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!