May Revival

It’s official: Spring’s nearly gone and Summer’s itching to get going. My sunburn confirms it. After a kind of winter hibernation, songs that have been formulating and fermenting over the past few months are starting to take shape. In the past week I’ve had the great pleasure of jamming and rehearsing with my fave guys to make this music with, Jeff Younger (electronic effects adventures on guitar) and Skye Brooks (heavy sonic exploration on drums). Dusting off the oldies, adding some new flavour to them, and taking the plunge into evolving a few new tunes. Leaving a gig inspired to do more is one of the best feelings.

It’s an interesting thing, picking up a piece of a piece that seemed like it would go nowhere, dropping it onto another piece of a piece that also didn’t have much direction, then finding promise in something you might even call a song. And in all those little pieces are the story of your year, your decade, your morning thoughts, your lifetime. But it’s so often a conflicted process: do you limit the development of the almost-song to the moment that inspired an idea? Do you cross-contaminate? Ultimately, do you even get to decide, or do your collaborators or the song itself determine that for you? It can seem like dishonouring an experience to draw from others to finish a song, yet it can equally be limiting its life to give it a time stamp, and not invite the neighbouring crises to have a say. (So to speak.)

All this rhetoric boils down to a bunch of scribbles on staff paper, unintelligible notes on confusion, happiness, darkness, terrible ideas, wonderful ones, narcissism, self-sacrifice, and on and on. Beat up journals full of stuff that just might be interpreted as sounds and lyrics.

I’m playing some of these sounds in the next couple months: Monday, May 27th at the Libra Room (Vancouver), and for the Vancouver International Jazz Festival on Monday July 1st (Canada Day) at Ron Basford Park. Looking forward to discovering where the momentum this project is gaining will take us.

Yours in all things music,

Shan

Photo credit: Maggie McPherson