whatever's coming, it's coming fast

For the first time in my life I have written a political/environmental song and I don't think it's cheesy. I have always been so afraid to try writing one, and when I've tried, I couldn't stand myself. But I did it. Yay!
Here is is:



And this one too. This is actually the first one that I wrote. I was intending it for a contest that asked for songs related to "ecology and the environment." I later discovered that they wanted positive massages and optimism. This song is neither, which is why I went on to write the other song - which is dark, but I think it's more appropriate.

Number two: Too sad for contests

Music Carreer - A push.

Oliver and I are in full-swing music mode once again. Back in recording studio (a real studio!) once a week, and I’m cooped up in the cabin working on booking a tour about 40 hours a week. I wish I could say that I’ve written a bunch of new material and that we are working out the kinks, but I haven’t had time to think about being creative. It’s amazing how much time and energy goes in to the office-work portion of a music career. It really is a full time job; The Balling Jacks were right. Writing emails to venue managers who mostly don’t get back to me, tweeting to successful people who really couldn’t care less (I’m going to quit twitter, I think it was a stupid idea.) Writing to radio stations is actually getting me somewhere for once. I’ve got four on my side in BC right now, which is sweet. CHLY in Nanaimo, CBC One in Victoria, Long Beach Radio in Tofino and Kootenay Coop Radio in Nelson. I love that. One must focus on the good things!

I’m not intending this to be a depressing blog post at all. It’s just going to be honest. I’ve learned a few things, or I guess maybe just had a few things confirmed lately. Path-changing things.

The other day a really awesome band came to play on Denman Island. They were a Juno-nominated quartet, whose name I won’t mention here because I’m not sure they want to be associated with my ramblings.  I got a short opportunity to talk to one of the members of the extremely talented, professional and well-rehearsed group, and we shared a few little tips about gigs and festivals and whatnot. It surprised me to learn that this band is going through the same struggle as I do to get venues, festivals, people to show up for shows, money to tour, time to tour, etc. It actually sounded like there was very little difference between their current battles and my own. Juno nominated, do you remember when I said that?  Learning this was two things: Reassuring, and depressing. I thought “I’ve sort of made it then haven’t I? I’m about as pro as I’m ever going to get. Good right?” and I also thought “I’ve got nowhere else to go. This is it. End of the road, it’s a giant struggle or I can just give up.” 

A couple years ago a friend of mine had gotten some radio play on the CBC and I was downright jealous. She totally deserved it – a very unique and talented singer/songwriter, but I figured she had it made and honestly, I was green with envy. Famous. Successful- Music-Career.

When I learned I was getting CBC play last month, I did a little happy dance in my chair, and continued sticking my CD envelopes together with my glue stick and licking envelopes and praying that more than one venue in the interior would offer me a gig, because I can’t afford to travel all the way to the interior for one gig, and praying that I’ll get paid for my odd-job work the next day so I can pay the $35 fee to book the Denman Hall for a concert in June. Yes, that’s how broke I am right now.

What do I want from life? I want to spend quality time with friends and family. I want to cook good food. I want to make things. Metal things and fibre things. I want to play a lot of music, and write songs.  I guess I want to share the songs I write. I suppose I feel they are incomplete until they are heard, and the more they are heard, the more complete they are. Sharing them gives them life, and I suppose I feel a strong desire to give them life. Some people say songs are like children. I think that’s kind of weird, but I guess I see sense in it. Some of my songs I never want heard though. They get stuffed in a drawer and never get to breathe again, so I don’t think it’s healthy to compare songs to children. No.

I’m wishing for more time for the garden. Time to make some money and build a home. Time to start blacksmithing, time to for friends, time to have kids one day, (if the conservatives ever get taken out and Elizabeth May becomes prime-minister.) Time for canning preserves and smelling the flowers and living life.  I guess I thought a music career would be a perfect life. But I seem to be constantly longing for something else. A life in the country. Wine. Laughter. Lazy days.

We have a two-year plan. To push push push this thing and see if it gets somewhere that satisfies me, then breathe again (because it likely won’t) and maybe get a barn cat. And a barn. 

I'm Rich and I'm Poor

"If you shape your life according to nature, you will never be poor; if according to people's opinions, you will never be rich.

~ Seneca Quotes from Letters from a Stoic

I am poor. If we’re talking money, I am absolutely, most definitely poor. Way way way below the poverty line. Technically. But I’ve always been good at being poor, and I although it’s bragging, I’m proud to say that I find ways to donate a pretty good sum of dough to good causes every year, through fundraising concerts and selling stuff I make and whatnot. I have a really good life. I’m never hungry. I’m never bored. I never go without. I supposed if I wanted a big-screen TV right now, I’d be going without, but I’ve never wanted a big-screen TV. I actually think that term might be out of date – is it?  Ok ok, I actually go without warm, running water, and that’s a pain in the butt, but we have a big pot and a woodstove and most of the time we are happy with that, until one of us is in a rush and throws a fit. Luckily we have friends in civilization.

Sometimes I feel rich. When friends come over and we feed them woodstove pizza, I feel rich. When our garden is in full bloom, I feel rich. When it’s January and the garden is brown, but we are still eating its bounty, I feel rich. When I make a gift that would cost $200 to buy, I feel rich. Seedy Saturday on Denman Island last weekend made me feel rich. We traded our Pac-Choi and Buckwheat and Dill seeds for many other kinds of seeds, and this fall we will have several new vegetables to eat. When I finish a website that I am building for a friend with a nut and fruit tree nursery, we will have new fruit and nut trees. (Bartering is so cool. Bartering makes me feel rich.)

What up with money? Aside from having to pay property taxes, because our government fines us just for being alive, I think it may be possible to get along just fine without it. For all of us to live rich, prosperous, happy lives, without money – that would be something. I’m hoping to get there at some point.

When the tomatoes I canned sideways on a Coleman camping stove, in old glass-lid-jars, successfully preserved until mid-January, I felt rich. And very lucky. 

Wood Stove Pizza = Wood Fired Pizza.

 

I believe this was a November Watermelon.

No Coal Mine

Yesterday over 400 people from my community and folks from other west-coast communities gathered together in Buckley Bay (across from Denman Island) to stand up against the proposed (and apparently government supported) Raven Coal Mine, being planned to go in very close to our home.  There are so many devastating effects expected if the coal-mine goes ahead.  I am nervous because it most often seems like our voices are not being heard. Christy Clark, the premier of BC and Stephen Harper are both behind the project and seem unwilling to hear the cries of the people (Harper calls us “radicals”) who live in the area and will be most directly affected.

I am, however, hopeful because my community is not backing down for a moment, and proud of the fervour with which they/we are willing to fight this thing.

Last year there was a public hearing in Union Bay with representatives from Compliance Energy including the CEO, representatives from the provincial and federal government and many people from the community.  It was a very exciting event. The government-hired (frazzled, fuming and belittling) moderator had a very hard time keeping the room under tight control as so many people wanted to have their concerns and comments heard in full, without interruption, and were not willing to back down. The event began at 7 and went until after midnight. 

What was most amazing was the vast array of arguments from people in so many different kinds of expertise, generations, and investments in the land.  We heard the emotional pleadings from owners of Oyster Farms who knew their businesses and livelihoods would be destroyed in the wake of a coal mine.  Biologists stood up with scientific knowledge and advice, elderly citizens stood up and raged against the condescending reps on stage. Retired English professors and back-to-the-land anarchists, young children, worried parents, nature and sport enthusiasts… everyone had something different and important to say.  It was very touching. I don’t know how the Compliance Energy reps didn’t burst into tears and throw in the towel.  The CEO was so emotionless (the only thing close to feeling he showed was annoyance toward the end of the night) that I think it would be easy to label him a sociopath. 

It was great to see many more people out for the rally on Saturday; some great speakers who really knew their stuff and a lot of creative individuals with costumes and signs. 

Bad ass!

http://www.coalwatch.ca/solidarity-not-compliance-antil-coal-rally-brings-year-dragon-comox-valley - Coal Watch - About/Against the Raven Coal Mine

Garbage Land

A few weeks ago, in the spike of pre-Christmas shopping season I saw a transport truck accident at the side of the highway. The trailer was on its side and spewing from the back doors was a mountain of over-packaged, candy-coloured plastic dollar-store junk. There was something about it that made me shudder – for real, shudder. In the scheme of things, it’s not a huge deal – it won’t make any kind of headlines in the news or attract much concern from any safety or environmental groups. But it got me thinking. And blogging apparently.

Over the last ten years I have moved several times. And in the past two years I have spent a lot of time sorting through boxes of stuff trying to decide what to keep and what to toss as I slowly transfer the good stuff from my original home town, Bracebridge Ontario, to my new permanent (whatever that means) home on Denman Island in BC.  It’s a long and expensive road for my stuff. And I’ve been kicking myself over a lot of it.

When I was a kid I used to love dollar stores. I would march in with my bi-weekly allowance and buy up as many awesome trinkets as I could afford. I loved little boxes and bows and craft objects, small toys, hair accessories… pretty much all of it. I thought is wise to stock up for rainy days, or just in case I couldn’t get the stuff for so cheap later.  My mother begged me not to spend my money on these silly trinkets, but I ignored her. I was certain I would find a use for every little thing.

Now as I sort through boxes and boxes of stuff that I used once and forgot about, stuff that is too crappy for the second hand store, stuff that I spent my parents’ hard earned money on, (earned later by me as I complained my way through a counter full of dishes twice a week) I am so angry with myself for not listening, not caring, not seeing the big picture.

I didn’t think of the sweatshops, the greedy corporations, the enormous amount of waste and toxins produced to create and transport this stuff that was essentially more waste and toxins. I just wanted the toys.

That over-turned tractor trailer was a sad reminder of how disgusted I am with myself and my culture. It was a gleaming epitome of wastefulness. Forget the big expensive stuff – the cell phones and generations of digital devices, the tickle-me-Elmos and lava lamps and hair straightness. Those things make me fret, for sure, but the amount of one-time-use plastic crap, absolute 100% garbage that is shipped over land and sea to be unwrapped, used once and thrown out (or in my case, stored for ten years, panicked over and then thrown out) is… atrocious.

I would say that over the past two years, since moving to the island and living small, I have become what a lot of people would think of as extreme in my opinions about wastefulness. My good friend Krystal and I have had some lengthy ranting-duets about friends and acquaintances who see us as “oh no, you’re one of those…” total fun-killing freaks for caring – a lot – about our world. The fact that most of the population of North America (and there are a hell of a lot of people out there) thinks this way is really, really fucked up. That’s right, I’m not even going to sensor that.

If you’ve read any other blog entries, you know the way I live. It’s pretty much camping. My car is a bicycle. My hubster and I grow food and plant trees, and actually hug trees. We actually do. I admit, I feel like a weirdo doing it, and I’m going to go ahead and say that my husband usually starts the tree hugging on any given day and I join in with some reluctance, but ya. We do it.  And still, the fact that I have flown in an airplane more than five times in my life and usually forget my travel mug at home but buy hot chocolate anyway, and that I bought a pleather jacket last year, means I refuse to call myself an environmentalist. I have already, in my 28 years of life, used enough of the world’s resources that I’m sure my footprint is irreversible. Which makes me think there are actually very, very few environmentalists in the world and most of them are so poor they are almost dead.

I was listening to a radio interview on the CBC a while ago with a few panel members talking about the oil sands. Please forgive me, I won’t remember all of the details accurately, but I’ll try to get a point of some kind across here. There was a Calgary audience, who seemed to be mostly in cahoots with the environmentalist on the panel, but also sympathetic to the oil-sands representative, not so much when she claimed that Canadian oil was ethical oil, but when she stated that, let’s face it, our economy and thus world depends on oil. Without oil we’d all be poor and miserable and probably also dead. Canadian oil is way better than oil from the middle-east, and we need oil, there’s no way around it, so suck it up, the oil sands are good.

Blllaaaarrrrrgggg!!!!! I did not like that lady! We don’t need all of this stuff we have. Period. We don’t need it to be healthy, we don’t need it to be happy and we don’t need it to live. I swear we don’t. I have been living without a lot of it, and I’m pretty damn sure we don’t need it.

We need friends and family. We need skills, people who can make things out of what the earth provides, on a small scale so the earth has time to recover after we take a tree or move some soil. We need community cooperation and support. We need crafters and gardeners and people who know how to make medicine from herbs without processing them in to coloured pills and capsules and mixing them with poisons. We need to barter. We need pride and celebration. We don’t need S.U.V.’s in the city. We don’t need trips to Disney Land. We don’t need cheap plastic junk.

I’m going to stop ranting, because I’m going on a lot of tangents for one blog entry, and probably making someone angry. Please though, continue the conversation through comments. I’m interested in your opinion about all this kind of stuff.

And check out some Canadian artists and crafts people online. There’s a lot of high-quality, beautiful stuff to buy – purchases that really help the ecomony and don’t devastate the environment.

I’m being bossy. 

  

krystalspeck.com 

annaheywoodjones.com

Ampersand Quilts

 http://houseofhsueh.com/

 Yuck.

Contrasts

Hello again. It looks like I may not be capable of keeping my blog up-to-date, so I’m going to stop apologizing about it. At this point, it’s not very popular anyway.

That said – here I go with another one.

It’s December 28^th – just after Christmas. I am back in Ontario for the holidays. Oliver and I were lucky enough to take part in Via Rail’s On Board Entertainment program, which took us from Vancouver to Toronto and Montreal and then back to Kingston in trade for performing our music on board the train. We played a show in Montreal at Grumpy’s Bar as part of Brie Neilson’s Chick Pickin’ Mondays. Brie performed at the end of the night and was outrageously awesome and very inspiring. There was also a performance by Hanna Epperson who layered violin tracks on a loop pedal, sometimes adding vocals and the whole time rocking everyone’s world. It was a really fantastic evening – I love playing a short set and then getting to hear other people play too.

We also played at The Bohemian Café and Gallery in my hometown, Bracebridge. A mother and daughter operation, The Bohemian is a very good thing in a town that really needs a venue for art and music and young people and emerging craftspeople to do what they do. Tammy and Kristen are doing their best to keep it going in what I would say are challenging times and are really reaching out to the community with this venue. Thank you Tammy and Kristen.

I am a little sad to admit that it seems impossible to get anyone from my generation out to any shows in my hometown. Shit, was I really that unpopular in high school that my peers still don’t want to be seen associating with me or what?  My parents’ friends (who yes, are also my friends too) are always supportive, encouraging and most importantly present at these hometown concerts, but never a soul from my school days. Huh. Thank god for Amber and Scott (a fine Muskoka singer/songwriter himself) who I met at previous gigs and who show up to hear us almost every time. And for the slew of teenagers who wandered in to The Boho and stayed to listen. My love to you. 

Anyway, contrasts, contrasts… that’s what I called this post so…

While sitting in our private cabin (the largest cabin) on board the train, admiring our bunk beds, private toilet and sink and the little chocolates on our pillows, we started laughing about the incredible contrast between our regular life on Denman which includes chilly outdoor sponge baths from a five-gallon bucket, having to drag a battery in from the solar shed if we want to turn on a light or run a laptop, using a bucket full of straw and sawdust as our toilet, freezing our butts off in the morning if we don’t have time to light a fire, bicycling absolutely everywhere on the island, even in the most wretched weather, and getting our hands pretty dirty daily, to our life at some of these gigs. At the Roots & Blues festival this summer, the festival organizers put my whole family up in a really nice hotel room! They just threw it in when I mentioned I needed to find accommodations for my family. We got the big cabin on the train and nice meals in the dining car three times a day! In Tofino we got to stay in a nice room too, were well fed and well watered, and taken on the most awesome whale-watching tour ever! We get to do all this stuff that we could never, ever afford do if we weren’t touring musicians, but also could never afford to do because we are touring musicians.  It’s kind of great. We reaaalllyyy rough it from day to day, but then we get to live in style once in a while.

I think I’d originally planned to drag out the whole contrasts thing a little more, but that was back when I originally thought of this blog post, and when I should have written it.

Oh I thought of another tidbit. I used to enjoy shopping when I lived in the city, but today I tried to go shopping with my Oma and aunt and sister and it seems that I have become a huge fashion snob. Me – bucket girl – a fashion snob. So much so that I told my Oma that something she liked was tacky.  I wouldn’t let her try it on. I think it’s a good thing though, I think it’s driven by my friendships with some very good craftspeople who make extremely good quality work and a renewed, ever growing consciousness about where clothing is made, who makes it, how many people, animals and plants suffer for others to have nice (nice from a distance, poorly made from close up) things. I’m officially done with shopping malls, I think.  I was trying to hold on for nostalgia sake. Growing up in the country, I loved going down to the city and looking through the mountains of stuff and returning home with fists full of plastic shopping-bag handles. But I’ve grown out of it. The people watching isn’t even very fun anymore. I just end up feeling sorry for the boyfriends who are being dragged around, awkward and feigning (badly) enthusiasm by their girlfriends.  That must really suck. I’m glad Oliver hates shopping and comes right out with it. He knows how build all kinds of useful things. That’s better.

This really is a yammering blog. I hope it’s ok.

Until next time!

Happy New Year! 

Oli and Leo

Somewhere north.

Grumpy's Bar in Montreal

Hurricane: New EP, and it's free.

In 2011 Oliver and I moved the furniture around in our little rented cabin on Denman Island and set up our mics and computer to record the EP, Hurricane. We hadn’t released any music since The Things That Stay With Me in 2009, and I wanted to get some of my new songs recorded and out there.  Through trades, improvising and generosity, we were able to produce the EP for next to no cost and now we have released it for free download through my website: www.ashleajonesmith.com.  A handful of good friends assisted with these recordings – Ken Hatch, Cameron Walsh, Stephen Stepanic and of course my partner, Oliver Wives who puts as much creativity and hard work into my songs as I do while writing them.  

Get the New EP for free