Boucher Guitars now in stock
We are proud to be offering Boucher Guitars. Our first order of 5 guitars has arrived. We’re thrilled with these guitars across the board — the premium materials, build quality, playability and tone are excellent.
Godin Acoustics – The new line is here!
We are now fully stocked with all 5 Godin Acoustic guitar models. They range in price from $850-$1895 and they all have electronics so they’re ready to plug and play. Here are the 5 models:
Dave Gunning Up Against the Sky
On New Years’ Day, Dave Gunning decided to record a demo of a song he had always loved. “Circle of Boots” was inspired by Dave’s time touring with George Canyon, when “Every night we gathered in a circle and he would pray before the show,” explained Dave when he spoke to me between tour dates in Saskatchewan, “and I thought this could be football players, this could be schoolmates who haven’t seen one another, or a reunion of people, or soldiers going into battle. That’s your circle of friends, your circle of boots. I wrote that one with Tom Swift and he recorded it years ago and I just always loved the song.” With two stationary room mics set up in his home studio, Dave played acoustic and electric guitar, stand-up bass and drums and in three hours the song was done.
He invited friend and collaborator JP Cormier to the studio to listen to the demo. JP said “Who’s playing the bass and drums?” Dave told him he played them himself. “Okay, that’s the band. That’s the band for the whole record.” Initially skeptical, Dave agreed to lay down a few more demos, trusting that JP, a “brutally honest” friend, would never tell him something was good unless he meant it. Dave Gunning didn’t know it yet, but he had started recording his twelfth album, Up Against the Sky, and had already completed one of its standout tracks.
Dave Gunning is photographed on the cover of Up Against the Sky standing in a field, the camera close to the ground to let the grains of wheat tower over him. The photo, taken by George Canyon, references the title directly, a line from the song “Horse for Sale” which captures the mix of optimism and adversity contained in the album’s songs. Dave was attracted to the dual connotations of the phrase, which can just as easily refer to the ticking clock of climate change as it can suggest that the sky’s the limit. “It’s that double meaning of it,” he said. “It just caught my attention and my imagination and I thought this really ties in a lot of what the songs are about, whether it’s a sense of impending doom, something closing in, or whether it’s positive, a celebration of the crop.”
Despite its bittersweet moments, the album brims with a sense of community. Most of the time Dave speaks in the third person or the plural first person; “I guess I find the lives of other people more interesting” he tells me. “Celebrate the Crop”, “Horse for Sale”, “Ferris Wheel” and “The Loyal Fisherman” all read like short stories set in the same town. The town in question is presumably Pictou, Nova Scotia, where Dave is from and still lives, and that closeness he has with his real community can’t help but find its way into his songwriting.
Adding to this communal feel, eight of the ten songs on Up Against the Sky were cowritten by Dave with a variety of songwriters. He credits the cowriting process for holding him to a higher standard: when he’s working on a line or a melody, he feels inspired by the immediate feedback he gets and works harder to impress his collaborator and produce something that they can both feel proud of. “It also has helped my career over the years,” he said. “If I look back throughout my catalogue, I can see a wide range of topics and moods and melodies within the material. It hasn’t been maybe as ‘samey’ as it would have been if it was just all me. So I’m in a sense spreading out the genetic pool of my writing.”
A notable exception is “In the Time I Was Away,” the album’s most introspective moment. Dave Gunning and Mark Lang started writing it while on tour together in Australia and Dave finished it off after he had returned to Pictou. It’s a classic premise for a song, acknowledging the hard realities of being a touring performer, but it remains fresh in Dave’s seasoned hands. And unlike many songwriters who work as hard as Dave, he doesn’t fall into the trap of having his albums read like a tour travelogue, preferring to spend the rest of the album rooted in his strong sense of home and place.
He credits this in part to how he spends most of his time. In the last eight years, his music career has come second to his work in his community, an ongoing effort to hold Northern Pulp accountable for the environmental degradation caused by the Pictou bleached kraft mill, one of the highest-polluting mills in the country. Boat Harbour, once a biodiverse tidal estuary, became a dumping site for the mill in 1967 and is now the largest polluted site in Nova Scotia. “I’m part of the group that’s been working on this intensely for over eight years,” he said. “It takes more time than my music career for sure… Like an old fellow in the community said, clean your own backyard first before you start preaching elsewhere.”
There’s an unintentional irony in “Wish I Was Wrong,” the song which most explicitly addresses his work on the mill, being immediately followed by “Nothing on Me,” a tongue-in-cheek “confession” about how Dave has had a pretty easy life and there’s no dirt to dig up, since from certain points of view his activism against the mill could be perceived as dirt. He was partly inspired by the efforts of mill representatives to dig up dirt on him, but the song also challenges the myth of the tortured artist.
It’s an appropriate subject for an album on which Dave strips away the artifice of the studio and allows the songs to exist as a genuine performance happening in a single room. For most of the songs, he let the instruments bleed into each other’s mics, preventing himself from fine-tuning and editing out any imperfections in each individual channel. Up Against the Sky lets the songs breath, and has an incredible warmth and immediacy because of it. “It’s not perfect, it’s a little rough, but maybe that’s good,” he said. “You can waste so much time trying to polish something and taking the life out of it, and that can happen without even meaning it to happen… it’s my favourite record so far.”
Dave Gunning will be touring through Ontario beginning on March 22nd in Corbyville. Find his full tour dates and buy tickets here.
Up Against the Sky is available now:
Noah Derksen in the Winnipeg Underground
“I’ve always known that it is a rite of passage as a musician to have all of your gear stolen. At some point it’s bound to happen; the more you do it, the more opportunity you have… And then getting it back is just such a massive relief, because that doesn’t really happen.”
A week before the release of his new EP, to be supported by a month of shows beginning in Winnipeg and ending in Kitchener Ontario, Noah Derksen’s van was broken into, the thieves making off with his laptop, his suitcase, a set of harmonicas and his Stonebridge guitar.
Noah spoke to me from the road after a house show in Steinbach, Manitoba to tell me about how he narrowly avoided a disaster that could have ended the tour before it began. He is travelling east into Ontario in support of America, Dreaming (Part One), an EP launched on March 1st which is in reality the first three tracks from his latest full-length album, to be released in three parts throughout 2019.
America, Dreaming adds an overt Americana sheen to his self-described “contemplative folk” but Noah, an American citizen raised in Winnipeg, doesn’t romanticise America. In the last few years, living for a time in Oregon and touring more frequently in the States, he has come to a more nuanced perspective of the country. Only after he began recording the new album did he identify this as the unifying theme of his latest batch of songs – and that’s what led him to the title.
“The American dream is perhaps just a disillusioned idea of how the world functions. America, Dreaming is a play on the American dream and how perhaps that is, and always has been, just a dream.”
Noah’s goal is to unveil a piece of the puzzle with each release: three EPs with three songs each, together making up the full album. This release strategy is a compromise between the traditional album format and the more casual way that most people consumer music today. By releasing three songs at a time, Noah doesn’t demand too much of a commitment from the listener but is still able to deliver a complete, unified album at the end of the day.
But taking America, Dreaming (Part One) to twenty different cities in Ontario, Quebec and Manitoba, including a performance at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa on Friday March 22nd, would be difficult without a guitar. When Noah realized he had left his van unlocked and found the door wide open and his gear missing, his first reaction was shock.
“It’s kind of just panic at that point. I’m thinking of the story of how I got the guitar, how much I’ve gone through with the guitar, how I’ve got it set up perfectly for me, and more practically how I’m going on tour in a week.”
As the gravity of the situation set in, he began to realize what he would need to do to pull this tour off. Not only would he have to replace his guitar, but months worth of planning and logistics were also stolen with his laptop – budgets, schedules, marketing materials, not to mention the digital audio files of the new EP. Finally, he realized there was only one solution: he had to get his stuff back.
He jumped in his van and began patrolling the icy streets of Winnipeg’s West End. Living in the neighbourhood gave him a sense of where he might find clues about criminal activity, and this led him to a man and a woman pushing a garbage cart toward a four-storey inner city apartment building. “Hey, I just had a ton of stuff stolen from my van, my guitar, my laptop, my backpack, do you have any idea where it might be?”
“Ah it’s a tough neighbourhood, a lot of criminal activity goes on here.” They played coy, evading his question, but Noah wasn’t going to be turned away that easily. He followed them into the building – and was transported into a different reality. The place was in rough shape, the halls were filled with people running in and out, shouting at each other, tenants arguing with security. He realized he was seeing a way of life that was totally outside of his experience.
Noah began canvassing the building for information until he met a man who said “If you bring a thousand dollars cash and me meet here at four a.m., I’ll have your stuff.” Noah was not enthusiastic about this plan, and asked the man why he was so confident. “Because I know who took it.”
“Oh? Who took it?” The man pointed up the stairs and identified a woman as Simone. She was wearing the backpack containing the stolen laptop and a woman with her was carrying a suitcase which still had a baggage tag with the name Noah Derksen printed on it. It was at this point that he had to slow down; he knew he couldn’t let Simone pass him down the stairs, but he also knew there was nothing to be gained from being confrontational and aggressive. Instead of getting angry, Noah took an empathic approach.
“Although they did steal my stuff and that’s wrong and inconvenient and does a disservice to me, I have to recognize that their reality is very different from mine. They have a different support structure and they’re just doing what they have to do to get by.”
Careful to toe the line between being non-violent while also making it clear that he wasn’t going to let Simone walk right through him, he refused to move from the staircase until she threw the backpack to the ground. With the help several others in the building, he was able to retrace Simone’s steps and find the people who had bought his guitar and, with a combination of persistence and understanding, convince them to give it back as well.
Still short a harmonica set, the next morning Noah scoured the neighbourhood pawnshops. He didn’t find the harmonicas, but he did find video footage of someone trying to sell the set – and recognized him as Richie, one of the helpful tenants from the night before. Returning to the building, he tracked down Richie who was happy to return the harmonicas and also had a pair of shoes Noah hadn’t realized were missing as well as a stack of out of date business cards which were getting passed around the building.
“As I’m walking out the door a group of people come in the apartment building with a new load of groceries. Somebody offered me a store-bought cookie and as I accept it, he looks at me and says ‘Oh you’re the musician, you’re the guy from the card with the ponytail and looking off to the side; very handsome!’ And then I left. So I’m famous in this one apartment building in Winnipeg.”
Noah Derksen plays a Stonebridge D33SR and a Stonebridge DS40CM. You can find him performing around Ontario this March (see full show details at www.noahderksen.com):
