WHAT I DID ON MY SUMMER VACATION"
So my team of collaborators suggested there might be a missing song for this new batch of recordings we are making this fall. Always the kind of challenge I secretly love even though the pressure to come up with "the right material" can make for a lot of inner anxiety and drama don't you know. The timing for the suggestion was perfect though, as I had a few summer months where I could book off coaching in the city and work at the family cottage. Perfect, I've always found North Ontario a dreamy, intense place to write.Perfect also because my mom author Lilly Barnes was doing the final editing on her novel "Mara" (which will be published in the New Year) so our little family cottage functioned as a kind of a writer's retreat all season.
I remembered back when touring with The Nylons the way the audiences responded to our biggest hits, (Like The Lion Sleeps Tonight, Kiss Him Goodbye etc), standing and singing along and sending this huge wave of love and energy back to us on stage.
This summer I found that I was able to tap into that more joyous feeling in the new melodies and rhythms by getting out of my head and getting out of the way and just letting the universe guide me to the songs.
Starting my day in meditation before anyone was awake, I worked during the morning down in the boat house with a view of the moody, intense lake all of July and August. And gradually something special started to happen. Whereas the material from my last solo release "Micah Barnes" is all very dramatic and intense, mapping my experience of becoming lost in Los Angeles far away from home, the new songs that started to emerge this summer were much happier in their emotional vibration. Hmmmm.
MONTREAL CITY OF MY DREAMING.
By the end of the summer I had a batch of tunes that felt strong enough to want to demo and present to my team. But they sat in various states of unfinishedness. A missing bridge or second verse here and there kept them from being presentable. As luck would have it by dear friend Kathy and I had been talking about sharing an apt in Montreal where she goes for business. I have been having trouble focusing on the writing amidst my busy coaching life in Toronto and wanted a little "get away" place. No sooner had I put the word out to my Montreal singer pal Bil Ringenberg than he got back to us with the perfect suggestion. His friend Patti was starting an artists B&B above her Art Gallery Pink Espace in the Little Burgundy area downtown Montreal. So off I went for a concentrated week of hard work finishing the tunes while the end of summer heat beat down on sexy swinging Montreal. Yummy.
Coming home to Toronto in Sept I used the deadline of studio time to help me stay focused and booked myself a couple of sessions at JP's Rogue Studio's down where I live on Queen Street West. Engineer JP and I cut demo's of six songs
My Teenage Heart, First Steps, Everything, Domesticated, One Last Hurrah, Falling (Now I Know). You can hear the demo's up on MySpace (just click the button from this sites home page).
At this point of the fall brother Daniel and I are putting the new material up on it's feel for shows and working them into the concert set list. Let me know what tunes are speaking" to you! It's all about communication don't you know!
