Running To Open Arms

I was laying on the ground
Under a fairytale sky
Wishing you were there
So I could feel you by my side

Thinking, all we are
Is carbon and love
One goes on and on
While the other turns to dust

     CHORUS      
     You’ll never be lost too long
     With your heart as the northern star 
     Nothing can steer you wrong
     Running to open arms

All I’m sayin’ now
Is time, it don’t wait
There’s no sure way to know
Till you’re looking back on it

So wrap your arms around me
Let’s dive right in
Gotta roll the dice
If we ever wanna win      

     CHORUS

BRIDGE
Here we go now, climbing over the mountain
With each step, every moment, we’re counting
On leaving our own trails behind
To blaze one side by side
 
     CHORUS
 
All we are
Is carbon and love
One goes on and on

Hounds At Bay

Hounds At Bay

Hunger and craving
The jaws and the teeth
Lusting and longing
No chain, no leash
I will be hunted again
If you ever leave

Stay, you keep the hounds at bay
Stay, you keep the hounds at bay

Safe under cover
Of your pulse and your breath
Shielded and sheltered
In the heat and the sweat
If a distance should grow between us
I’ll have no defence

Stay, you keep the hounds at bay
Stay, you keep the hounds at bay

Riding Shotgun

Riding Shotgun
(co-write with Nathan Smith)

The tank is full, my bags are packed
There’s room for yours beside ’em
No more talking ’bout our dreams
Let’s go see if we can find ’em

C’mon and leave it all behind
Just think what you could find

    CHORUS
    By my side
    On any highway
    We’ll take this ride
    And make it our way
    I’m in it for the long run
    If you’re riding shotgun
    If you’re riding shotgun
    If you’re riding shotgun
    If you’re riding shotgun

Pick a point on the map
Big or small, it don’t matter
It ain’t about the destination
We can figure that out after

Well I can follow any road
Cuz I got you to hold

    REPEAT CHORUS

SOLO

BRIDGE
I’m soaking up this red sunset
And dreaming of the road ahead

    DOUBLE CHORUS
    (Side by side)

Who says it can't be yours?

If I were a 20-something-year-old woman, I'd like to think that I'd sound like this:

When your streets are paved with coal
But you walk around ‘em just like they were gold
Some jerks are gonna call you a crazy fool
If you're not gonna do what they all do

You gotta chart the course you want
Let the sheep all laugh and doubt and taunt
Believe that when your ship heads out to sea
They’ll all be drowning in envy

Let courage scream, cuz talk is cheap
Let haters hate while dreamers dream

CHORUS
There’s a new wave rolling over that old ocean
There’s a fresh wind blowing in an ancient sky
There’ll be new sparks flying off of every fire
Until the last, lone ember dies

Who says, who says, who says it can’t be yours?
Who says, who says, who says it can’t be yours?
Go in search of more — make it yours

Well everything comes with its price
A champ is never born without a fight
You’re gonna have to take some to the chin
And lose a few before you win

So punch until your knuckles bleed
You’re Rocky, not Apollo Creed

REPEAT CHORUS

BRIDGE
Keep kicking and climbing and digging and screaming
And kicking and climbing and digging and screaming
And kicking and climbing and digging and screaming
Till it’s yours

REPEAT CHORUS

Rumours Of Spring

Aside from a cowrite with my friend Smudge in February, and edits to a couple of my existing tunes, I haven’t written a complete song since October 27 (which was the title track for my new album launching June 1… stay tuned for more on that).

I s’pose it’s been a long, cold winter in more ways than one. So it’s only fitting to dust the cobwebs off with this new one. Had the hook idea a few weeks back when walking on a very cold Toronto beach. Wrote the lyrics this past weekend. It’s melancholy, but I still dig it, especially the chorus.


Rumours Of Spring

Even the weather man says he can’t recall
A year when we had it this bad
I swear we’ve been frozen since fall
By February we were nearly mad

Annie said we just needed a break
So I bought us a week in southern sand
March crawled by, oh how long did it take
Till April came, fool’s day in hand

CHORUS
Now I’m down by the lake where the dogs run free
Sunday morning with my back to the breeze
Coming off the water, so the tears on my cheeks don’t freeze
There've been rumours of spring
But it’s something that I just can’t see
There’s been rumours of spring
But it’s something that I just can’t see

Right about now, she’s got her lips on a drink
And an old straw hat to shade her from the sun
I should’ve gone anyway, I know what you think
But some islands just have room for one

REPEAT CHORUS

BRIDGE
Well, things ’round here still feel icy cold
Yeah, Annie picked the perfect time to go

REPEAT CHORUS

Move Mountains (rev)

Nearly a year ago, I had a demo recorded for this song and I was super pleased with it. But the more I listened to it, the more the bridge lyric rubbed me the wrong way:

          They say, standing behind
          Every great man is a bride
  Telling him he’s strong...

This came straight from the song’s concept starter, “behind every great man is a great woman.”

But I happen to know some perfectly great fellas who don’t have women behind them. Some have male partners. Then there's the great women with men or women behind them. And many of the women I know who are in longstanding relationships were never brides. Besides, you’re only a bride for a day, and this song’s about love stretched over a whole lotta days.

I didn’t want my song to exclude any of these folks! I hated the idea of the song getting picked up with that line in it, and perhaps that the line might actually rub other producers or artist the wrong way too. Heck, I couldn’t even bring myself to sing the song anymore. And I really wanted to record it myself on the new album.

So I rewrote the lyric in September:

           There’s nothing he can’t rise above
           When he’s lifted by her love
           Telling him he’s strong...

It sounds more natural, it’s not so cheesy (to me anyway) and doesn’t exclude anyone. It’s still about a man and woman, but in the context of their story in the song. It doesn’t exit to some soapbox plane like the original seemed to do.

Yesterday, the folks at Beaird music got Matt Dame back in to sing the new lyric. I Skyped in and chatted with him before and between the takes. Took all of 7 minutes. The other really cool thing is that, although the music never changed a bit, my new melody really jacks up the energy at the beginning of the bridge where the old melody brought the intensity down. So it’s a positive change all around.

I got the remix today and it sounds great.


And my own acoustic version is happily residing at track #5 on my own new album currently being mixed. I'm blessed to have Nathan Smith playing fiddle, Don Kerr on drums and Jerry Stamp adding harmonies. Stay tuned!

Fool On The Hill

In the spring, I was questioned for two hours at the border crossing. They seemed to have a hard time believing I was going to go home again in six weeks like I said. This was my first crossing with the Nexus 'trusted traveler' card, so it was a huge and stressful surprise to me. In hindsight, I did have a ton of needless crap in the car, so maybe it did look like I was pulling up stakes. Anyway after finally calling my boss to corroborate my story, they let me in. Phew!

The two other big events on that trip were pro demo recording sessions at Parlor for This Old House and at Beaird for Move Mountains.

Matt Legge engineered and mixed This Old House. We hung around for a while, 'chewing the fat' as they say back home or 'shooting the breeze' they'd say elsewhere. He mentioned Sam Hawksley, a writer-producer friend of his who he thought I should meet. Only trouble was I was heading back to Toronto a couple days later.

We kept in touch and I timed my next trip to coincide with some album sessions that Matt and Sam had scheduled in July.

So I rolled into town again July 7, planning to stay for just two weeks. I decided to give up the 6-8-week visits partly because they seemed to cause undue suspicion at the border and also because it was hard being away from loved ones back home.

Matt invited me to hang out and listen to the sessions they were doing at Fool On The Hill for Nina Ferro's upcoming record. I listened while the five-piece band recorded two songs with Nina singing in an iso booth. Great songs, great band and a great voice!

Back up a few hours: it was Friday morning and I'd been in town five days. Up to that point, I didn't  have any plans to record. But following an NSAI mentoring meeting with Candi Carpenter, I decided I wanted to record a couple of simple acoustic versions of two of my not-so-country songs.

The mentoring sessions are an hour and mine with Candi was supposed to be Thursday morning. But the NSAI schedule got mixed up and she never knew about it. So she came in Friday just to hang out with me because she'd be on tour up north the following week and we wouldn't have another chance. We ended up spending around two hours talking and playing music.

Candi got excited about Move Mountains and This Old House. But when I told her I didn't have much similar country stuff, she said it'd be tricky approaching publishers with only two solid country demos. Although I might be hoping for a single-song deal to get things started, that wasn't necessarily how they'd be thinking.  Typically, they want to know that a new writer has a lot of stuff in the ballpark and the potential to regularly churn out a lot more stuff, including hits. Anyhoodles, I said I had some other stuff that I wondered about.

So I pulled out my guitar and played What About The Grey and Any Other Lover. In both cases, Candi was humming along harmonies pretty quickly and her positive feedback was incredible. It's funny how I'd discounted these songs because they didn't feel 'country' to me, even though I loved them. What About The Grey was about six years old, with an occasional edit in the meantime; and Any Other Lover was about two weeks old. Thinking of it now, it's interesting that they both started with guitar parts before lyrics (unusual bits for me that came from just fooling around, not intending to write anything) and out of emotion vs an objective hook-driven process.

Following that great meeting, I went to the studio to meet Matt and told him I was thinking of recording a couple of songs. He said "you need a guitarist?" and pointed through the studio window at Sam. I said hells yeah. So we lined up a session for the following Friday.

Sam would play acoustic and I'd sing. Nothing fancy. Candi had said she'd sing harmonies for me if she got back in town in time for the session, but it turned out she wouldn't. So she recommended Kenzie Wetz, a friend of hers and a great singer and musician.

I had another NSAI mentoring session the following Monday with Roger Alan Nichols and started right in with these and a couple other 'non-country' songs for his feedback. He loved them too! Roger really dug into the nitty gritty of the lyrics more so than Candi had. He had some great points about What About The Grey. A couple lines didn't really stick to the rhyme scheme. I'd hemmed and hawed over them through the years but liked the way they sounded, even though they clearly didn't rhyme. In hindsight, if I'm being honest, it was pure laziness that I didn't change them. Roger said "Publishers hear so many songs that they're just waiting for a reason to say no. When the brain's expecting a rhyme before the first chorus and you don't deliver, that's the reason to say no." So I sat down to fix them before the recording session and it didn't really take very long once I set my mind to it.

That Wednesday I met Matt at a pub to watch a soccer match and Sam came 'round too. We never got to talk much at Nina's session because they were working their butts off. So it was good to just hang out and get acquainted.

Matt setting up the session and Sam making loops

Come Friday, I showed up at the studio around 1:00 for a 1:15 start. Sam was already crouched over his laptop, programming a drum loop to one of the soundcloud links I'd sent.

We started with What About The Grey. Sam was on acoustic in one iso booth and I was singing in another. There was a window between us and we both had big windows into the control room where Matt was at the helm. We ran through it a couple times till we found a comfy tempo.

Sam had a solid guitar part after two takes and then added another part with a different guitar. I sang the whole way through each pass and we took the best bits from each to make a whole lead vocal part. Most of the bits came from one take, which I find is usually the case.

Sam playing 2nd acoustic for What About The Grey

Then we ran though the same process with Every Other Lover. The way Sam approached the first song had a bit of a different vibe than my original, but his take on this one was even more different – almost a reggae undertone, which was pretty cool. Sam is a fabulous guitar player – totally uninhibited by genre or style. He was playing electric R&B and soul last Friday and now he was playing reggae-infused acoustic folk rock.

Kenzi showed up on time for her vocal session and hung around patiently while we finished up the last acoustic track.

While Matt set up the booth for her, we ran the songs a couple times in the control room. She jumped right in and sounded so incredibly natural that I couldn't contain the smiles. What a beautiful voice, and we really mixed well.

I didn't have much in the way of concrete ideas for the harmonies, so I just figured we'd let her do whatever came natural and see what else popped up along the way.

Matt was great for this part of the process – not only engineering and keeping track of various parts of multiple takes, but helping me articulate my ideas and throwing in some of the best ones himself. We bounced a bunch of ideas around and Kenzie was great about trying anything and letting us know what she thought. All in all, easy as pie.

After that, Sam started setting up his electric gear. This was an awesome addition because I'd come into the studio only expecting acoustic tracks – and they were already sounding great. Matt said, "That's just how he rolls, man." They both seemed really into the tunes, which was the cherry on top from my perspective. They work on so much great music in the run of a day – it's a cool feeling to know they're digging your stuff.

While they were setting up, I took lunch orders and headed out to Firehouse Subs just out around the corner. By the time I got back, they were starting electric guitar parts on the second song. I didn't even hear the electric tracks for the first song until the end and we were eating sandwiches! But they were great and I had nothing to change.

Then I helped Sam load his car, Matt gave me rough mixes and we were all on our way again. What a great finale to the visit, making music with some wonderfully creative people.

For all the positive vibes this trip, thank you Candi, Roger, Matt, Sam and Kenzie.