CBC Interview on my own front porch

On a scorching hot day earlier this month, I had the great pleasure of recording an interview and performance on my front porch for CBC Windsor. The piece, entitled “Artists using music to send positive messages during these times of crisis” came out last Friday, and included interviews with two other acts, folk singer-songwriter Ayola and cover band Leave Those Kids Alone.

I was asked to talk about how my album has been received during the pandemic. I could never have foreseen how my year would change, going into lockdown just two weeks after releasing the album. And I’ve felt it challenging to promote this album because I don’t want to take up valuable space that should be occupied by public health officials during the pandemic, or by people of colour to help support the Black Lives Matter movement for racial justice and equality. But this album is also not unsuited to these times: it comes from a place of strength, resilience, and reflection, all things that are pretty valuable right now.

We actually ended up filming this across two different days. I had originally performed “Hungry Love” and “Can We Go Back”, but as we were wrapping up cables and tearing down gear on our porch, I realized I hadn’t explained what “Can We Go Back” was about. And I thought back to our discussion on camera, about the protests in US and the obligation for artists to use their platform for positive change, and I realized that this context was EXTREMELY unflattering for “Can We Go Back”. This was the day that I realized I needed to postpone the release of the song.

After much hand-wringing, desperately emailing friends for feedback, and generally agonizing about what to do, I was able to convince Mike (who was, in turn, able to convince the folks at CBC) to let us re-shoot the second song. I foresaw a ton of angry backlash about “Can We Go Back” coming across as a whole bunch of white fragility idiocy, instead of a lament for simpler (pre-pandemic) times, and was so relieved to have dodged that potential snafu.

The only hitch was that we forgot to use the same mic in the second shoot. So, yep - that’s a different mic on “Heaven”. We felt pretty rotten about not catching this continuity error, and we kept asking ourselves if we should re-shoot it, but we can only film between 2-3pm when our daughter is sleeping, and the weather was too miserable for us to do it again before the segment was due to publish. So, officially, there “was a problem with the mic and we had to switch it out during the shoot”. Unofficially, we filmed over two days because of my poor song choice, and in our hurry and haze of general exhaustion, we forgot to use the same mic. Oops.

At any rate, I’m fairly pleased with how these turned out! If it had’ve been making it for my own YouTube channel, I would have probably set the bar a little higher for myself - I would have sat up straighter, I would have warmed up first, I would have bought new falsies instead of these over-used old ones - but we had limited time to get it done, and I’m exhausted, y’all! I hope you enjoy it and don’t notice these little issues so much. It was a fun change to play “Heaven”, a song that I rarely sing, and share another side of Heirloom.

Thanks to the great folks at CBC for giving me this opportunity, and supporting independent musicians in this incredibly precarious and stressful time.

For more info, visit www.soulcitymusiccoop.com/tv

In other news… I’ll be doing a live-stream tomorrow evening, my first (full-length) one since June 1! It’ll be extra special because I’ll be doing a private after-show for those who donate. The main show will air at the same time and place - 9PM ET on the Soul City Music Co-op Facebook page - and the after-show will appear only on our website at 10PM ET. To get in, simply donate during the main show (or anytime today/tomorrow), and copy down the three-digit code that appears. That’s your password to the show, so don’t lose it. If I have time, I’ll send out a password reminder email before the show, but once the main-show begins, I won’t be able to do any reminders, so please make sure you copy down that code!

We did our first after-show last weekend for Mike’s latest live-stream, and I loved that we didn’t have to spend time reminding the viewer to donate, or asking you to like/share the feed, because you’ve already paid and the stream is private. It just feels… more intimate!

Join us if you can! xo