"Domesticated" is finally delivered!

Sunday Oct 17th

Wow folks. Just handed over the final mastered version of "Domesticated" on Friday and am still unwinding from meeting all the deadlines.. (our Toronto release show is just 2 weeks away and we wanted the disc to be ready!)

The decisions about artwork happened just before Canadian Thanksgiving and thanks to Michael Wrycraft's speed and creative smarts we solved a whole lot of problems real quick. We only shot the cover photo during mix sessions the week before. Final copy on press materials happening at the same time as final mixes and mastering sessions. Yikes! I'll be unwinding until next year.

This disc "Domesticated" is the best recorded work I've ever done (and that includes the 2 discs with The Nylons that I am very proud of!) The songs reflect a new kind of happiness in my soul.. but also the rough journey it took to get here. I'll be telling the story of this disc in following blogs

but today just want to take a moment to breath and reflect on the incredible experience. Drawing a team around these songs has been a deeply fulfilling journey, one of the best of my professional life to date and I really look forward to your feedback as we bring this music out to you starting with the Hugh's Room show.

This music doesn't exist without you after all..if a man sings at the top of his lungs in the forest where no one hears him..is there really music?

Trash Circus

The unholy marriage of rock n roll and cabaret has always attracted me. This second track from the "Micah Barnes" disc tells the story of my touring the previous disc "Loud Boy Radio" across America. (We called it the "couch and cuddle" tour) :) The glitter and glam influence of the LoudBoy rock n roll experience can be felt in the lyric and edgy vocal even though it's performed on voice and piano. From the safe vantage point of the present day I sound like I am out of my mind. Hmmmm. Maybe I was.

Long Drives. Ugly Hotel Room. Bad Food. Medication for the Blues.Filthy Dressing Rooms.

We musicians are lucky to get to make a life of music but we pay the price for the lifestyle. The road can be a depressing experience that makes you feel unhooked from the world and desperate to put your feet on the ground. This song Trash Circus was written to capture both the allure of the road and also some of the sadness and pain I've experienced out there feeling lost and desperate.

I stared writing Trash Circus as spoken word sketches for a about a year and finished it off as a song in Vegas while working on the track "Good Soldier" for LA based rapper Deadlee's disc. His label had a whole bunch of us staying up at a hotel on the strip while we recorded our parts and there was lots of waiting around so I kept working on Trash Circus while I viewed the decadence of Vegas from behind the Neon sign outside my window. Perfect.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/micah-barnes/id324429103

Venice Beach

Los Angeles is so intense under the easy going vibe. It takes so much of ourselves just to feel like we're doing OK, let alone great, and you need a safe place to chill and feel protected and peaceful and that's how Venice worked for me.

It was built as an amusement park around the turn of the century by Abbot Kinney (Which is how it's high end shopping street got it's name), and designed as a version of the actual Venice in Italy, with little cottages lining sleepy canals and public bathing houses along the ocean back when the public thronged to amusement parks. The freak show boardwalk still exists giving the tourist a destination,(and the drug dealers an office front!).

Back in the day the trolley went out from downtown Los Angeles along Venice Blvd taking inland residents to the big party at the beach and many of them ended up taking up residence in the little cottages. Especially the artists and writers who were attracted by the beautiful light and the idylic lifestyle. Soon Venice Beach stood for "the bohemian lifestyle" and it's denizens including post war european artists, mixed race couple and gays and lesbians who created an enduring stamp on the town. The 60's and 70's saw Venice become one of the destinations of choice for traveling hippies and grew a beatnik culture of it's own. By the time I came along in the 90's after all those decades of being a safe haven for freaks of every kind the decay and drugs and violence had taken their toll.

We moved into a one room railroad style apt on a crack alley and I proceeded to write the material that would become a series of spoken word and music pieces. Digging into myself for the unfigured out chaos under cover of morning fog that would burn off by noon leaving a brilliant sunny day for the wandering and suddenly this Canadian used to four seasons had found a writers retreat that seemed to go on forever allowing me the time and space to cook the songs that became this album.

Blood On The Keyboard

All those years of singing classic pop material in The Nylons gave me a real thirst to talk about my own experience as a solo artist. After some years experimenting and stretching myself combining spoken word and electronic oriented music I finally bought an old acoustic piano and put it in my Venice Beach apt.so that I could get back to creating music the old fashioned way. In time I found that my own songs worked best for the listener when they emerged from deep inner world that I had no way to communicate other than in song. You know,the messy unworked out stuff that is hard to name.

AFTER YOU "I took this ugly room with the parking lot view, so I could small the cheap perfume of lonelyness my love"

Working with producer Clint Yeager who comes from a rock n roll background meant taking a risk. Clint pushed me until I was raw. Both as a songwriter and as a recording artist. He said he wanted the audience at home to hear blood on the piano. LOL. You be the judge.

The first song "After You" on my piano and voice disc is written as a communication to an ex-lover, detailing just how bad things have gotten after the break up. Guys tend to hole up inside and wallow and this song is a kind of celebration of that particular state.

Although "After You" was the last tune written for the disc "Micah Barnes", producer Clint Yeager really felt that it defined the overall mood and would work as a good introduction to this particular journey and landscape....http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/micah-barnes/id324429103

Making "Micah Barnes"

Greetings Folks!

I thought before jumping into telling you about the writing and recording of the new tracks we are making in Toronto, it would be good to have a little look back at the adventure of the last disc and how it all came together.

I was living in Venice Beach, Los Angeles, a single man recovering from a very messy love affair and lifestyle that had literally brought me to my knees in every which way. Sounds kinda ridiculous now that I am so much stronger but sometimes life gives you the kick in the pants that you really need. Buncha intensely personal songs came out of it and focused the album which we called simply "Micah Barnes".

I was writing and performing shows with my rock n roll band LoudBoy and we had recorded songs with legendary producer Geza X. at his Malibu studio which were already finding license for film and T.V. In the middle of all that my buddy (and the bassist in LoudBoy) Clint Yeager turned to me and said that he felt the songs felt more powerful when I performed them solo at the piano ...and suggested that was how I should record them. It was a resounding shock to hear the truth coming from someone who I so respect (and who can eat even more than me at one sitting). I had started my career at the piano and it really and truly seemed the deepest place for those songs to exist. So I told him great idea but he had to produce the recording. :)

After some fun distractions, (involving a Billboard #1 Club single called "Welcome To My Head" produced by pals Thunderpuss), we got to work on choosing the songs and perfecting the arrangements for my own disc in my little Venice apt on Breeze Avenue. Clint would come out from Silverlake (where we had met performing in bands and working the door together at clubs) and we'd have a good visit, we'd play through the stuff and go eat and go for long drives playing music and talking about how important rawness and passion and personal truth were to pulling off this new kind of rock n roll cabaret material solo at the piano.... more on the songs as we go..

Album available online from CD Baby and itunes!

http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/micah-barnes/id324429103

Ye Ole Hometown Concert

DANIEL AND MICAH BARNES IN CONCERT AT THE AL GREEN THEATRE WITH SPECIAL GUEST LORRAINE SEGATO!

So way back in the spring when program director of the Jewish Y Harriet Wichin asked if my Jazz band leading brother Daniel and I wanted to do a concert at the brand spanking new Al Green Theatre in our home neighborhood of The Annex downtown Toronto we jumped at the chance. After all the tribute show to our father composer Milton Barnes had been a sold out success at that venue. Indeed Harriet Wichin is an intelligent producer who knows how to treat artists well.

Our first job was to find a suitable guest to round out the evening that would open with Daniel's Jazz Quartet and end with my more Alternative Pop-oriented trio. Of course our good friend from the Queen Street West days Lorraine Segato was the top of our list and we were thrilled she said yes.

We were also thrilled to have videographer Andy Frank and co. on board to provide live streaming footage of the concert to our friends and fans near and far.

The highlights of the whole event for me were rehearsing the duet of "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" with Lorraine at my apartment, joining Daniel's top notch quartet on stage for a couple of songs including the self penned "After The Sun Goes Down" and performing the Nylons cover "Up On The Roof" for the audience that included The Nylons producer/arranger Peter Mann along with other notables including good pal Molly Johnson and her whole family.

A Yummy night of family and music all around.Thanks to those who attended or watched from home! FYI for the local folks Next Toronto Concert event will be June 11th at Hugh's Room.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

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!