Headed up to Ottawa for Westboro Village’s Westfest in June. Will Currie & The Country French opened up for Sloan on the Saturday night Pop Explosion. It was a fantastic festival that was really well organized. The artist relations manager Terri Sanderson was charming to to deal with. She had everything laid out for us as soon as we pulled through the gates. Couldn’t have been better from a TM’s point of view. So Thanks Terri!
Check out www.westfest.ca for a count down to next year’s Westfest.


It takes me forever to update this blog. Things just pile up and then before you know it half a year is gone. Anyways here are some photos from a tour in the spring of 2010. I went out with Graham Wright and the Good Times Band, up to Montreal, Ottawa, London, Hamilton, and a couple other places that I now forget. We met up with Said The Whale and In Flight Safety as they passed through Ontario and headed out east.
Graham has internet ADD. He requires things to be new every couple months or he loses interest. He has had 3 or 4 blogs now all hosted on various services. WordPress, tumblr, band camp to name some of them. So a few weeks ago he sends me this very well done PNG file and claims its “just and idea”. Well he did such a good job on the PNG that I was able to slice it up and upload it pretty quick. It is basically like a site map that spans across all of his websites and acts like a directory to his blogs and twitter. So here is Graham’s new internet portal web site jump off station. www.grahmwright.ca

Back in October I headed out with Will Currie & The Country French and the Dan Mangan Crew for a short jaunt around the eastern side of Canada. You know? The pretty part with oceans and red dirt and stuff. It took me so long to get around to posting this. Not sure why… I have had my favourite pictures pulled out for a long time. Anyways here were the dates and the venues we played in.
9 Oct Phog Lounge – Windsor – Ontario
10 Oct Paddy Flahretys – Sarnia – Ontario
13 Oct L’Escogriffe – Montreal – Quebec
14 Oct Algonquin College – Ottawa Ontario
15 Oct Montreal House – Peterborough – Ontario
16 Oct The Rivoli – Toronto – Ontario – Aaron’s Birthday!
17 Oct The Black Sheep Inn – Wakefield – Quebec
21 Oct UPEI – The Wave – Charlottetown, PEI
22 Oct Dalhouse – The T Room – Halifax – Nova Scotia
23 Oct Paragon Theatre Halifax – Nova Scotia Halifax Pop Explosion
24 Oct The Capital – Fredericton – New Brunswick

The Rivoli show in Toronto and the Wakefield show at the Blacksheep will be the most memorable. These are some photos of those shows. Its hard to get photos of the Country French since I am stuck at front of house mixing most of the time. I did manage to get photos of Dan, Mike, Erin, and Laura playing. Very special thanks to Tom from The Zolas for taking the group shot and then taking Aaron with you for a few weeks so he didn’t sleep in my living room for another month.



One day I plan on doing another blog with just photos from this tour. I got so many great shots and a lot of good stories to tell. I just hope I get around to writing it before I forget what happened. Theres a ton of footage from this tour as well. Neil Mangan and myself both had cameras rolling for the majority of the eventful things that happened. We just have to get around to mailing each other the DVDs.
All in all it was a fantastic tour of the eastern provinces. We missed Newfoundland on this one, so I hope we hit it on the next round.
The Novels project I have been working on has been going well. Just before Christmas we put the whole album up for free download on the website www.okaynovels.com. The first phase of the promo was a simple twitter blast across 3 or 4 twitter accounts with approximately 3000 followers. We had 700 downloads in the first 24 hours with no more then a 140 characters written. A few days after the initial roll out the Novels project we launched the “Sharing Blog” which will document the people sharing the Novels album. We are encouraging people to burn the songs to a CD and giving it to people, either strangers or people they know. We are also encouraging people to leave the album in locations where people may find the CDs at random. Using photos and stories from all over the world we have been able to create a community of people that are enjoying the music and sharing it with other people. The blog is also being used as an outlet for cross promotion of music blogs and the contests they are holding. Check out the blog for some rather amusing photos and updates on how you can get a copy of the 200 limited edition handmade albums.

December 4th I headed out with Will Currie & the Country French to Hamilton Place’s Studio Theatre to open up for Arkells. I mixed front of house for the show so the photos of The Country French were taken by my friend Mark Araujo.




Cambridge Fall Fair 2009
Just a few shots that I thought were cool. Wizard guitar heads from Canada.
Here is a panoramic shot of the crowd. Very hard to pull off with a 16mm lens that bends the horizon line. Didn’t really do it as an art project but more as a way to show the whole event in one photo. Click here and it will load in a new window. It is about 600 kb in size FYI.


Couple months back The Country French played an opening gig for Our Lady Peace at Elements in Kitchener. I took some photos and mixed front of house. Thanks goes to Matty K for being laid back and funny as hell. Dave Levitt from Global Act One Media came out to the show to shoot some photos of the actual performance. I will upload those to the Country French Facebook and Myspace eventually. Thanks Dave! I also have photos from the Eastern tour out to Halifax last month. I have to sort through those and upload them in the next little while. Its been a busy autumn!


Consoles - Digidesign SC48 and Yamaha LS9