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There were times when I blundered and got the dreaded look from the lads. But that was a good sign. It showed I’d attempted something I’d not tried before.

– John Bonham

Fills bring the thrills, but grooves pay the bills.

– Steve Gadd

The funk isn’t in what you play. It’s in what you don’t play. It’s in the space between the notes.

– Clyde Stubblefield

LOS ANGELES – JUNE 03: Drummer John Bonham of the rock band ‘Led Zeppelin’ performs onstage at the Forum on June 3, 1973 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

This week has been a full on, intensely stressful one at my day gig. One that saw the music vibes down to a trickle. These ones always drag. I’m the kind of character who needs to be creating something to feel connected and grounded. I’ve been recently reintroduced me to the concept of radical acceptance. It requires being cool with everything as it is, especially the hard stuff. Timely, but also difficult, trying to apply it to situations aflame with conflicting personalities and an avoidable disarray regarding the planning and execution of work.

 It’s now Saturday morning in the window of the local. The sun is shining in. Friends pass by and we catch up. I sat with my coffee and listened down to my new tracks in their current state. About half of the record’s been recorded. The working title is Misfit & Rhyme. It’s all sounding great. The next phase of the recording is live drums.

I have the capacity to record almost everything at home but a full drum kit. I got in touch with an old friend, Cory Blackburn, of the Blackburn Brothers. We’ve been mates since high school. We share friendship, but also musical lineage: both of our papas were players on the Yonge St. scene in the mid-60s. Cory and the brothers have been doing amazingly. After years of slugging in out on the bar scene, they released a killer record and have been playing a lot of huge North American and European festivals. It’s awesome to watch. It’s also been hard to get our schedules together! We finally made it happen. Drum sessions are booked for later this month and I’m super pumped. I’ll send Cory scratch tracks of me singing and playing the acoustic. He loads them into his system and I’ll sit behind his drums for the first time in years and let ‘er rip. The kit is a beautiful Gretsch in silver sparkle and Cory, being a drummer himself, is a whiz at getting killer sounds. I’ve played this set many times and I know sitting behind it again will feel like coming home. There are fives songs in the queue.

I’ll spend the next two weeks laying down the vox and guitar bits and getting them mixed down for the sessions. I’ll send the lot to Cory, along with tempo. We’ll talk about how we’ll approach the recording. What sound we’re going for. All the juicy stuff.

It feels great to have the next wave of the project sorted. I’ve been feeling a bit rudderless for the last few weeks. I have something to hang my hat on now.  And I haven’t seen Cory for a million years. It’s going to be a musical and family reunion.

I’ll share some grooves when they’ve landed.

‘Til then…

K. xo

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Fame and stuff like that is all very cool, but at the end of the day, we’re all human beings. Although what I do is incredibly surreal and fun and amazing and I’m really grateful for it, I don’t believe my own press release, do you know what I mean?

– Tom Hardy


I’m just getting settled as a responsible man – but if you split the elephant into little mouthfuls it will be fine.

– also Tom Hardy

Last night, I watched I’m Tim, a Netflix doc about Tim Bergling, aka Avicii, the unfortunately late EDM superstar. I didn’t know much about him, only that he was globally known and that he’d committed suicide a few years ago. The story is achingly typical: a sensitive, high-anxiety kid who found himself through making music. Fame struck. Tim turned to drugs and booze to maintain. At some point, he’d had enough and stepped away. Also achingly typical is that, while to all around him, he was in a better place, he took his life while on a solo vacation to Oman. A bright-eyed kid, destroyed by fame. In the doc, there are voiceovers by Tim while he was alive. He says “Making music was much better before I was famous…”

With the vapour trails of that floating through my head, I woke this morning and checked out a piece about the bluesman Skip James. In the 1930s, Paramount Records paid him $40 to record a body of his work. The Depression hit and Skip disappeared into obscurity. During the blues resurrection in the 1960s, a young John Fahey (one of my guitar influences) and two pals scoured Mississippi in search of Skip. They found him, with terminal cancer, and brought him back into the limelight. Before the disease finally got him in 1969, he gigged for three years, appreciated, beloved and respected for his talent, songwriting and what he brought to the blues. Who knows what might have happened in the thirty odd years between the recordings and resurrection? Maybe three years was enough to not have the life sucked out of him by fame.

I’m no stranger to craving fame. My younger desires firmly embedded that craving when I first started down the musical road. Along the way, I unconsciously wove the need for fame into the validation that we all seek, on both human and artistic levels. It’s something I’m not as haunted by now. I’m more comfortable in my own skin. I still find myself moaning internally (sometimes externally) about working a day gig and not being able to make music full time. This, too, has become better with time. I’ve engineered my life to maximize my creative time, and time with family, while working a day gig that brings in a suitable income, with people I care about. With all this in mind, a friend a few days ago sent me a clip about Philip Glass, the American minimalist composer. Even after achieving success, he kept his day gig as a plumber and a cabbie. The clip goes on to say that, if you’ve got a day gig, congrats, you can finance your music and stay independent. It was a reminder of what an amazing place I’m in.

The kid was away at camp last week and I missed her a lot. I took advantage of the time and worked in the studio on guitar parts for the new recordings. It took a lot out of me. I started a week ago Sunday and worked every day through to tonight (Monday, Feb 2). I was a bit spent as this past weekend dawned, but found the chutzpah to keep on keepin’ on. Apart from the creative juice expended, my feet went weird. We live in a sub basement. The floors are very cold in the winter and the studio nook, at the front of ours, is the coldest part of the unit. I have to kill the HVAC when I’m recording anything with live mics. It was dreadfully cold. I ended up with chilblains across my left toes. If you haven’t heard of them, they’re a nasty business. Abrasions on the skin due to prolonged exposure to cold. This while wearing thick socks and slides. I felt most of the time like I was recording in a walk in cooler. That is, when I thought about how cold it was. Mostly I was just there, digging the wood and wire and the toasty sounds coming out of my amp.

The recordings are going smashingly well. This time round feels different than all the rest. A close pal, who often gets to hear the dailies of the new tracks, said there’s a levity to these songs that wasn’t there before. I feel that. Life is still not without its struggles. It never will be, but the music is good right now. That means a lot. It’s my meditation and place of stillness while we navigate these barbarically insane times.

I hope, when the new record comes out next year, that it reaches far and wide and, at the same time, that I remain mostly anonymous. It seems like the worst time in history to be a famous person. Here’s to success under the radar. Maybe I’ll start looking into getting my plumber’s certification…

K. xo

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“Fak, these blankets smell nasty.”

– Me

I bunked off work early yesterday with much excitement. Last week I’d tracked vocals for Tattoo, the last song I need to add anything to. It was a bust. The intro is the most sensitive as far as needing quiet to record. The recording of vox and acoustic guitar for this record have been anything but quiet. We live only feet away from the streetcar and main street traffic ripping by, to say nothing of the orange men on the DeGrassi Street train bridge, whacking away at the the Ontario Line all hours of the day. I was able to make the rest of the vocal tracks happen, along with traffic noise and life sometimes audible on the vocal tracks, but Tattoo needed some real quiet.

I moved my vocal mic into the anteroom outside of our bathroom and reran the studio leads accordingly. I then headed off to Canadian Tire and picked up some moving blankets, at a friend’s recommendation, to help buffer the noise. I got home and excitedly hung the blankets and got my MacGyver vocal booth cooking. I noticed that the blankets were a bit stinky. I thought it was because they were just out of the package. After a special afternoon visit from a friend, I had some dins, went for my usual night walk around the east end and arrived back home, not sure if I’d record then, or spend the night kicking back and wait until today, when I was fresh with Saturday’s promise, to lay this final track down. The latter won. With the lights down low, I went slack and took in all the proper British crime drama that my inert, self-flagellating self could handle.

I woke this morning with my lungs and sinuses on fire. Our place is not that big and is open concept. The whole place bore the funky smell of yesterday’s newly opened blankets. I checked the material label for contents. Turns out some sod thought it was a good idea to put propylene in the blankets. I’d heard of this chemical before, but didn’t know much about it. Turns out it’s shite and should not be huffed in. Small wonder, on the heels of lifelong asthma and two recent, back to back respiratory infections, that I felt like crap after sleeping with these olfactorily strange bedfellows.

A quick shower and some brekkie, then off to return the offenders. I’m at the local now, having a coffee and feeling good about getting the Tattoo vox done. I’ll go old school and hang up some blankets and go for it. When the recording is done, I’m planning some studio upgrades. I’ll add the acoustic treatment to the list and get something dope cooking for future vox and acoustic geetar recordings. It’ll be crucial, as I’m planning for the next round of recordings to be live, off the floor solo voice and acoustic.

In the meantime, I’d like to share the premaster of The Pass, which is the first track on the record. Some of you have already heard it and have been in touch with your praise, which makes it all worth it for me. Thanks so much for that.

Hope ya dig.

The Pass

K. xo

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“Never make a decision when you need to pee.”

– Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

My back feels broken, my shoulders like crags of rock, my orbs are sore and red, my right arm feels like it’s telescoped from using the mouse, I’m irritable, I haven’t been the most patient Dad, the smallest inconvenience results in a reaction not at all on par with the inconvenience itself. In short, I feel like a bit of a wretched prick…and intensely alive and awake.

Making Stereophile, my new record and book, has been so many things. I’ve run the gamut of emotions, from despair to the highest elation. Little victories and many kicks to the nuts. I’m going to write more about the entirety of the experience when the record is done.

Currently, I’m in mix mode. This is my first attempt at mixing my own full length. I’ve released a handful of singles over the last few years. Mixing a standalone track is a different beast than getting a collection together. I usually mix as I go. When I finished the vocal tracks, I thought I was pretty much done with the mixes. Not so. As with each phase of the project, I’ve been learning on the fly. I’ve a old friend and mentor in Howard Ayee, whose experience dates back to the golden age of recording, the 1970s. I say the golden age, but we’re in a bit of a renaissance now. Technology now allows us to get analogue warmth with the convenience of digital editing. Howard’s directed me on how the greats did it back in the day, in the context of the gear available to us today.

This latest phase of mixing the songs to get them all ready for Howard to master sees me working, in particular, on the strength of where the vocals sit in the wormhole of the mix. The last week has been an immersion in the finer points of how the pros do it. While I grumbled at the thought of yet another learning curve, it’s been worth it.

There have been many days and nights of sitting at the console, having to pee. I’m not sure how many decisions I’ve made while nature called. Probably a bunch. Sorry, Len. Hopefully they haven’t been made in vain.

I can’t wait to share the record with you.


K. xo

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The Silent Accord

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”

– Jiddu Krishnamurti

Sitting here in the window at the local. It’s a rainy Saturday morning. The studio is whispering to me from a few blocks away. Urging me in. Urging me on. I’m in a weeks long cycle of pain, illness and procrastination. I am one guitar track and one vocal track away from finishing Stereophile, my new record. I am mustering the courage, the heart, to lay them down. To breathe it all out and elevate out of this hard place. I’m aware that, while I moan about the delays, I’m afraid to finish. Afraid to release this work into the world, these bits of soul made digital, and see it mostly ignored, if my previous work is any measure. I’m at once hopeful, while feeling the cold whisper of the voice of ridicule and shame trickling down the back of my neck.

I drink my coffee and watch the people go by. I think of a better world. One where we are not so pressed and dented. Where art is not reduced to content. Where the substance of our silent accord is lived, rather than its loss bemoaned as a symptom of modern life. A place free of our Post Pandemic Disconnection, the cortisol coming in waves as we panic for breath, for a short reprieve.

I think I may be in the wrong lane. It may be time to hang up my modest public presence in the world and beat a retreat. I’m sick of the spiritual shithole we’ve made of this place, with all its potential for greatness and kindness. I’m tired of the helpless, hateful rage I feel towards our politicians, and the corporate world, who continue to refuse accountability for the widespread damage born of their relentless pursuit to hoard and boast. These for whom money has replaced the hardwired neanderthal idiot male need to compete and dominate. The depth of this greed is an uncommon stupidity in this day and age. For those of you feeling like this is a finger wag, make no mistake, I see myself in these people. I see all of us in each other and everything else. We all have the potential to shine or shit the bed.

Coffee is almost done. Time to head over to the studio and get embryonic, while my heart longs for more real time connection, to be among a group of souls. Maybe that’s what’s missing. Maybe, instead of retreat, I need to get out more. For me, and everyone I know, having the energy and making time for something as simple as seeing a friend has, due to the relentless hustle to make ends meet, become elusive.

We are fragmented. The societal machine we continue to allow to run is sickly and wrong. The silent accord I mentioned earlier is the feeling we all get, in the quiet moments, where Love comes in and fills us with its amber glow. That light is in all of us. It is the eternal, fixed point, like lights along the landing strip at night’s most impenetrable hour.

I’ve been sitting here for a while now, thinking about a succinct way to wrap this one up, but I can’t find one. This is an ongoing trip. One without end. We are Divine Misfits made flesh and bone, each with our own story, each flawed and returning, missing home and looking for the runway lights…

K. xo