I was a nervous teen when I delivered my first live music performance for money. Suffering my initial attack of what I would eventually understand to be almost crippling stage fright I sang poorly and with great conviction in front of a three piece rock band covering a barely recognizable repertoire of eight songs. The audience of fellow teens didn’t complain that night in spite of the fact that the one hundred dollars that we received for the performance represented a vast overpayment.
I would remain a dabbler and a dilettante while a decade swiftly passed.
An assortment of day jobs and the injury induced end of my athletic career later it would be 1989 before I hit the stage as a professional performer of country music in the mainly rural saloons of my Canadian prairie home. While the quality of my performing skills had improved significantly my crazy was far worse and it would be 1998 before the release of my debut recording. I would spend those early years of my career working at music on nights and weekends while holding down a varied selection of day jobs and performing in an assortment of cover bands that continued to tour the nameless small town saloons of western Canada. When my always fragile mental and emotional faculties eventually proved unable to manage the stress of full-time employment and my oldest son had left my home I would then depart myself, and would spend the early years of the 21st century living off of the road while finally pursuing music full-time with another collection of bands. By that time the music that I performed was primarily my own, and the road that I traveled would lead from coast to coast in Canada and across the United States while I released another half dozen album length recordings on CD, either solo or with an assortment of studio musicians, of which the current release ‘Dance Floor’ is the latest.
Thus it was that when I stumbled off of the tiny stage of a small town Alberta saloon in the wee hours of the morning on January 1st of 2014 it occurred to me that fully twenty five years had somehow passed since I had given my first New Year’s Eve performance. While appreciating that a man spending the best years of his life performing in the obscurity of a nation’s mainly rural honky-tonks was not something to be looked upon as an auspicious anniversary by any means, it was nonetheless a significant occasion for the man who had accomplished the largely anonymous feat.
The relentless travel so critical to earning a poor mans’ living in music, from coast to coast, from north to south, and to the end of more than a few highways, has always informed my songwriting. Most of the titles featured on the ‘Dance Floor’ album were composed during and after my return to the saloon stages of rural Alberta in the early spring of 2013. A collection of goodbye songs to an era now passed, the album is a recorded tribute to a style of life and music also gone. To the songwriter the songs on the album represent a summation of twenty five years spent wandering the byways of the nation in search of something. The result of the search, like most searches that a man undertakes in spite of what we like to tell ourselves, was almost entirely inconclusive.
In spite of this I continue to persist with the wandering life of a professional troubadour, although where the unfathomable quest leads now, with the music business rapidly crumbling in the face of destructive technology and the changing taste of modern times, a man can’t even pretend to know. While it often seems that there may in fact be no answers to ask more questions remains the only acceptable conclusion for some of us. That nothing ever really ends also seems as likely as anything else and thus a man is wise not to underestimate the healing power of song. For some of us that would seem to be what the entire mess amounts to after twenty five years, seven albums, and an uncountable number of miles have passed beneath the wheels.
Enjoy the music and thanks for being here.
All things willin’ and the creek don’t rise; I’ll see you at the show.
TH, October 16, 2014