Author Archives: ij

If I Had It All To Do Again

Posted on by


I was 12 when I wrote my first song, and songwriting has been a big part of my life ever since then. It helped me to cope with a lot of life’s events, and gave me a way to express my desires, my opinions, and my sense of humour in some cases. As it turns out, many songwriters start writing at about that time in their lives, and for the same reason. The angst-filled adolescent and teenage years are truly a creative (or destructive, in some cases) hotbed for all kinds of things.

I’ve written dozens and dozens of articles on all aspects of songwriting since I first put up a website in 1995. I’ve met a lot of other songwriters over the years because of that website, and participated in other online sites, some of which are still very active. They include the Muses Muse, a huge songwriting community created by a fellow Canadian Jodi Krangle, and SongU, a kind of songwriting university designed by Danny Arena and his wife Sara Light from Nashville, both of who are very involved in teaching and who have also written songs for a Broadway musical. It was really exciting to watch when they were nominated for a Tony!

I’ve performed hundreds of times for the smallest of events to big ones, for all kinds of people. My smallest audience was an audience of one :-). It was at a coffee shop in Burnaby a few years back in the middle of winter. The evening started out as a poetry reading, and I was supposed to be the second act. Well, once the poetry reading was over, the audience all left too! All except for one. She sat on a couch and patiently listened through a whole set of my songs. We laughed in between at this odd, private concert she was getting. Outside it was dark and raining pretty hard…no wonder there were no stragglers off the street, it was a terrible night!

It would be hard to say what my largest audience was…but I’ve performed for audiences at festivals where there were literally hundreds and probably thousands of people within earshot.

There was a time when I didn’t even perform my own material, I basically just played cover songs at bars in order to make some money. I’d slip the odd original song in, but I had little confidence in my own songs then. I didn’t like that kind of performing much…driving alone up to Duncan, about an hour’s drive from my home, over a pretty tricky part of the highway called the Malahat, playing three hours, and then driving back again after midnight, was not my idea of a good time. I just about gave up performing for good after that!

In the early 90’s I discovered recording and that was the beginning of a whole new aspect of music for me. I began by recording my own songs, of course, but I also got to record others, and had an opportunity to record some music for a television series called “Home Check with Shell Busey”. When I listen now to those first recording attempts, I cringe :-). I didn’t take any training, all of my learning came hands on. And I made a lot of mistakes! Eventually, I got better…the highlight came when I was asked to write the theme music along with many other music beds for CHEK News here in Victoria.

Another aspect of music that blossomed for me was teaching guitar. I made a proposal to a local community organization to teach adults guitar in an eight week program and I did that for a couple of years beginning in 1989. Then I was approached by a woman, Becky Bernson, who was also a guitar teacher, to become a part of an organization called the Whistling Gypsy. It was meant to be a kind of teaching umbrella, but part of the mandate was to put on folk music concerts featuring better known artists and groups travelling through our area. Becky and I would each teach guitar classes and private students out of our homes, and she gathered up other teachers in voice, bass, mandolin, and banjo among others.

At its peak, the Whistling Gypsy did very well, but it was a non-profit organization and it was hard to keep enough volunteers involved to manage the events and keep it going. Still as the Whistling Gypsy came to an end, I continued teaching. These days I average anywhere from 30 to 50 students, some private, some in classes, and teaching continues to be one of my main functions. I can’t tell you how much fun it is for me to watch someone learn to play their first chord on a guitar :-). I do have times when I get a little burned out, but find me a class of adults who have never been near a guitar before and I’m happy as a pig in mud! When I get them playing their first song, the smiles on their faces are priceless.

My Dad didn’t know what to think when I talked about playing guitar and performing when I was a kid. He didn’t see that as anything more than a hobby. And it took many years for me to find the confidence to pursue the many avenues of music that I did. But if I had it all to do again, I wouldn’t change any of it. The song in the video above, however, tells a different story.

There is a poem out there called When I Am An Old Woman, I Shall Wear Purple, by Jenny Joseph. If you’ve never come across it, you might find it a treat to read. What it meant to me when I first read it, was the idea of believing that old age would bring with it a kind of liberation from having to do what we have to do now. At the end of the poem, the writer considers that perhaps she should start doing those crazy things in the present so that people won’t get too shocked when she begins to wear purple in her old age.

The underlying message I think is the idea that we really want to live our lives fully and completely NOW. When I was writing this song, I was imaging getting to the end of one’s life and having regrets. I sure hope I don’t. Quick! Get me the purple clothes and the red hat!

IJ

Photo Madness

Posted on by

Originally written in 2008, never published:

My guess is that the three of us came back with anywhere between 1200-1500 photos from our recent trip to New York. On our bus trip around Manhattan, almost every person on board had a digital camera…you were constantly getting out of the way of somebody trying to take a picture somewhere. In fact, you kept your eyes open for them (and they for us I guess!) as the middle of a street or a familiar landmark suddenly became a back drop for a family photo album. I spent the whole day yesterday trying to find a website to upload my photos, but most of them restrict you in numbers or make it so complicated that you spend hours just trying to rotate a shot or add a caption. Finally, I created one through the Google program called Picasa. And here it is:

New York June 2008

 (Sadly, the link no longer works…)If you click on the photo, you can see the album either shot by shot or as a slide show. I uploaded about 141 shots, but had plenty more. Many either didn’t work out or became irrelevant, or just seemed stupid once I looked at them later! I think I took a photo or two of my lap or the ground below me. Half of the time, the sun was shining in the little screen viewer and I couldn’t see what I was shooting. Or I didn’t have my glasses on. That happens a lot 🙂 These days, digital cameras can come with nice big LCD displays that you have to be blind not to be able to see. I need one of those. Sometimes I miss not being able to look through the little viewfinder of an old film camera that has the rubber around it so the light doesn’t get in your eyes.

But I digress.

I wonder how much we’ll really look back at all of these photos after a few years have passed. I can imagine that if you look at them often enough, they’ll just imprint on your brain somewhere and you won’t need to see them anymore. Maybe one day, we’ll get little chips implanted in our brains that will play back slide shows of digital photos of our entire lives.

But isn’t that what memories are for? In fact, I remember on a couple of occasions during the trip where I just put the camera down and decided to simply look around for awhile, or when I told someone taking a photo of me to stop for a minute and just soak up the atmosphere.

You can’t really take a photo of the feel of a place, you need to use your physical body to do that. And if we spend our whole time just taking digital photos, we’re really missing something.

After all that work yesterday, I have been hesitating over the idea of emailing my friends and family a link to the photos. I mean, maybe a couple of them will truly want to see them…but do they really? Remember how it used to be a joke, the idea of watching somebody else’s family vacation slides? Maybe this is really the same thing. Who cares? There might be a good shot or two in there, but the experience really belongs to me, and I can’t translate that experience to somebody else. Not really.

I remember the evening we were on top of the Empire State Building and I commented to someone that you really can’t take a bad picture from up there. Well, I figured out later that if you’re me, you can :-). But for any of you who don’t mind flipping through 141 shots of a vacation you never took, you’re most welcome to check the album out. And I promise that if you send me a link to your family vacation photos, I’ll check them out. Either that or I won’t and say I did :-).

IJ

The Bronx Is Up And The Battery’s Down

Posted on by
For some reason this article that I wrote in June 2008, never got published on my blog…so here it is:


All last week, I was in a place I’m not sure I ever believed I’d visit; New York City. The first walk from the depths of the hot, dank, underground train station up the stairs into the smells and the crowds and the noise of the street was something I’ll never forget. People, people, people…pushing, cars honking, sirens wailing, heat, smoke from the street vendors selling all kinds of greasy food. Immediately, you feel like you have to hurry…the sweat is pouring from you, you can’t hear each other speak, you keep smashing your suitcase into things, trying to negotiate it around a swarm of human bodies, all rushing off somewhere else. Nobody really gets out of your way…you get out of theirs. You don’t know where the heck you are, you’re trying to get perspective, trying to keep yourself from having an anxiety attack. Then there is the great relief of finding a cab, finally seeing a way out of the madness…you sputter the address of the hotel and, sighing, you sit back in the cool leather seats of the cab and watch a whole different world whiz by you. Cabs have TV’s in them. And GPS video image maps so you can watch yourself getting to where you’re going. How strange is that?
From that moment on, it was a whirlwind of activity…we were overwhelmed. New York is almost a world unto itself. You know it’s big because you can’t see a way out of it! Every street you look down is just a cascade of tall buildings, one after the next. You don’t really get any geographic perspective; all of the buildings are so tall that you can’t identify your landmarks even if you’re only a block away from them! It wasn’t until the last day that I figured out which way to go when I walked out the front door of the hotel.
Now I’ve lived in a city, the city of Vancouver in the West End in the late 70’s and early 80’s, and I remember the feel of it, the pace, the constant rush of white noise. So I’m not exactly a country bumpkin. But it’s been awhile, and even though I anticipated what it was going to feel like, I was still thrown for a loop. We all were.
Yellow cabs. There are over 12,000 yellow cabs in Manhattan alone. And they are always honking…honest to Pete I don’t know how there aren’t ten times more accidents than there are. The cabs are always chasing each other, twisting and turning, squeezing in between and then squeezing some more. And honking some more. They honk at each other and at everybody else if they can’t get their way. Fists come flying out windows, obscenities belch through the air, out into the streets where a person like me stands on the corner trying to figure out where the heck I am. Too late…the crowds push behind me and I have to cross the street. Damn.
Pedestrians. They don’t wait for walk signs here. They wait for the last yellow cab to peel through and then casually cross behind them, cellphones glued to their ears, oblivious of that little red hand flashing across from them. Usually by the time the walk sign comes on, there are three or four trucks jammed in the intersection. But the locals brazenly swarm off the corner in groups, either rushing between vehicles or their heads peering back and forth looking for the first hole. Then bam! A car couldn’t make it through the horde of human bodies if it barreled them all down. The sheer volume of pedestrians, especially near places like Times Square, is unbelievable.
Times Square. That’s the picture you see above. It was the first recognizable landmark we came across the first night we ventured out. We were fish out of water, just meandering aimlessly looking for food, when suddenly the whole world lit up and started buzzing and flashing. There’s a law in the city that in Times Square a majority of the percentage of the buildings’ face must have advertising. One building owner doesn’t even have tenants anymore. He makes $300,000.00 a month just from the advertisements on his building! There are giant M&M characters climbing the Empire State building on a 30 foot high screen. I saw a 20 foot high bottle of Corona, my favourite beer! Nike, Pepsi, DKNY, Broadway theatre advertisements, movies, television stars. Macy’s Department Store, Rockerfeller Centre.
What an assault on the senses!
And would you believe it, it so happened that the Tony’s were being broadcast live from Radio City Music Hall, just as we were mosying on by. Whoopi Goldberg was in there, and the limos and black Cadillacs were lined up and down every street, parked and waiting for their consorts.
Okay. That was just the first night. There is so much to tell that I’m going to have to do this in bits and pieces. But I will certainly have more to say.
“New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town
The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down”
Now I finally know what that means!
IJ