great vibes at the cran hall

 well well well, mr, Twyford, you have returned from the darkness…

um, yes.  I am aware that I have been unavailable.  My apologies to the throngs of devotees.

don’t patronize us fool!  We are you. 

we are one, man.

I am not a man.

word.

word… how was the show?

The SHOW!  was awesome.  I love the pesky alders.  They put fuel in my tank.  like, literally, but moreso unliterally, laterally maybe.  They feed my soul.

your soul is hungry?

not so much today.  Alder trees are very sustaining.  Do you know you can cut them down and just stick them back in the ground and they will grow?

no.

yes.

tell us more about the show. 

well, I have to say, that having nothing to do with promoting or organizing it was cool.  Nice to just go for a drive and play a show.  As a result I was feeling pretty loosey goosey.  I plaid the trash cans for the fifth time I believe,  It wen’t pretty well, I suppose.  The trash cans are definitely trashy.  We could use a bit of practice, the trash cans and I.  Actually I busted a skin on my little kick drum.  Supertrash.

We hear that you “flailed gloriously.”

yes, I grow ever better at making the breakdown the main attraction.  Trashy is funny. 

funny trash.

I played pretty good though, between the flails.  I’m getting the idea that my audience is learning to expect absolutely nothing from me.  I have served them my truth and they’ve granted me freedom.

You have never stricken us as much of a prisoner.

yeah, that’s what I hear.  fear is a jail, and it is also top secret, and ever evolving, like bugs that develop immunity to pesticides.  Love on the other hand is freedom.  I guess it boils down to accepting their love…  The audience.  and mine to.  Everybody’s passing freedom around, but we’re fairly comfortable behind bars.  let freedom reign!

let freedom reign….  we love you can.

you mean cam?

can.   we love you can.

we love you too can.

 

 

 

a snack

what are you doing today cam?

I’m putting out a single!

a single!  has your album been reduced to one song?

no silly.  The album is still on it’s way.  The single is a little snack before dinner…

that’s fantastic.  how many songs do we get to eat?

three.  Salad not Sod, which was going to be for dinner, and then a fun version of horsetails, and also a little demo I made for city hall.

cooool.   So tell us about salad not sod.  I can tell from the track lengths that salad will be the bulk of the meal….  I mean snack.

Well, I’ve been playing this song alot lately; it has definitely morphed from this version here, but this one is cool; I think we can call it the grunge version.  Tom and I recorded it back in March when I first put chords to the song.  This was the first recording we worked on actually….   we played a bunch of songs with the mics on,  and then we went back and worked on salad not sod, adding bass, guitar, extra vocals… we did all that in a night.  The version of horsetails I’m putting on the single is from that session too, but we didn’t add anything to it, so it’s raw.

gross.

….horsetails is actually going to be on the forthcoming record, but it sounds nothing like this version here – this was the very first time I ever played it with Tom…  in the first verse there is a sharp turn that throws one off one’s horse.  Tom managed to grab the horse by it’s tail and climb back on and continue riding.  It makes for an exciting minute and a half…. On the forthcoming record we know whats going on a little more and it’s played with quite a different groove, there’s piano, and sexy ethnic bass…. that verison makes you want to shake your booty, whereas this version makes you want to take cover…

in the horsetail patch?

in the garden…  but any good garden has it’s share of horsetails.  Don’t weed them out, harvest them and make tea and tootbrushes with them.

and that’s what you’re yelling about in the song?

yup.

ok,  whats up with the city hall demo.

very hokey, low quality, four track recording I made to communicate with the trumpet player what I wanted her to do for the record.  It’s kind of what my old records sound like.

And city hall will be on the forthcoming record as well?

yeah, again it’s totally different tom ended up playing romantic piano for it…  the album version will destroy this version completely.  It’s going to be the make-out song of the summer.

wow.

but this demo was important, it helped us see the song, for sure.  I knew city hall was going to be on the record long before I knew how to play it.  I’ve been carrying the lyrics around for a year and I didn’t know what to do with them till I was shown the I – IV- minor IV progression, and then the words had a home, but beyond that the song was kind of a mess,  but I still knew I wanted it on the record…

….this demo was actually recorded after the drums were recorded, and it changed the feel of the song, we did keep the drums,  but we ditched the guitar and added the piano.  -And of course the trumpet, which ended up being way more sparse than the synth trumpet I play here.   recording is kind of wild like that.  It’s like a painting where you still have control over the colours after you put them on the canvas…  and the paintbrushes need to be tuned all the time.

So when’s dinner?

you mean when is the real record coming out?

yeah man, you told us it was coming out like two weeks ago. WTF?

well….  That’s what the snack is for.  you are supposed to be distracted by these songs for a little while….  when you are hungry again the album will be ready.

grrrrrrr.

Newspaper releases single, Internet goes wild

Terrifying headlines has entered the music world, releasing a single for the song, salad not sod, and the general public has scince been heard chanting, humming, and shouting it’s contageous refrain:  Salad not sod!… lettuce not lawns!…”  All over North America, front lawns, back yards, even underused foodball fields are being turned from expensive symbols of unanimous helplessness into thriving  stakeholds of resilience and independence.   Grocery stores are quickly transforming into dancehalls, and the highways are being taken over by cyclists, stricken with freedom.  The polarity has been reversed.  We as a nation appear no longer to be slaves to corporate interest.  We are well fed, we are rich, and we are sharing!

The economy is in “fractal relative bliss” the finacial wagon reported yesterday.  “No one can control themselves!  local is no longer an issue!  Neighbourhoods are changed forever, everything is changed forever!  Let Abundance Reign!”