Skye Wallace

It’s been a while since I’ve posted an entry.  Let me try to sum up these past three months.  Impossible, no.  Improbable, yes?

First things first. The tour is over and went splendidly.  Over three and a half months (the entire season of AUTUMN!), I travelled from Toronto to Ottawa to London to Halifax to Edmonton to Calgary, and everywhere in between, landing me again in Vancouver & The Sunshine Coast for December.  It was 25 shows throughout, and what a time it was!  I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who supported and helped me out along the way, including my family, friends, and those I made the acquaintance of as I went.  Also thanks to the audiences who made sure that not a single show was under-attended!  And, lastly, thank you to all the musicians who collaborated with me on stage across this great country!  That’s Graeme McGillivray & James Law of Toronto, The Kehoes of Whitby, Laura Vercammen & Elizabeth Harris of Kingston, Mike Carroll of Halifax, Richard Lam & Sophie Heppell of Edmonton, Blaine Dunaway of Victoria, and Alexander Keurvorst, Bronwyn Malloy, & – once again – Richard Lam of Vancouver.  I could never find the words to express the full extent of my undying gratitude if I tried.  And I try really hard!

Since then, I’ve decided to move to Edmonton and enjoy a bit of a hiatus to record my next album.  (It’ll be very different from the folk-rooted EP of last year, and is suiting up to be something else!) Of course, what I’ve experienced thus far has been drifting farthur and farthur away from any definition of hiatus.  During my first three weeks of living in Alberta, I played three shows without searching very hard at all and I’ve got quite a number lining up in front of me – as we speak! – for the following months! Not that I’m complaining.

Life has been very busy and very artistically fruitful (believe it or not, Edmonton has the most well-supported music scene I’ve ever experienced!).  I’ve begun writing on the harp and taking off with side project, “The Northern Fights”, alongside Richard Lam & Paula Humby. On top of that, I’ve recently added a Twitter page into the mix of musical matters (www.twitter.com/skyewallace), and am currently refurbishing the ol’ web page!  Maybe you’ve noticed?

All in all, I am happy, things are good, and things are HAPPENING!

YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

Keep in mind that the tour is going fabulously. I have made multiple posts about the bad aspects, but its funny how the bad parts tend to be the most interesting to write about. Just note that they are few and far between.

I was rehearsing with a mandolin player, Graeme McGillivray, and fiddle player, James Law, before the show we were to play on College Street in Toronto. We finished around 7pm. From Graeme and James’ house, I took a bus so that I could meet up with friends somewhere near the venue.

I had everything with me, clothing bag, guitar, sound equipment for later, bags and bags. I was following the instructions given me by my iPhone maps app.

My stop had come, so I squeezed through the people on the bus with all my bags to get to the door. I didn’t even look at anyone when two girls standing by me said,

“You’re a bitch.”

“Yeah, you’re such a bitch.”

To my face.

WHAT? I had to get off the bus, so I lurched out the door and onto the street, where it started raining. A lot.

I tried following the map on my iPhone, but the directions didn’t quite make sense, and I ended up in the middle of a very strange bridge with no idea of where I was precisely or how to get to where I needed to go.

Then came the texts and emails from those who had promised their attendance at the show later, plentiful and all-too-consistent “sorry hun”s and “sorry babe I can’t make it out tonight”s.

I began swearing under my breath and saying “I hate this city, I’m never moving here, I want to leave, I don’t even want to do this stupid show, why am I here-“

Eventually, I got it together.

And, although it was a shit experience, I got a good story for during my set later that night, a show that went incredibly well.

It’s all in a lifetime.

So we went to get a suggestion from an expert about Sheila (my guitar) and her crack. (Aside: my guitar’s name is not Sheila, nor does it have a name. I do not support such a concept.)

We walked into what seemed like a quaint independent (and speculatively sketchy) guitar shop in Whitby. The shop consisted of a few shelves in disarray and a gaunt man looking at a guitar in his lap. This seemed like a good sign, that he’d be able to help, despite being horrifying. I asked him about it.

“I can’t fix it,” he says.

We couldn’t really do anything but stare back at him for a moment.

“Well… do you know who could?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Ah… no.”

“No.”

Keep in mind that during this exchange he was making this obnoxious tentative sigh/suck noise that would grind one’s gears regardless of circumstance.

“Actually, yeah. Take it to a furniture place… like repair place.”

“You want me to take it to an upholsterer.”

“Yeah, I have a friend who does it.”

Why would I bring my guitar to a furniture upholsterer? It’s a guitar. Furniture upholsterers don’t have to worry about how the couch is going to sound after it looks pretty. Why on earth would I bring it to an upholsterer?

“Who is your friend?” I asked him, just to have options.

“Chris.”

Chris who?

“Well,” I continued, “can you tell me how to get in touch with him?”

“Oh, well, he works full time, so I don’t think he could do it.”

Thank you, sir. You have been the most helpful.

On a side note, Sheila is fine, despite the crack.

Not Sheila.

Guitar is broken.

Big crack. Up the side. Doesn’t affect the sound. Still very sad.

I am lost.

I am obsolete.

The show this time around, in Kingston, Ontario, has been full of valuable lessons, indeed.

Clark Hall Pub is a great place to play on Queen’s Campus, and I was very excited to have booked it. Close friends Laura & Elizabeth (who were, incidentally, the violinists who were to play with me later on) and Biz (the official roadie) accompanied me to Clark Hall only to find a locked door at 8:30pm. Curious, we knocked. A man came to the door, only to say that the venue didn’t open until 9pm.

Fair.

So we walked around a little, stopped to talk to a few friends, and were a good ten minutes into our jaunt when a young man gave me a strange look and didn’t look away as he passed by us. He stopped and said, “Are you Skye Wallace?”

“Yes…”

“You’re here! I’m Joel!”

Joel was the one I’d been emailing, the booking manager of Clark Hall, who had been very nice during the whole process. I hadn’t heard from him in a while.

“Are you playing somewhere tonight?” he asked me.

I paused, a little confused. “Uh… Clark Hall, isn’t it?”

“Oh man.” He looked a little flustered during all this, and I was about to find out why. “You never sent me a confirmation email! I thought you weren’t able to make it out!”

I froze. For whatever reason – be it that the email didn’t go through, I didn’t hit the send button, I imagined writing the email without actually writing it – I hadn’t been booked to play. So much disappointment. So many people I told to come. What am I gonna –

“But… you know,

the band that was supposed to play the same spot as you just cancelled, so… Wanna play?”

And so I played, despite all that stacked up against the performance. It was a great show, with so much added by my wonderfully sweet violinist/scientist friends, Laura and Elizabeth, and I feel like this is a sign of sorts, a little indication that I’ve made another step in the right direction. Let’s hope this keeps up.

Today was the epitome of all the amalgamated tension, anxiety, and lonlieness that I’ve experienced at all in the last three weeks.

I was skyping with dear Richard Lam, talking about everything I was having a problem with today, be it clothing, packing issues, bookings that weren’t coming together, etc. The conversation soon digressed and after about fifteen minutes of “talking it out”, I ended up sprawled limp on a beanbag chair moaning “I am obsolete…” and “I have no meaning, I’m lost…” while Vera Lynn’s “(There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs Of Dover” played sad in the background.

Now that I have undergone this invasive eradication of all-too-much emotion, I feel like I’ll be okay.

Oh, wait I just saw the forecast.

Rain forever.

Song: Southwood Plantation Road, The Mountain Goats

I’m on the train to Kingston, currently. After five shows, I feel like I’m finally getting the hang of this thing. This whole tour thing. This whole blasted tour thing.
No, really, I like it.
The first two weeks of this trip was all too relative to the words of Dan Mangan’s Pine For Cedars. Look at that – it’s even Vancouver-specific! But I’ve started to adapt; even though the way those words go together make me feel like an animal…

Adaptation: the evolutionary process whereby a population becomes better suited to its habitat.

Hm. I don’t have a habitat. My habitat is more a concept than it is a tangible space. So it goes. – I’ve been quoting Vonnegut too much. How much is too much, you ask? The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest. – I made the acquaintance of a group of quails living in my aunt and uncle’s livingroom; they had quite a secure habitat. They seemed to be adapting well.

The best part about those sweet little quail were their eggs. Yes, I had quail eggs for breakfast. Kindly do not judge me, they were delicious and unfertilized!

I’ll get off the train now.

Friends from afar, wonders in jars, and a cat named Bibble.
Song: Reconstruction Site – The Weakerthans

The show at Free Times Café in Toronto was peak. The performance itself went well (once Dallas Sutherland and I figured out that the P.A. system wasn’t working cause the whole damn thing was on mute), but besides that, it was made great by those that filed into Free Times from all kinds of fragments of my life and past.

A friend from grade 6 drove all the way from Oshawa all by herself like a champ just to come to the show. This one guy who I briefly met (and performed with in a piece of theatre) while he was traveling around BC showed up with full enthusiasm. I met a guy named Ritchie on the street half an hour before the show and – gosh darn it – he came too! Suffice it to say, I would go back to play at Free Times[1] in an INSTANT. In fact, I would come back solely for the doorman, a small and peppy middle-aged man with glasses and a plaid shirt, who happened to be the most sincere man in the universe[2].

Needless to say, Toronto treated me well. I made some new friends, reacquainted myself with old ones, scoured Kensington Market, and lurked Chinatown. My diet consisted of oranges and pho[3] and peoplewatching was a matter of principle, as frequent as the corners where the streets combine. Of course, one of the most memorable pieces of Toronto was a little cat named Bibble.

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[1] Upon talking to the owner, I found out that Free Times Café is about to celebrate their 40^th Anniversary! I was also informed that they’ve had over 10,000 acts grace their stage! How novel!

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[2] Upon my exit of the stage, he greeted me nearly in tears, oozing with compliments about my music and what I do and what I’ve yet to do. What a man!

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[3] And shitty overpriced sushi. Being from Vancouver, a common price for 18 pieces of pretty decent sush, including miso soup and green tea, is $5.95. In Toronto, my friends and I decided to go get “discount” end-of-day sushi. It consisted of sticky poorly made lumps housed in brittle plastic containers (about 18/20 pieces in total) for $11.00!!!!! I miss Vancouver a bit. Okay, a lot.

Maybe this anxiety is related to that of abrupt and incessant travel. Maybe I need to stop eating pasta altogether (god forbid).

I had a dream in which there was a mass-scale worldwide pasta recall. My Dad received a telegram and came down to the basement (because that was where I was) to tell me very grave news. Anyone who had eaten any kind of pasta in the past week would die on the sixth of the month due to food poisoning with a long-term, but very specific “release date”. I was, obviously, in tears. This was it. Death hath come. And all because I loved pasta so much and just haaad to eat –

Wait.

Then we realized that we had been on a gluten-free diet all week! There was no way that we could have ingested pasta at all! We were safe (but the rest of the world wasn’t).

The first place to hit on the tour was Whitby, Ontario. This is one of the many suburbs in the Greater Toronto Area, full of such gems as the Whitby Curling Club, which is where I had my first performance. It was a great show, sponsored by Wine Kitz and Labatt Beer, and was also a veritable mosaic of flukes, upheavals, and improvisations. The most memorable piece of the show to fit said descriptions would be that of the opening band, The Kehoes.
Two weeks prior, my uncle, Rob, was putting together logistics and arrangements of the tentative Whitby gig. His head was still on the matter when he and some friends were sitting around late one night with several more drinks in their systems than is typically prudent. This, of course, led to the whipping out of the ol’ gee-tar.
Renditions of Violent Femmes songs, Proclaimers songs, and Neil Diamond songs sounded all too slick. Memories of their grade 7 music teacher Mrs. Kehoe flooded into their conversations. Ideas began to emerge in Rob’s musically-laden psyche.
“Let’s make a band, call ourselves The Kehoes, and open for Skye at the WCC on September 12th!!”
All agreed, as one does under such circumstances, and promptly forgot about it the next morning.
All but Rob.

Having never really played the guitar before, he got on it, practicing at least once a day, choosing songs “Fat” by The Femmes and “Oh Jean” by The Proclaimers. In immersing himself, Rob neglected to mention the idea again until the night before the performance, where, once again, he and his friends were sitting around with several more drinks in their systems than is typically prudent, only this time on the deck a new in-ground pool (this bit of information is irrelevant, but pretty).
“What are you talking about? That was a joke,” said his friend, Steve.
“No way, we got this. I’ve got it all figured out, we just have to figure out a last song and-”
“No. No, sorry, I don’t think we should-”
“We have to. Mrs. Kehoe is attending and she’s heard all about it.”
A wave of sheer horror crossed the faces of both Steve and Leanne – The Kehoes, as it were – as they proceeded to log onto the facebook event page, and note Mrs. Kehoe’s undeniable promise of attendance, along with her promised invitation to everyone in their seventh grade music class of old.
And so it was that the Kehoes performed the next day, who, having gotten over the indignation of it all, had one hell of a good time.