I have to admit that I've become accustomed to being in Central America when the Stanley Cup finals hit. I remember one time in Panajachel Guatemala watching the final (Calgary vs. Tampa) I think? You wouldn't believe how hard it can be to get the game on down there. I did find a place eventually though. An American guy owned a bar and put it on for myself and a group of three others - all Canadians. There were three minutes left in the game and, of course, the power went out in the whole town. We scrambled to unplug every refrigerator in the joint from the generator and plug in the TV. We saw the minutes dwindle. Then seconds. Then Calgary lost. Of course, we rioted. Or I did anyway. I threw my ice cream cone clear across the street in a riotous age and refused to walk over to pick it up. I held out for a good three minutes before collapsing under the weight of peer pressure and sluggishly lumbering across the street to deposit the ice cream cone, as best I could, into the trash.
This year is different. First thing of note: I didn't riot. Second thing: I'm in Toronto. Why? I have to admit, it's because of my silly little band. I could have spent the entire period from May to September down South truth be told - nothing much ties me here. But something seems to be clicking with the band, so I thought I'd stay and see it through. That something that seems to be clicking: band members.
When Matt and I started Lazybones, the idea was to minimize costs and maximize simplicity. Just the two of us. We imagined dusty roads and unknown trains; depressing little bars with chicken-wire to protect performers from beer-bottles and other projectiles; walking though swinging tavern doors; interrupting high-stakes poker games... None of this ended up happening. Partially because it is not the 18th century and this is not Texas. But also because Matt and I got kind of addicted to playing with other musicians. Now Matt and I have a polygamous musical relationship that results regularly in an orgy of hillbilly-reggae. First there was Danno O'Shea - who we convinced to play only a kick drum and a conga instead of his usual full drum kit. Oh, then there is Alex Wells, whose inspired harmonies and ludicrous jokes keep his son, Matt, in a permanent state of slightly-annoyed dependence. Stella Panacci has recently joined, adding a fourth harmony part and an impressively sultry girl-in-hat look to the stage show. Dwayne Gale who adds (and occasionally sleeps with) banjo and mandolin. Finally there is Andrew Shaak, who is at this moment obsessing over the implications to the band of a switch from round-wound to flat-wound bass strings. Oh, and he also plays a mean accordion - if you can imagine what a "mean" accordion might sounds like.
For better or for worse it is beginning to seem a lot like a seven-piece band, and Matt and I are loving it. So we've been jamming ALOT in Matt's kitchen, playing shows around Toronto, and now comes the grandest band-bonding expedition imaginable - playing the George Street Festival in St. John's Newfoundland with Great Big Sea. That show is on July 28th and we will also have a few more including July 29th at the Ship Inn with Mark Bragg which is very exciting because it's the first time we have had the opportunity to bring the full band to Matt's homeland. That translates to four days of revelrous merry-making and music-making. I have no idea what sorts of adventures will reveal themselves during our trip to that rugged isle, but I am beginning to suspect that it will make the decision not to go to Central America this summer pay off for me.
TimA Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Flash Mob
So there I was in the middle of a crowded market, eyes closed, immersed in the din of hurrying shoppers and the loud cries of an angry butcher, and I was kissing deeply a woman that I had never kissed before. The kiss itself was quite pleasant actually, but I would be lying if I told you that I didn't feel the odd rush of disorientation and self-doubt. I mean, I knew I could expect the eventual phone-call from my mother: "who was that girl Timothy? And why were you doing that anyway? Are you OK?" What could I possibly tell her?
Well mom, we I wanted to create this song. We wanted it to be the perfect sweet love song. But we wanted it to have tension. So we made a song that sounds perfectly sweet at first, but secretly critiques the very notion of romantic love that many of us are obsessed with, and what it costs to get it. We wanted to celebrate love, but make it clear that love is everywhere, in multiple forms - many of these significantly different than the form we have delivered to us thousands of times a year in Disney fairy-tales, romantic comedies, and sitcoms. We wanted to point out the ways in which love is purchased by wealth, and even by forced clichés that evoke a Pavlovian response of conditioned romanticism. But we wanted to also point out that love is real, pure, and beautiful despite these tensions. With the help of some amazing musicians, including guest vocals from Jill Barber, I felt like we had accomplished that. In fact, we were so excited about this little song that we wanted to release it as a single - not as part of a record.
But how? Well obviously you know that we decided to do a flash-mob. We though a flash-mob was the only way to capture a sense of tension similar to the one that we had written into the song; simple enough. I was very worried in the days leading up to it though. Would anybody care, or even notice what we were doing? Will we have enough couples to participate? Well, in the end, people cared, and we got tension. The incessant yelling of the kiss-averse butcher is testament to that. So is the security guard who unsuccessfully tried to move one of our couples in mid-kiss, dejectedly having to phone his superior and say, "I don't know what to do. They're kissing."
But in the days leading up to the flash-mob I became very concerned that we wouldn't have enough couples to participate. And I found myself without a partner so I couldn't help myself. Or could I? Frantically I began to call friends that I thought could help; just to hug, no kissing. We'd just fill-up some space in the market with G-rated snuggles. One friend was out of town, another was busy. Then I thought of her - Paulina.
Paulina had met some time ago and went on a real actual date, but for whatever reason we had decided not to date any further. And we had never kissed. She was attractive, adventurous and creative though. An actor, an artist, and a traveler. I called her up - asked if she could stomach hugging me for five or six minutes. She said "sure". I hadn't seen Paulina for some time by the day of the mob, so it was nice to catch up. We planned to do some light kissing on the forehead and a lot of hugging. But when the flash-mob started, all these couples around us were kissing deeply and romantically. The next thing I knew, so were we. And there I found my tension. A beautiful woman, a deep meaningful kiss, a yelling butcher, the odd "awe... there's another one!" heard amongst the chatter of the market crowd. Uncertainty. Adventure. Romance. A little bit of fear. The kiss felt like the song. I guess that means it was a success. Oh and mom... Don't worry. I'm OK.
TimothyMatt - November 2010
Every November I think about my time on the road with bucket truck because we always seemed to wait until it got really really cold to cross the country. I can't remember the exact year but I'm thinking it had to be 2001 and we had just finished a show in Jasper (I know it was a Sunday but I can't remember the name of the bar) and our next show was in Toronto at the Horseshoe for a Nu Music Nite which are always on a Tuesday. That gave us about 40 hours of driving to do in just under 48 hours, and we were not gonna miss our first gig at the Horseshoe. We left directly from the Jasper gig with a broken heater in the van we bought from a day care, played musical chairs along the way and chatted the hours away to keep the driver awake, we even had to call CAA to wake some poor dude up at 3am somewhere in Alberta to open his gas station, but we pulled up in front of the Horseshoe on the Tuesday night about 2 hours before out set; we played to less than 15 people. This summer on a warm Tuesday evening, now living 15 minutes from the Horseshoe, Lazybones played a New Music Nite and the place was full….I'm not sure what the musical Gods are trying to say, but I can tell you this: not much has changed for me. Making, performing and writing music still makes every up and down that it brings, totally worth it.
Lazybones has evolved from a recording project to a 7 piece band which is blowing mine and Tim's minds right now; we still struggle with where this is going because the deeper we get the more we are faced with the nonsense that comes with the business of music (which is why we stepped away in the first place). The one thing we do know is that it has been growing in such an organic way that we kinda can't deny it, even if we wanted to. Aside from a goal to unite the bluegrass, country and reggae influences that have crept into these pop songs Tim and I are writing, we also just want to exist in a place where music connects people, and that's it. We want to exist where nobody cares about being cool and the cool police don't question what bar we play at, who comes to the shows, or wonder if our clothes match our sound. I'm guilty of falling into that trap myself sometimes (not Tim, he's perfect) so It's hard to imagine a place where the absurd idea of cool doesn't factor into how many people will get to hear our music; it kinda feels like driving 45 straight hours to play for 15 people……. which is just enough for us to keep trying.
Before 2010 leaves us we there will be a new video for Sleepy Tune which we filmed a little while ago with our pal Jill Barber, 6 new tunes which we are recording as I type and a show with Great Big Sea in Toronto at the Masonic Temple Dec 4th. Pretty cool huh? I mean….not bad huh?
xo=matt
Tim - June 2010
I don't know how long ago it was that Matt and I started the Lazybones project. I just remember a nice springish day that was probably over two years ago that I happened upon Matt on St. Clair Avenue in Toronto. We were surprised mutually to find out that we'd been living a block away from each other for quite a few months. Neither of us knew the other was in Toronto. Anyway, a vague commitment was made to jam on some acoustic guitars one day. And we did.
It was more about drinking a few beer and playing music than about reenacting the tired musical cliché of a goal - "conquering the world" with our vicious band. So we just wrote a couple of songs "Slowmotion" and "Perfect Life". We were pretty happy with them. But coincidentally other people were too and within a few months we had garnered enough support from those to record a CD. And we did.
We wrote some songs we liked. I recorded my tracks. Matt recorded most of his. I took off for Central America for a few months. I remember Matt calling me about ten times one day when he had managed to rustle up some musicians in Newfoundland "the Panting brothers" to do some banjo, accordion, and Mandolin tracks. He and Laurence Currie were recording them in the living room of Matt' mom's house in St. John's. I heard scratchy tracks being beamed from the house to some satellite in some orbit to me in some little town in Guatemala. Matt asked excitedly how I thought they sounded. “Awesome” I replied " I had no idea. I couldn't hear because of the incredibly loud fireworks that were going off all over town to celebrate a patron Saint, or the winning of a soccer game, or a birthday, or a new flavor of ice cream or something. Matt screamed through the phone, “are you ok? You sound like you're in a war-zone”. “No I'm ok” I said, “its just ... Guatemala”. “Cool”, he said, “I've also got Jill Barber and Huey Lewis”. An incredibly loud rapid-succession “bomba” was, unfortunately, going off near my room. I couldn't hear a thing. “Cool”, I said. Then I believe the satellite must have gone plummeting to the Earth. Or I had forgotten to pay my phone bill perhaps. Matt was gone.
I arrived home that September and was ecstatic to discover that Jill Barber and Huey Lewis were on the CD. We liked the CD. A lot. Sometimes with a new project you really don't know what you sound like until you hear your first CD. It was like that. We were happy that we didn't suck. It sounded surprisingly good to us actually, so we began to get excited. Still it took a while to get the thing released. We wanted the music to be for us and our audience, not for radio program directors, hip weekly entertainment tabloid editors, or nervous, about-to-become-extinct, major record label executives. We also wanted to release it according to some of our deeply felt ethics. Remember those? They were popular in the 1980s for a while but then people became more interested in video games and mass-produced “alternative” music (I could never quite figure that one out). Anyway we teamed up with Warchild Canada for the release, and felt good about what we'd done.
Unfortunately with all the deliberating about how most ethically to release and market the CD, by the time we were set to release it, I was in Guatemala again. So we had two simultaneous release shows" Matt played one in St. John's Newfoundland, and I played one in Quetzeltenango Guatemala. We wanted to simulcast video feeds but unfortunately there was another birthday, or election, or grand opening of a tortilla factory in Gutemala and I'm pretty sure another satellite was knocked out of the sky by the "bombas". But the CD was out in the world and that made us happy.
Since then we've played a bunch of shows all over Canada. And we released our first single for “Perfect Life”, which smashed its way into the top 100 country charts for an hour or two. Yes I said “country”. Now it is set to be released to “non-country” radio. So we're excited about that. We've been adding members to our live show and refining the sound for our next CD as well. Lots of harmonies " sort of bluegrass-style " with help from our friends Alex and Sonja, and thick percussion thanks to Danno " a hippy we know. A bit more Latin style has seeped into the songwriting " I have no idea where that came from. We've got about twenty of those songs written now and are about to start pre-production and to do some preliminary recordings. We love the new songs. And we think the new CD will be a doozie. I hope we get it out quickly. I'm thinking of going to Venezuela for a while.
Tim from Guatemala: June 25, 2009Today the release date for Songs from Here was announced in Canada. Given this, some people have rightfully asked me why I am in a ramshackle town in the highlands of Guatemala instead of working to promote the CD in the majestic beauty of the corporate cultural playground that is Toronto. There are a few reasons for this. First, the majesty and beauty of Toronto has been brought under question numerous times via accounts of people who are actually there. Second, I have it from reliable sources that the city currently smells of garbage. Fourth, Leafs suck. (I realize this has little relevance in June, but I just had to get that off my chest). Careful readers will realize that I have missed a reason. I will address this now. To avoid any controversy, I will call this reason # 3. This reason requires careful reflection on my part. It also requires a snappy title.
Reason #3, by Tim MacNeillOK, the title thing did not work out as snappily as I had hoped. But here is the deal. The story really wraps around the concept of Slowmotion, the first single from the CD. I began writing this song on a beach in Guatemala just after I had decided to leave the music industry behind a few years ago. It is a metaphorical piece about my relationship with music. In writing it, I was promising myself that if I were ever to re-engage this relationship it would be on my own terms, not the industry?s. Matt and I found that we both had this outlook as we began to work on the Lazybones CD, so finishing Slowmotion was easy. And the decision to give all proceeds from its release to WarChild Canada, instead of to a record label, or to line our own pockets, was obvious to us.
Now, especially since the release of my last solo record in 2004, (still available online a www.sonicvalley.com/tim), I really started to take the idea that life can revolve around more than writing songs and releasing CDs to heart. That there is more to life than being a rock star. I began working with social movements in Central America that are struggling against all odds to reverse the effects of centuries of colonization and racism, and trying to formulate new and creative global and local socioeconomic operating systems. The peoples with whom I work (indigenous groups with varying languages and cultures but a common Maya ancestry) have survived multiple attempts of exploitation, assimilation, and genocide over a number of years. These offences were first inflicted by Spanish colonial powers in the 16th century of course. But they continued and perhaps even amplified in their ferocity throughout the 20th and into the 21st centuries. This story involves the US multinational and CIA backed forced replacement of democratic government by corporatist dictators, and the ensuing genocide of the 20th century. More recently it has been Canadian mining companies that have infiltrated the Guatemalan government, polluted local ecosystems without speaking with local people, and have had entire towns relocated and burned, amidst the obvious protest of the townspeople.
This is neocolonialism driven largely by Canadian mining companies. Many of the local people know this and are rising up to fight for their rights, their livelihoods, their homes, their environment, their culture, and their humanity. It is important for Canadians to take up their cause since the perpetrators of this violence are so often Canadian companies. I have the opportunity to help tell the story of these people through the writing of various publications and, obviously, through music. This summer, I had to make a decision whether to stay in Canada to do television, print, and radio interviews in an attempt to promote the new Lazybones CD, or to come to Guatemala and continue my work here. I am immensely proud of Songs from Here. It is a labour of love. And I am excited to return to Canada to play shows and write more music with Matt. But for now I have to be here. This is all a part of a promise I made to myself to only take part in the music industry in a socially responsible way, on my own terms, or on terms that recognize larger social realities and the relative smallness of the life of any one Canadian songwriter in comparison. This is the philosophy that I put forward metaphorically in the Lyrics of Slowmotion. It is due to my commitment to this sentiment that I am here. It is also due to this sentiment that Matt and I are giving all money made from the sale of Slowmotion to Warchild Canada. Having said this, I will end by reproducing those lyrics below. Muchas gracias, y hasta Septiembre mis amigos en Canada. A los negocios de Canada, Ya Basta!
su amigo, Tim