Day Of The Pig / Night Of The Toucan

The numbers have yet to come in, but by the turnout on Saturday, it looks one of the best years yet for Homegrown Live. Great to see! Good job Kingston!

I dare say that the Foley Mountain Playboys made our share of new fans on Saturday night at the Royal Tavern. We pumped out  a 2 hour set and the crowd was begging for more. Yeehaw! It was a great way to celebrate one year together as a band.

And the cool gigs keep on coming for the FMP. In fact, on Saturday May 17th, you have not one, but two great opportunities to check out the band. In the afternoon, we are playing at Seed-To-Sausage for their Day Of The Pig celebration with Kyra & Tully and The Huaraches.

Beer. Sausage. Music. Sun. Fun!!

Then, in the evening the Foley Mountain Playboys are heading back to Kingston to lay down our country music jams at the Toucan. Sharing the bill with us is our good friend from Winnipeg, JD Edwards, who is touring with another talented singer-songwriter, Faye Blais.

That's a full day of music right there Folks! Hope to see you out !

Best Of The Song A Week Challenge #4 : Good Friends, Good Times, Good Music

I couldn't have made it through to the end of this challenge without the interest and support of my friends and fans. Knowing that folks were keeping track of this thing certainly motivated me to keep going. This all started with my buddy Ross Neilsen and I joking around about the idea on Facebook. We had never met in person up to that point. We just helped each other out with information about venues, helped set up gigs, etc. When Ross did a show here in Kingston at the RCHA, you know we just had to get a song down for this challenge :





Ross was doing the challenge as well, but only made it to week #15. Still, he got some great tunes out of it, and a couple ended up on his latest record. I'm sure he would say it was a worthwhile creative exercise. You can pick up a copy of his latest record HERE.



Another opportunity that arose from this challenge, prompted mostly by the necessity to continually come up with new material, was co-writing. Tony Silvestri, Geoff Chown, and myself were sitting around, before or after practice one day(can't remember which), and I turned to Tony and said,'I need a song for this week, like today. Let's write one.' So we did just that. I'm still not sure I know how to play this one on guitar. Tony took care of the music. We need to get a studio quality recording of this song(sound quality on this video is pretty rough). It's gonna be a hit, I tell ya!




While TST was on tour out west last fall, we stopped in and visited with our good friend, singer/songwriter JD Edwards, at his home in Winnipeg, MB. As always when we are in Winnipeg, we had an awesome time out on the town, and ended jamming at a local pub by the end of the night. But to start off, we sat around in JD's living room and wrote this tune. Warning: this can be an earworm.

This recording says it all for me, about the experience of doing the song a week challenge, and being creative for creativity's sake, and nothing else. Good friends. Good times. Good music. If you've got that, you're doing alright.