hours later we had the song, and we were very pleased with it. (There's a sample of it here if you'd like to listen, and it's also on our album (merciless plug)).

At Swing Jazz camp Sarah took this song to her vocal masterclass, where a couple of professional singers were commenting on people's delivery and performance of a chosen song. She reported afterward that she sang through the first verses and chorus, stopped, and waited for comments. The response was: "Oh! We were listening to the song because it's so good. Er, can you do it again and we'll pay attention to your technique this time." So she did it again. Response: "Yessss... and what needs improving about how you sing this? Anything else?" "Well," quoth Sarah, "I often get a break in my voice when I'm trying to sing high." "Oh! Well we can listen to that. Do some scales." Sarah does some scales, which are pretty much perfect because of the amount of singing she's been doing through the week. "... yesssss... that sounds fine. Anything else? No? Oh well." I was very pleased for her because so often she feels that she's not the 'singer' of the two of us, because she prefers me to sing the songs (even though on the album I think she has more vocals than me, tee hee). And to get such praise from a couple of pros must have been very satisfying. I'll take credit for the song lyrics being gripping, mind you...

Looking at our song list, I see that September produced three songs:
- Other People's Business, a comedy song which frankly I'm still not completely sure about... we've performed it once, but it didn't feel right while I was singing it, and I'm not sure I can get behind the anti-Bush message which emerged in the third verse. Not because I'm pro-Bush, more because I want it to be less specific.
- Get Out Of My Sky, a guitar song - written largely because I thought it would be an interesting experiment to write a "singer-songwriter" song. (Most singer-songwriters who show up at open mic nights have a guitar slung on their back and a bunch of overly-personal songs about breakups and so forth, and I detest them, so to prove to myself that it can be done right, I wrote some lyrics about a breakup, using a James Blish novel title which I've been wanting to use in a song for years, and handed them to Sarah with the instruction "On guitar, please".)
- Everything's Better With Monkeys, another comedy song, which we wrote for Alexis.

And that brings me to talking about our brief return to England in mid-September. Sarah had already gone back to Ireland for a week when I caught the plane to England and met her at Gatwick.

Did we enjoy seeing everyone? Oh, god, yes. It was a Posse rave. In fact, it was several of them. It was groovy to see everyone, to catch up, to spend so much time with Phil, Jacqui, and Alexis, and to get in some hardcore gatherage both at restaurants and in the form of All Back To The Twines.

But England still sucks. We'd forgotten just how we don't like Perfidious Albion. The air quality was atrocious: Sarah's asthma deteriorated to the point that she had to go back on all her drugs for a month when we came back to Vancouver. The crowds were rough, especially in London - they complain about the number of people here on Robson Street, but it's nothing compared to the raw fury of Oxford Street. I lost my temper at the toilet attendant at Victoria Station because they charge 20p for access to the loo. It occurred to me almost immediately that I was Verbally Abusing British Rail Staff, which could be construed as a crime, and Sarah wasn't getting any happier about my making a scene so I calmed down after a while, but sheesh. It all feels so small-minded and petty over there. It's not ideal here, but we didn't feel anything to make us want to come home.

Still: Posse!

And because Alexis used to spend a lot of time announcing "Aww, monkeys!" whenever she banged her elbow off a table or suchlike, we had written a song for her called Everything's Better With Monkeys. In fact we wrote it on the train back from London on the Wednesday after we'd been up there to see Parade (he cut Big News! the cad!) and our attempts to sing it quietly for practice purposes were obviously confusing the woman sitting opposite us. We unveiled it for Twiney that evening and it's proven a big hit with people over here since our return... most recently Kim, who almost stopped breathing from laughing at it so much. Exactly the effect we want, really. (Nothing personal, Kim!)

When we left England in January - ten months ago - we were sad, scared, nervous, and committed. Since then we've learned a lot and blossomed a lot. Leaving England again was easy. We'll go back, because England is where our friends and my family are. But that's the only reason.

Blog TARDIS: "Can you, just, like, not come in right at the start?" (August 2007)

Don't mention the war. Don't mention how Barb Wire is a remake of Casablanca. And particularly don't mention anything to the effect of "who the hell are you and didn't you used to write a blog?" Clear?

So: VWORP, VWORP, VWORP, and the Blog TARDIS lands splat in the middle of three months ago. Let's step out to discover what the Jaysmith timeline was up to at that point...

... and it appears they were just getting ready to go to Sorrento, which is about five hours' drive north-east-ish of Vancouver. Susan from choir took us in her van. I had two Red Bulls in swift succession so I was just a leetle hyper. A running commentary on the excellence of the scenery was soon followed by nonstop mockery of the ludicrously small city of Merritt - Canada's Country Music Capital, I'll have you know - but it was as well that Susan and Sarah didn't give me the bullhorn I demanded, or let me roll down the windows to mock the citizens of Merritt at high volume, because one of the van tyres turned out to be flat and we had to stop off at a garage for a quick fix. Brilliantly, Merritt advertises itself on the highways with big signs saying (across the top) Tourist attractions (and then underneath on the left) The Walk Of Stars! (and then underneath on the right) Reserved for future tourist attraction. Yes, folks, Merritt will be twice as interesting - sometime real soon. For now it looks like a mile-tall child threw a bunch of buildings at a mountainside in a tumpy fit after being told to put his village away. Let's go back there!

But wait! Why were we going to Sorrento? The presence of Susan is a clue. Any guesses? Bah, can't hear you, so I'll just tell you - Ieva (who runs High Spirits choir) had gone on non-stop about the Swing Jazz Camp run at Sorrento every summer, and eventually she'd persuaded us to come along. The idea is you immerse yourself in music for a week; there's convenient accommodation on-site and you wander around taking various courses and linking up with your fellow musicians for fun and jamming. The course tutors are professional musicians, songwriters, choir leaders, or what-have-you. So OK, Ieva by her own admission wasn't going to shut up about it, so we figured it would be interesting, and the networking potential would help with our overarching goal of hitting Canada hard, so let's do it. We booked a shared cabana with Ieva, Susan, and Callum (also from choir) to cut costs a bit, and off we went.

The good things about Swing Jazz Camp:
- the quality of some of the pro tutors. Sarah signed up for a daily jazz piano course run by Michael Creber, and I signed up for daily drumming with Phil Belanger, and we both joined a choir class run by Brian Tate (remember that name).
- Band Lab - a daily experiment in random band formation... each day those interested would assemble in the hall and the organisers would make six or eight bands out of us, assign us one of the two songs of the day, give us an hour to figure out an arrangement, and then recall us for a concert
- nightly concerts and dances - two chances to be singers in front of a 40-piece big band (with some very good soloists), a chance to perform our own material (I Want To Be A Panda went down a storm, and the five of us did a blistering version of Sing Sing Sing from last term's High Spirits repertoire)
- generally, we learned a lot about how jazz music works. Well, I say jazz, these are still normal songs, often in 4/4 or 3/4, not so wildly experimental jazz... more, it's that they're frameworks for singers and musicians to stretch themselves, improvise, and generally try things out with the support of other musicians

The big bad thing about Swing Jazz Camp:
... it turns out I don't like jazz or musicians ;)

That might sound like a sweeping statement, so I'll be more specific. And first I should stipulate that the professionals there, and the band, were very good, and when performing on their own they had plenty of understanding of what was necessary to make the music sound good, or at least listenable. However:

A lot of this music has two aims which are somewhat in opposition to what we think about music, with our show tunes background and specifically with my liking for pop. This music is (1) for people to dance to, (2) all about the musicians rather than the song (I feel).

There you are on the dance floor, most likely with your "baby" in your arms. You hear a song start. Ah, how you love this song. You hear the singer singing it once through; the lyrics are usually short, maybe 12 or 16 lines total. You dance a lot as the entire song is repeated several times with various soloists taking the place of the singer. Then you hear the singer again, repeating the entire song form one last time. This is your warning that the song is about to end. They play the tag a few times - e.g. the last couple of lines, or whatever - and then they finish. Lovely. A song one minute and thirty seconds long (at a pinch) has been made to last seven minutes, given the musicians several chances to show off their improvisational skills, and crucially, you've been able to dance in the same style for seven lovely minutes.

But suppose you're not on the dance floor? The kindest way I can put it is: it takes a certain frame of mind to appreciate the typical jazz jam, and I either don't have, or more likely refuse to spontaneously operate in, that frame of mind. If you're just sitting there listening to a song going on for seven minutes, including five repeats, even with different soloists, it's really boring, unless the improvising players are really good. And even then, there's a limit to how many such songs you can listen to before they start to sound the same. Most of the songs sound the same by design anyway; while I might admire them as pioneering and/or skilfully done in their way, they're all a bit old and they aren't really very adventurous lyrically or musically. (Sarah's chord sequences are much more interesting than the average old-school swing-jazz song.) Also, I'm strongly lyric-oriented, so it bugs me that the lyric is short, often quite abstract, more often horribly dated, and is overwhelmed by the song being treated as an instrumental for 80% of its duration.

The problem with jazz musicians jamming is this: they won't stop playing. For me good music is all about when instruments aren't playing. It's the arrangement, the decisions of who will be creating emotional effects, the space left for the singer... it's all about the planning, about making sure that the right sounds are reaching the audience. It's a special kind of audience indeed which will appreciate technical virtuosity for itself, rather than in the service of a creative or emotional goal. If a random band is jamming, I think that's the start of the creative process which ends with a good song, and the results might be worth listening to in order to review which bits worked really well, and if you were one of the musicians contributing to that process then at least you'd have something to do during it. But as a listener? No! I don't want to hear hours of monotonous comping turfed out by everyone playing at the same time. I want to hear the results of a creative director selecting what's best for the listener. I want to hear a finished song, and finished songs do not sound like this, and I am not interested in hearing the intermediate stages.

During Band Lab this was particularly painful. (Ever wanted to hear two songs played five times each by amateur musicians with an hour's rehearsal? Then come along next year, when I will be bringing my earplugs.) A couple of times when we were contributing to the arrangement process, we tried to persuade apparently competent, intelligent musicians that they should not play at certain moments, for effect. I swear, they looked at us like we were speaking a foreign language. "Trust me, come in later, it'll sound cool." "What? What is this 'come in later'?"

So a lot of the time I felt quite frustrated, because as a singer I can't actually do a whole lot in the part (the very long part) of a song when I'm not singing. I could scat-sing, but this is basically taking a solo, so that's still only maybe one-sixth of the instrumental section covered. The rest of the time I'm standing there as bored as the audience should be. (Except of course in a jazz camp setting like this the audience, all musicians too, is watching carefully to see how they can learn to play as professionally boringly as the musicians currently on stage.)

There was a joke quoted at the camp: "A rock musician plays three chords to an audience of a thousand people, while a jazz musician plays a thousand chords for an audience of three people." And why is that joke funny? Because usually you're not in the audience of three. When you are, it becomes a matter of not gnawing through the body of the person in the next seat in order to escape after twenty minutes.

Our own songs, even the ones with jazz chords, are not "jazz songs" in this sense, and I feel kinda pleased about that, and I think that that's why people like them. Maybe jazz musicians wouldn't like our songs because there's no room for soloing; we've mostly locked down the song structure in the service of the emotional effect of the song, which is driven by the song motifs and lyrics, and more importantly the need to make our point and not be boring. Maybe we aren't mature songwriters who understand the value of leaving space for musicianship, but my mature and considered response to that is "Feh."

In the student concert, what got the biggest responses, and not just from me? I Want To Be A Panda, because it's funny, it's been crafted very carefully for maximum amusement value, and we stick to the script. Sing Sing Sing, bursting with energy channelled into a really tight arrangement. The gospel choir, again all to do with energy and doing the song right, having rehearsed it every day that week. And a couple of songs written by their performers which had good lyrics and/or excellent and well-rehearsed arrangements. The elephant in the room is that even jazz musicians don't really like jazz!

Rant over. And if anyone from Sorrento is reading this, well, there were exceptions to the above, but statistics say that you were probably not one of them. Unless you were one of the people we made an effort to talk to, in which case we probably did that for a reason.

What else can I tell you about Sorrento? Well, despite the above fulminations, we did kinda like it. It was educational - in positive and negative ways! - and inspiring - we got a song out of it, Just A Moment - and I bought some brushes and have been doing very light drumming-along to songs, and Sarah has experimented with improvisation, although she still prefers planning her improvisations out in advance. We met some interesting people, and we certainly met some excellent professionals, even if in Sarah's case the benefits she might have gotten out of studying with Michael Creber were somewhat limited by his having to deal with other people in his jazz piano class who just weren't up to it. Finally, Brian Tate, who used to run the Universal Gospel Choir (which is apparently really big here but of course we'd never heard of it) has now set up a new choir for Monday nights in downtown Vancouver which we've joined. More on that in a later Blog TARDIS.

I'll leave you with some photos from that week - all taken by Guy Smith, the photographer on site - and next time we'll catch up on what we did in September. Enjoy.

The piano class, including Sarah.

The drum class, including me.

The dance class, including Ieva (top row, third from left), Callum (top row, far right), and Susan (seated, second left).

Michael Creber (left) and Brian Tate (right) performing.

The three professional jazz singers (Jennifer Scott, Karin Plato, and Kate Hammett-Vaughan).

Drum tutor Phil Belanger.

Brian Tate leading the choir class - Sarah and Susan taking full advantage of the "seated" option.

The choir class in full effect outside the refectory, singing something noisy no doubt. Susan and Sarah in the front row in shades, Panda lurking at the back.

And lurking no longer!

What a cool bunny :)

An exhuberant Susan...

I Want To Be A Panda, of course!

The gospel choir's contribution to the Thursday night student concert. Susan and I had solo lines.

Susan in action during her solo.

... and me during mine.

Sing Sing Sing

Band Lab - Sarah and Callum on vocals.

"You used me as confessor and as cash machine..." (Tuesday 7 August 2007)

You remember us. You don't remember us? Well we remember you. The absence of clamouring emails demanding further blogs from the intrepid Jaysmiths has been noted, let me tell you. And now, up to one month later than expected, may we present the continuance of the Vancouver-hitting...

Almost everything we've done this month has been music-related, which is good. It might get tedious for you in the details, but frankly, you'd read this if it was the phone book, that's what friends do. So:

Area 52 Designs, 48, Querns Rd, Cirencester, Gloucestershire GL7 1RP, Tel: 07866 970651
AVENUES VETERINARY CLINIC, 22, Garston Lane, Watford, Hertfordshire WD25 9QJ, Tel: 01923 894274
Dan Perkins Nissan Ruislip, 313, Field End Rd, Eastcote, Ruislip, Middlesex HA4 9NT, Tel: 0845 811 0395
Hyundai Bishop Auckland SG Petch, West Auckland Road, Tindale Crescent, Bishop Auckland, Co. Durham DL14 9TW, Tel: 0845 112 5004

... see, you're still reading, ain't'cha? Astonishingly, those are the first four matches for 'panda' at the Yellow Pages website. I'm not totally impressed. And now, back to the music.

When last we deigned to address ye, the adoring masses, we had just performed a 45-minute 'set' (as we pros term the affair) at The Wired Monk in Kitsilano. We were booked not long after that to come back and do it again, and that's where we should have been last night, but David the organiser called us over the weekend to confess that he'd organised it without realising the cafe was closed that day. So we've been rebooked for August 20th.

Meanwhile, these S.M.A.R.T. goals. This is a technique designed to ensure that your to-do lists don't become vague and unanalytical compilations of "wouldn't it be nice if..." / "I should do something like..." / "RULE THE WORLD! (but, er, how?)" and suchlike. Each goal needs to be Specific: "I will do X"... Measurable: "I can tell whether or not I have achieved X"... Achievable: "I have the power to do X"... Realistic: "I can do X quickly, easily, or at least with the application of existing skills and knowledge"... and Timely: "Doing X is a good thing to do now." So, whereas we'd had very vague plans - and yes, they did include "RULE THE WORLD!", but I would make a very benevolent dictator-panda - we switched to having a concrete to-do list on a fortnightly cycle.

And we still slightly goofed it up! But it's worked mostly to our advantage.

The first major goal was: make a good-enough recording of all the songs we've written up to now. This was so we could make CDs to send to the Copyright Office and our friends, and have something to hand out (or sell) at concerts. Fantastic - mission accomplished by July 18th.

Except... up till then we'd been recording in our cupboard, using my laptop, one of our performance mics, and software called GoldWave and Reason. And, while it sounded not-too-bad for something recorded at home, we were a little disappointed that it needed so much work. Sarah can play piano parts directly from her keyboard through a MIDI cable into Reason, which can replay it with a surprisingly authentic piano sample, but the vocal lines had to be recorded into GoldWave (as Reason doesn't deal too well with vocals, being primarily designed for sample-driven music such as techno and ambient) and then I had to mess around with them to get rid of the considerable background hiss and hum. Early MP3s which we sent to a few people still had the twinkling tinkerbell-like effect of my hamfisted workarounds for this irritant. Eventually Sarah found a genius way of removing the hum and the tinkerbell effect all in one, but it cost us some of the richness of our tone, and added a slightly mechanical, razory sound to the vocals. Which was also irritating, but what can you do?

Answer, quite a lot. We had pretty much committed to using the tinkerbell takes, mixed with my slightly rubbish Reason skills to within an inch of their lives, on the basis that, well, we're recording at home, so how good can you really get? The idea was to make recordings we could send to people to sell them on our songs, not necessarily on our performances or our production skills. On July 22nd we dropped into Tom Lee, the big music store on Granville, and asked one of the staff about it.

We came out with a $250 external audio interface and condenser microphone, went home, discovered it wasn't compatible with Windows Vista (my laptop), grumbled and plugged it into Sarah's laptop - and, dear god, the difference! First off, our vocal mike was picking up too much outside noise - the condenser mike somehow, magically, picks up only the sound from a space directly in front of it about the size of your cupped hands. Sarah was standing next to me talking during one of our tests, and she barely shows up in the recording. Then, having an external audio interface plugged into the laptop via USB, with the mike plugged into it, means that we don't get interference from the laptop power supply and other circuitry. Finally, the external interface contains a microphone pre-amp, which laptop soundcards lack, so the microphone doesn't have to be turned up to the max to squeeze a signal into the soundcard.

Result: sounds damn good. Except now we have to rerecord all our songs. Grrrrr...

Oh, in the meantime we went to a new venue, Myles Of Beans, a cool coffee house in Burnaby. This was on, hmm, the evening of Thursday July 19th. We performed Panda, Fireflies, and Henry VIII. (Scurry, scurvy brigands, to our MySpace page, where you can hear some or all of these, depending on when you read this.) That was fun, and we certainly got their attention. They were initially a bit bemused by Henry, but that's hardly surprising, as you'll find out when you hear it, and by the end they were roaring. It's very satisfying to get applause before you've finished a song... it shows not just that the audience appreciates it, but that you've structured it so that they can tell they're hearing the end and they know they can start applauding now, rather than waiting.

So, yes, we had to rerecord everything. This was a bind, but by the cringe, it's produced far better versions of everything, and I haven't had to apply ninja mixing skills to get something listenable out of Reason for each song.

And for the record (ahem) this is what's on our album, which will be arriving with you at whatever date the Post Office or our personal appearance on your doorstep happens to facilitate:

1. I Want To Be A Panda
2. Too Little, Too Late, Too Bad
3. I Gotta Get Me One Of Those Girls
4. Velvet
5. The Six Wives Of Henry VIII
6. Fireflies
7. If Love Is
8. The Night Train
9. The Journey
10. All You Have To Say
11. When You Smile
12. Love, Dance & Sing
13. I'll Rescue You
14. 24 Days
15. Air Conditioning

Not bad! But wait, there's more! While we were rerecording, we were still writing. We decided to stick with those fifteen songs for the CD, but in the meantime songs sixteen, seventeen and eighteen have crept out from the Jaysmith Hit Factory:

16. Titanic
17. Waiting For The Sandman
18. If We'd Never Met

We road-tested Sandman at our second trip to Myles Of Beans last Thursday, but more satisfyingly, Sarah's performance of Too Little, a fierce feminist rebuttal of a man's attempts to get back in with his girlfriend, got positive whoops of delight from the girls in the crowd. Very satisfying!

Producing songs carries a heavy ancillary cost, most of which is, I'm ashamed to say, borne by Sarah. Usually my work is pretty much done once we're settled on the lyrics, although I kibitz the music a bit, and obviously if I have to sing it then I have to sing it. I also do the mix. But Sarah has to compose the piano accompaniment (which she does superlatively, considering how she claims to hate it), play it into Reason, fix it up as necessary, sing it if it's a female vocal, and then produce the sheet music in Finale, which often means playing it again, this time to a click track, and then more fixups. It's a lot of work and we've been forging ahead so fast with compositions and performance that the backlog has almost exhausted her. However, as of tonight we have sheet music for everything except the two newest songs and a couple of the old ones. Amongst other things, this means we can send them to Alexis :)

Thinking about it, that may be all on the music front for now. Which means I can tell you some other stuff.

Sarah has been on the radio! She was taking acting classes on Monday and Wednesday nights in deepest darkest South Granville, and at the end of the course, the organiser, the excellently-named Jay Hamburger, recruited the entire class to assist in his 'drama hour' which goes out on co-op radio (essentially, public access) every week. So Sarah played one of the tailors in George Orwell's adaptation of The Emperor's New Clothes, and also wrote a three-minute scene for two of the other actors to take on. So she's an actress and a playwright! Boom!

We finally got around to eating at the pasta place on Davie which so intrigued us last September. It looks like a snazzy hotel and indeed the interior is reasonably decadent, but after some confusion (caused by a deaf panda whose name shall remain mine) we got seats on the lawn and proceeded to scoff some very nice food. I had meatballs and spaghetti in meat sauce, couldn't finish it, got it boxed up, and finished it just now. Delicious. Straight back there for more next week. It's got some way to go before it displaces Sarah's favourite, the Kalypso greek restaurant - who amongst you would have thought that Sarah Elizabeth Jaysmith would be seen eating hummus? - but it has a chance of dragging us away now and then.

For anyone we haven't told: we've booked our flights back to the UK for mid-September. Sarah is coming over on September 8th to Gatwick and then immediately flying on to Ireland to see everyone there. (Well, I say everyone, I mean a subset of everyone she knows, she's only got a week.) She then flies back to Gatwick and meets me, inbound, on the 15th. We spend that week in England, and fly back to Canada on the 23rd. No doubt we will be exhausted, but at least we'll have seen you all, and, most importantly, we'll have given you our CDs ;-)

Culture report: we went to see Julius Caesar as part of the Bard On The Beach festival in Kits. It was good, with the drawbacks of a small cast leading to numerous cases of "wasn't he called something else earlier? Oh, it's a different character..." and the collective Jaysmith decision that this is not an ambiguous play about whether Brutus and Cassius were right, it's a tragedy about Brutus and Cassius being wrong. (For those who don't know the story: Cassius is the sledge.)

Non-culture report: we finally bought a television. And lumped it back from Futureshop to here at great personal physical cost to Sarah! We finally caved in and bought insurance for an electrical good, too. I was extremely tumpy about this in the shop, but the hell with it. It looks good and is very flat. And it's meant we've finally started watching series three of Doctor Who.

Culture report again: we went to see Bobby McFerrin Friday before last, with some of High Spirits. Now this was interesting. I thought I liked Bobby McFerrin. And some of you will know I banged on about his Circlesongs album when I was in Littlehampton. Which is fair enough, because it's a work of genius. However, when eagerly wanting to book tickets for the show, I'd neglected to recall that when I've listened to the other two albums I own by him, I've felt kind of overloaded... and in fact, bored. His vocal technique is remarkable, but it don't half get samey after a while unless he has other people involved. And sure enough, while his interactions with the audience and his scratch choir and dance partners were amusing, entertaining, and sometimes breathtaking... every time he returned to the stage alone, I got bored again. Oh well.

Finally, for those interested in rather late news about small babies: Sarah is once again an aunt, thanks to Rebecca emitting her second child in mid-June. His name is Hugh Thomas Canning, and rest assured, if I have any say in it, his first words will include 'panda'.

They might be giants, baby. Much love, Gil & Sarah.

Shameless self-promotion... or bust!!! (Friday 13 July 2007)

This link here ->>> http://www.myspace.com/chilliandsage <<<- yes that one. Click on it now. And listen to music. And become one of our elite (i.e. low) number of friends. You know you want to. I know we want you to, and that means more people want it, and you believe in democracy, right? Anyway, just go there. We have four of our songs on the player, and will cycle them maybe every month or so.

Our news this week mostly just involves our Monday performance - twelve songs in 45 minutes, all originals - which in turn could be best summarised as "Excellent, but a bit of an anticlimax". Many thanks to the people who came along to cheer. However, it was a case of being on first and thus getting a smaller share of the floating coffee-cafe audience - although we sure held their attention with what we did. Nothing much is likely to come of it; we'll have to go back several times to build up a reputation and get put on later in the evening. Which is fair enough.

We wrote another song, Too Little, Too Late, Too Bad, over the weekend and Sarah performed it as part of our set. And our Big Plan For World Domination has now been broken down into a number of S.M.A.R.T. goals... you know about this don't you? Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timely... Sarah has a most amusing story about my forgetting the exact acronym here.

Much love, Panda.

The Empty Orchestra At Lindisfarne (Saturday 7 July 2007)

That sounds like a novel title doesn't it? All will be revealed. And a big welcome to Justine, who's reading the blog for the first time in ages, apparently. You slacker!

I now summon Mnemosyne, the muse of memory, in all her fashionable glory, who will remind me what we've done since June 19th. My suspicion is that we've done a lot, and are consequently exhausted. I shall just consult Mnemosyne's PDA to see what appointments she made for us...

Thursday June 19th: along to support Kim as she performed in Ceili Idol. Yes, I know. Even worse, it was in an unarguably Oirish Pub, Ceili's on Smithe. I can't honestly say we held our tongues; some of Kim's friends were in stitches at our various expressions of disgust. Among the many highlights of their menu was the Fighting Irish Steak Sandwich. For God's sake. Or the County Cork Calamari - because Cork is justly world-famous for its squid farms. I'm sure if I went to visit Cork I'd be asking to see them. (What is it about Ireland that everyone wants to be Irish? I hope Kim isn't too offended if she reads this, she is by no means the first person we've met who's in this boat, Abby being a prime example - but - if you're going to be attuned to, sympathetic with, devoted to, or otherwise expressing an interest in Ireland, wouldn't it be good to know (a) where it is? (b) that it's two countries, only one of which belongs to the United Kingdom? (c) why that is? (d) that pubs in Ireland aren't going to call themselves 'The Irish '? Et cetera.) Anyway, the place was horrible, so after entertaining the table with our precision decor-abuse, we gave up and concentrated on the music. There isn't too much to say about that. There were ten contestants, Kim went seventh and acquitted herself well, but events like this are all about getting the crowd going and bringing your friends, so the winning three were (1) the most talented person there, (2) a talentless freak with a bunch of friends, (3) a pigtailed blonde with a tight top and a pert attitude. Eh.

Friday June 20th: meal out with James & Susan. We meant to go to Kam's on Davie but it shuts at 9:30pm. So instead we went to a Greek place up the road whose name I forget. Everyone else seems to kinda detest it; it was okay for me. Back at midnight, all of us very sleepy, and we hadn't gotten around to any singing, so we just gave up by tacit mutual agreement, and so to bed.

Saturday June 23rd: (I think) - couch shopping with Susan. She drove us out to Grandview Highway and we tested about a hundred couches in three shops before making our selection. There was a couch entirely covered in blue denim! Sexy! We ended up with a very comfy dark-green couch, which to their credit arrived at our apartment less than two weeks later, and I'm sitting on it right now. Because it's my couch.

Sunday June 24th: have I mentioned that my mother's bear controls the weather? Well he does. His name is Bear and he can change traffic lights and weather patterns in your favour. Sarah didn't believe this until one day she was walking home in Littlehampton and she asked Bear to sort out the mild rain she was experiencing. As she wasn't on 'the list', Bear promptly made it snow on her. A very unhappy Sarah got me to put her on 'the list' and now Bear is very considerate. Possibly too considerate. What does this have to do with our activities on Sunday? We went to a 'Harmonic Overtones Singing Workshop' in Nanaimo, five blocks down from the Skytrain station. And it was a bit sunny on the way there, and the Skytrain is going East-ish at that point, so Sarah, who had forgotten her sunglasses, was a bit dazzled. So - as you would - she asked Bear if he could make it a little less sunny. Bear, obviously distracted by the thought of bedtime in the UK, moved some clouds around but this wasn't quite enough. He therefore offered to move the sun. How we laughed at this amusing deal.

Little did we know.

The workshop itself, well, I hesitate to comment on it lest Sarah, proofing this in my immediate future, is forced to recall all the horrible details, and turns on me to rend me flesh from bone. Suffice to say that the idea is you made a sound in your throat, and then with your tongue moving up and down the roof of your mouth, you change the shape of your throat to create a different vowel sound, which adds a second tone which you can control to create specific intervals.

It's all very interesting, technically, but it has no particular use outside of its own specific kind of singing. You won't be singing two lines in a choral piece, for example. Add to this that the teacher, while stunning in demonstrating the technique, was pretty rubbish at teaching it, and you have a recipe for an extremely irritating three hours.

By the end of which time, there was a rainstorm lashing the area like something out of the opening scenes of Flash Gordon. Seriously, more rain coming down harder than we've ever seen. And in our heads, there was the very apologetic voice of a small brown bear saying: "I'm sorry! I've put it back! I've put it back!"

Bear: do NOT. EVER. EVER! Move the sun again! Got it? Thank you!

Sarah growled all the way back up the hill to the Skytrain station. What a tumpy bunny!

I don't think anything much happened the next week. Which brings us to this week...

Monday July 2nd: we have evolved a Big Plan to do with our music. It's this: we want to be rich. It's that simple. We have songs and we have skills, we just keep giving them away, and giving our time away too. Not gonna get rich that way. So, the Big Plan is to start performing, songwriting, schmoozing, and generally making an effort in order to get ourselves profitable careers in music. This is a long-term plan with many stages, but the first one seemed pretty clear: go and find places to perform. The obvious candidates, considering that we want to show off our own songs, are the many open-mic nights held all around Vancouver. There's a list here: http://www.openmicvancouver.com. I investigated them as best I could online, and we chose the Backstage Lounge on Granville Island as a starting point.

We got to the venue at about 8:15pm and signed ourselves up on the list to perform fourth. Just as well we did, as when we returned for the starting time of 10pm after a meal and a chill-out, we found the list was now full down to 13th place. It didn't quite start on time, but we were up there by sometime past 11pm. They had a very nice grand piano, and we performed Love, Dance & Sing and I Want To Be A Panda - to an audience of about ten, none of whom were really listening. The event was a bit of an audience-free zone, really, with the corresponding lack of feedback. Mildly disheartening if taken that way, but as Sarah pointed out, you can't expect everything to be wonderful.

However, on the plus side, two people there invited us to subsequent open-mic nights, one of which was on...

Tuesday July 3rd: ... at the Wired Monk cafe on 4th and Trafalgar. This meant a slightly inconvenient bus-trip with a keyboard and stand under our arms, since the guy, David, advised us that there was no piano or keyboard in situ. But we trogged there, we had a snack, and we went on second, playing I'll Rescue You, Fireflies, and I Want To Be A Panda to an audience of about twenty. This went down much more like it, with definite whoops and sincere applause. (It's fun but a little weird to sing I'll Rescue You as really it's Alexis's song. You should go buy a copy from Alexis's website.)

Generally the music at the Wired Monk was much better than at the Backstage Lounge, and several people said nice things, including a singer/guitarist called Tony with whom we had an excellent long chat. The best part was as we left, though. I went over to thank David and he invited us back to perform on the following Monday night, which is the Wired Monk's 'best of open mic' evening - and we've been asked to do a 45-minute set! Erk! So this weekend we're doing a lot of thinking and rehearsing! I probably ought not even to be taking time out of it to write this...!

And that's almost everything except for Friday July 6th, last night, when we went out for a meal with James & Susan (and this time managed to reach Kam's before it closed) and then spent three hours back here singing. In that time we showed off the new song The Six Wives Of Henry The Eighth and the four of us put in some serious effort on Sarah's SATB arrangement of Air Conditioning, which already sounds not half bad. And is, naturally, sheer genius in its every particular.

So today we're feeling a bit peaky but we have only slightly over 48 hours to prepare for certainly our longest just-us performance and who knows, maybe an important one. The word has gone out to High Spirits and at Radical for people to come along. A report to follow after the event.

Wish us luck!

PS I forgot to explain the title but you're smart folks and I'm sure it all makes sense in retrospect.

"I hate cars! Cars should be destroyed!" (Tuesday 19 June 2007)

Well, we had an action-packed weekend...

I'll get the rest of last week out of the way first: nothing much happened until Friday. We had a very tasty meal at Checkers on Davie, and there was the final High Spirits outreach concert on Wednesday, which was mildly fun. There, who said I suck at summaries? And now...

Friday. Off to Granville Island to see the Broadway Chorus perform a revue show called Misplaced, a spoof of Lost in the form of a revue show with a plot connecting the songs. Kind of like a pantomime, but with good music. They even had Sailing - although recast as a chorus number and sung for laughs, thanks to where it appeared in the plot. Plenty of songs from obscure musicals, and from bang-up-to-date musicals too which was more impressive - The Light In The Piazza and Seussical, plus For Good from Wicked. The chorus was basically very good, and certainly very enthusiastic. They don't have much in the way of choreography, which is good, and being an adults-only group there's no sensation of jailbait being thrown onto the front of the stage in skimpy outfits to please the audiences, specifically the two-thirds of the audience who are the parents of the jailbait in question. Not that we know any theatre groups where that used to happen, no sir! Some slightly flaky voices, but nothing dreadful. The biggest problem was the length: 21 songs in the first half, 14 in the second. Only maybe 20% of them were poor enough to be cuttable, but if they'd done that, we wouldn't have been somewhat exhausted in the second act and waiting for the show to end, which never reflects well upon the songs you're hearing.

So I might go and audition for them, as they rehearse on Tuesday nights, which are currently free, and they're a little short of men!

Saturday. We ran around doing things during the day, mostly trying to get our impromptu "recording studio" set up and working so that we could make a CD. The occasion? Ieva's 60th birthday party. We got to the venue for about 5:15pm and had just about enough time to rehearse the ensemble and solo stuff we were performing, and then people started arriving. By the time the party was in full flow, there were well over 100 people - Ieva has a big family and three choirs who all love her! Marvin (Regier, of the choir and singing workshops some weeks back) was Master of Ceremonies, and first we sat through some toasts and roasts, and then there were half a dozen musical tributes. A group from High Spirits sang May You Always, an Andrews Sisters song, and James's group My Lady's Chamber sang three songs including the hacked-about What Shall We Do With The Drunken Ieva? - which was a hoot.

And then on came Noisy Panda with his faithful lop-eared accompanist. I announced that we had been asked to write a song for the occasion, "or at least I hope we were asked, as we've written one anyway." (Looking back on it, we're genuinely not sure, but too late now.) And I sat happily on the edge of the stage to start singing it. Someone reported to me later that Marvin had offered me back the microphone I'd used for my introduction when he realised I was going to sing, but I'm not sure I noticed, or if I did I just pushed it away...

And then I woke up.

I've probably mentioned before how I have this alarming tendency to wake up while performing; I mean by that that I find myself fully understanding that I'm on the stage performing. This is alarming in that until then I've clearly been doing all the right things, because I haven't had to think about it; the song lyrics are stored in my throat, I'm acting the song out by rote and according to plan... it's all good. When I wake up, this is a problem: I may now enjoy it more, being totally aware and in the moment, but I'm also now 100% responsible for everything I do. Nerves! Crisis! Autopilot is much more relaxing.

So having clarified that, let me now tell you that I sang this entire damn song 'in the moment', which made for a very nerve-wracking four minutes as I had only just learned the lyrics, and was still having to think very hard about the shape of a couple of the lines. Plus performance in front of 120 people. Plus, it was an important occasion. I didn't want to screw up (a) our song, (b) in front of Ieva, to whom it was dedicated and by whom it had been inspired, or (c) in front of a crowd of 120 of her family and friends, many of whom had heard 'all about us' from her or by our scarily-spreading reputation.

I was mightily relieved when we got to the end. But I was also mightily pleased, because after passing the last point in the song where I was concerned about the lyrics, I took a moment to look around the room, and I heard and felt that incredible emphasised silence which tells you that right now, as far as your audience is concerned, you are the only thing in the world worth focusing on. And that is a hugely satisfying feeling - I ought also to say humbling, but bah! Ego trip all the way, baby. We finished the song and there was a standing ovation. Hurrah for Gil and Sarah. Very excellent, worthy of the occasion, and general proof that we are Musical Geniuses Wot Write Songs Wot Are Not 'Alf Bad.

And boy, did we do a lot of schmoozing over the course of that party. More on that should anything transpire as a result.

Sunday. Argh! Owing to a slight error of timing, I ended up on at least provincial and possibly national TV, gleefully declaiming a rant (including the title of this post). This came about because Veronica from High Spirits was organising and appearing in a band playing at the Car-Free Day on Commercial Drive, and she'd invited us to come along to listen and generally soak up the ambience. Commercial Drive, at least this section of it between First and Venables, has a very Brightonian vibe, and in a car-free state it was like the North Lanes, albeit with much more street entertainment. We ambled around, listened to Veronica's band Toot-A-Loot, bought some stuff, and went home. But along the way, we were ambushed by a camera crew, who wanted to know how we'd gotten there - SkyTrain - and what we thought of the car-free concept. Gil, never short of a word or ten on the subject of "cars, and the evil that they do", launched into a prizewinning torrent of abuse of cars and drivers, praise for Vancouver's transit infrastructure, approval of London's congestion charge, political conspiracy-theorising about how the rich people get out of paying it, and so forth. Sarah stood faithfully next to me and nodded and chipped in with agreement about Vancouver's farsightedness (rather than, for example, saying, "But I like having a car"). As we departed the scene Sarah heard the interviewer saying something about "that was a perfect..." But we weren't aware of just what a "perfect..." it was until Monday morning when Josh at work informed me that he'd seen me on the news. Argh! Argh!

After a certain amount of searching we found the video online: if you have an FLV player, this is the link to it; failng that, I downloaded it and if I manage to convert it I'll post it up somewhere...

Sarah quizzed me on my panic yesterday evening. "What did you expect might happen if a TV news crew interviewed you on camera?" Well, clearly not this. Canada, consider yourself 'hit' again.

And now the weather. Or to be more truthful, some photos:

James working on our mirrors last weekend, with Gil looking on from a safe distance:


The view down Alberni Street.


A better view, showing the construction happening diagonally across from us. And yes, Podge was feeling very brave, poking his nose out of the window like that.


A picture of extremely happy bathing pigs, taken in the restaurant where we supped on Sunday after the High Spirits concert.


A very happy pig statue:


James and Susan (who are now together)


Wot Holidays?!


This is 'The Qube', an apartment building on West Georgia, the road down from us. Yes, it's being held up by straps. No, this is not safe. Next question.


A rather large water feature outside another building on West Georgia, its scale brought into focus by the presence of a small bunny. (She's actual size but she seems much bigger to me, as They Might Be Giants used to sing.)


Another, much smaller and prettier, water feature a little further down the street.


An odd tree trunk thingy outside a building. You may not be able to see pinecones squirming all around the base like living things. It was creepy.


I bet we've posted this before but it's just brilliant.


While waiting for the delayed Kim on Saturday afternoon. Mr Jaysmith's t-shirt by Monstrance.


Same location twenty seconds later.


At the car-free festival, much activism centred around a proposed new port extension and highway. Apparently 'marmots' will be threatened. (We spent quite some time estimating just what the hell this was before finding a sign saying it was a marmot.) But if they're this size, I foresee them having no trouble whatsoever in fending off construction crews.


Community drumming, led by our favourite star drummer Pepe! He's everywhere!


Birds of New York. (We're in a Blog TARDIS now; this is back to Sarah's trip to the east coast a couple of weeks ago.)


The world's dotiest piano?


Company is setting New York on fire. Lots of Tony awards. Sarah dug it.


Charlton Heston with a bunny. A rather large bunny. Proof that they get everywhere, and are secretly running the country.


And on the subject of 'getting everywhere':


Who was that blue-garbed superstar?


Oops, back to Vancouver. This giant (and nonfunctional) abacus sculpture stands outside the gate to an apartment complex in Chinatown. Wouldn't it be more fun if the access code for the gate had to be physically set on the abacus?


And back to the concept of superstars. An action shot, hopelessly (and hammily) posed while we were recording Love, Dance And Sing. Is there no stopping this panda?




Right, I think I deserve a rest after that. Cheerio, squires and squirrels... more next time. xxxxxx from Gil and Sarah.