a week abroad

hye (that's my new greeting.... just a typo, but lazy and artistic can merge sometimes),

i just got back to montreal after a week east. i arrived at 5 am early monday morning. drove from halifax. kinda crazy. especially in the rain. but i wanted to have the day here. ended up sleeping half the day, so i don't know what's the smarter thing in that case. okay. rambling over here.

i had a really nice week away from montreal. but it's awesome to be back and get back into writing and cooking and just plain taking care of myself.

i left last sunday and headed to sherbrooke to spend a couple of days with andy creeggan's family. andy and i worked on some demos for 3 of my new songs. it was a lot of fun. andy's got a great shed that he converted into a studio. it's a bit chaotic, but it works that way. it was also real nice to play a grand piano. andy's got a nice one. so the songs we did are 'slow through the city', 'real tight', and 'do you feel the world'. maybe i'll post them... they're real rough and i had a cold.

on tuesday i made the drive from sherbrooke to halifax and i started to obsess over how to record a potential new album. and then i got caught up getting deeper and deeper into obsessive inner thinking and i found myself missing all of the wonderful external things that make this world such a fun place to live sometimes. so that's going to be my challenge for this next recording, whatever way i record it. to keep the creative flow and keep receiving wonderful signals from this old world. it's easy to get tunnel vision when recording. i don't know if i'm ready yet.

so halifax. it was so amazing to be back there. all of my friends and some more came out to the show on wednesday night at the company house. jason macisaac and the heavy blinkers ensemble opened up and played all new songs. jenn grant sang with them and it was beautiful. and i played solo but everyone helped me out at one point or another. such a wonderful vibe that night!!! i'm glad everyone had a good time.

thursday i went to musquodoboit to rehearse with the kids choir for the friday show. i also performed a 15 minute set for the school. a lot of the kids sang along to good watermelon, one of the songs they were planned to sing. the rehearsal went well and i have some of it on video. i'll post it maybe.... i only have like a couple of hours a day tops on the internet, so it's hard to fit in everything all the time. but it's all on my list to do!! thanks for staying with me....

the show on friday with the kids was a blast. it was electric. they sand good watermelon, and then i joined them for great pop song. one of the biggest highs of my life was after that song when i did some high fives with the kids and then it just ended up being high fives with every kid. i did 2 songs on my own, but the choir was still very involved, either by laughing at the lyrics or by clapping and singing. i sang if you were my girl and we should dance.

i also did some piano session work while in town.... a song on the next stance record. great fun guys. so nice. and a great thrill was to work with mike o'neill for a song on his next record. that was saturday afternoon. wow!! you know i've been obsessively listening to his 2000 record what happens now? so it was an honour.

i also caught some amazing live music while in halifax. on friday i saw erin costelo's cd release set! she burned up the stage. amazing. and then i also caught the first set from the new band called library ... an offshoot of the band i see rowboats. and on saturday i caught a fun show at st. matthew's church. hymm, ruth minnikin, the superfantastics and brent randall and his pinecones were on the bill. really was looking forward to that show. didn't disappoint. you should check out all of those bands!!! the highlight was hymm's duet between levon campbell and jess lewis called hills or something like that. it had the 2 of them at the piano playing together and singing together!!!

anyway, a really nice week away and now i'm back and a bit hungry, so i think i'll leave this cafe soon and head back home. yesterday my tire exploded on van horne street, so i gotta fix that too.

well, there.... a regular week away for me.

see you soon,
mike