Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel)

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My time with my daughter is the most precious thing I have in the whole world.

I made the very right decision to divorce her mother almost exactly three years ago – June 1st, 2013.  The time since has been extremely amicable and we actually get along better now than we did in the time leading up to the divorce, largely because we both remain focused on doing whatever is best for our little girl.

Those strangers who enter into your lives while you go through the process of divorce – lawyers, clerks, bankers – have all commented on our particular divorce in a favourable way.  Even our mechanic, who we both continue to use, can’t help but comment whenever he sees me how happy he is that we both seem to have found happiness apart from each other and actually tells me how he tells other people about us and our story and how a divorce can actually work out.  It’s all very humbling to hear and it makes me feel good that our efforts are noticed; while we may sometimes find frustration, we are quick to regroup and get back on track and provide the best example for our daughter that we can.

Our custody schedule is a 2-3-2 schedule, meaning that’s how many nights we have her in a row before the other has her, and it has been working well.  It means that each week I have her for different nights in the week, allowing for alternating weekends and for us both to participate and bring her to swimming lessons or gymnastics classes on alternating weeks.

In my line of work I travel a lot and so the 2-3-2 has been out of whack in recent weeks, with me either being out of town for slightly longer stretches or being in town and having my daughter for slightly longer stretches.  As any parent can attest, especially a single parent… man, sometimes we just need a break.  As much as we love spending time with our kids, putting them down early one night can just be a god-send.  I’m lucky in that I have breaks like this built into my custody schedule and, as much as I miss her when I don’t have her, it is nice to have that adult time to regroup and get some sanity back before another stretch of being the single parent.  It’s been a balancing act the last three years but one I think I’ve come to have a solid amount of control over.

There is a lot of pressure on both parent and child when you only see you child half the time.  The parent wants to make sure that their time with their child is perfect.  This doesn’t mean showering with gifts or letting them have their own way – believe me, there are fairly strict rules and consequences in my house – but you work hard to try and build your own consistency in the half of their life that you have control over.  This is how meals go… chores and expectations are this… this is the reward for that and that is the punishment for this… a consistency meant to help ensure that we don’t waste any of the time we have together squabbling or having to deal with the shitty part of being a parent – the tantrum.

And for the most part we do okay.

And then there are nights like tonight.

This weekend I had a fantastic weekend with my daughter – we did crafts yesterday morning, had a friend’s birthday party yesterday, she went for a bike ride to the playground last night, this afternoon we had a brilliant and sunny walk through a local street festival filled with lots of treats followed by a two hour nap followed by another party at a friend’s house.  A busy weekend and when we both got home today we were tired and when given the choice of more crafts or some TV, I allowed for some screen time – something she is not allowed Monday to Thursday and is reserved as a weekend treat.

Well when it was time to shut the TV off we hit MELTDOWN city.  Full on stomping, crossed arms, FUMING mad and then when the STERN voice came out, full on tears, non-stop, for close to half an hour.

I am big on apologies and I don’t rush them, but they need to happen and tonight that took a while.  And when it finally came we were able to move forward with the calming down process in the evening.

During the meltdown I made a simple threat of punishment that I didn’t realize would have the impact that it did.  In frustration I told her she was going to go straight to bed, no lullabies.

That set her off even more.

My daughter is going to be six in just a couple of months and while tonight it led to tears, I’m happy at how important the consistency of our routine and the sanctity that is our time together, at the end of each day when I sing anywhere from one to five lullabies (depending on how good her negotiating skills are in the moment), is to her.

After she apologized – the most sincere and heartfelt thing you’ve ever seen – I caved and we snuggled and I sang her the lullabye I’ve been singing to her since she was a newborn, rocking her to sleep in the crook of my arm.  It’s one of her favourites and it’s one that I wrote for her… it’s a simple, haunting tune that can be repeated for as long as it takes her to fall asleep.

The music notes to the lullabye will be tattooed on me at some point; I’ve finally decided on something important enough that I would have on me for the rest of my life, and after an evening full of tears and grief, that simple lullabye centred us both, relaxed us both and it let her drift off into a happy sleep where she knows she is loved and cared for.

* * * * *

As evidence by the extremely long lead-in to this post, I’m still working through how to do this parent thing part-time, and sometimes these moments hit me harder than others.

My time with my daughter is the most precious thing I have in the whole world and I want her time with me to be remembered as happy times filled with music, laughter and love.

Our bedtimes are important to me and sometimes, if she’s willing to play along, I record these Bedtime Interviews that I share on my Facebook.  Here’s one from last December to sort of show what the last minutes of our days are like…

When we are not interviewing, we read stories and we sing lullabies and one of the lullabies that I have butchered in the past with my daughter is “Goodnight My Angel” by Billy Joel.  It’s a beautiful song that I have only half-remembered the lyrics to and have tried to sing to my daughter on occasion.  As one of the goals of this website is to help me discover new things about the music that has made up my life until now, I thought I’d do a bit of research around the song.

There isn’t much to tell that I didn’t already know; this is a song that Billy Joel wrote for his young daughter and was originally intended to be a prelude to the title track on “River Of Dreams“, his final album, but revisiting the lyrics of this song tonight has resonated with me more deeply than upon any other listening.

Have a listen to this hauntingly beautiful tune…

One thing I didn’t know was that this song was turned a book.  I’ll be picking this up soon…

I’m going to learn these lyrics properly and work them into our bedtime lullabies often enough so that we get to the point where she can whisper along to my singing.

I want my daughter to know that, no matter what happens to her in life, her daddy will always be there at the end of the day and if he’s not physically there, he will always be in her heart.

I want my daughter to know that, above anything else in this world, I am working SO hard to give her the most magical life I can.

My time with my daughter is the most precious thing I have in the whole world and I want her to finish more of her days thinking these thoughts and dreaming happy dreams knowing how important she is to me and how much she is loved.

Goodnight my angel, time to close your eyes
And save these questions for another day
I think I know what you’ve been asking me
I think you know what I’ve been trying to say
I promised I would never leave you
Then you should always know
Wherever you may go, no matter where you are
I never will be far away

Goodnight my angel, now it’s time to sleep
And still so many things I want to say
Remember all the songs you sang for me
When we went sailing on an emerald bay
And like a boat out on the ocean
I’m rocking you to sleep
The water’s dark and deep, inside this ancient heart
You’ll always be a part of me

Goodnight my angel, now it’s time to dream
And dream how wonderful your life will be
Someday your child may cry, and if you sing this lullaby
Then in your heart there will always be a part of me
Someday we’ll all be gone
But lullabies go on and on
They never die
That’s how you and I will be

Concert of the summer so far…

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Florence Welch has one hell of a voice.

I would have paid the ticket price just to see openers Of Monsters and Men but to be followed by one of the most powerful voices in music today… it was just one hell of a show and what I would consider the concert of the summer so far.

Florence sang powerfully and spoke softly, promoting love, kindness and togetherness in a spin that made most of her doe-eyed, leaf-crowned and hempified fans coo and adore her even more as they embraced each other on the lawns of the Amphitheatre.  Part rock concert, part love-in, this was a show incomparable to any other in recent memory and I loved every minute of it.

It’s a powerful thing when a show can confuse you so much about which time and era you are in that you are left only to embrace the present.

It seems my opinion is shared.

A short post tonight, with a few clips from the show below.  Worthy of many more words than this when the time to do so permits

 

 

Further Reading – Rolling Stone

In which Florence opens up and shares the inspiration, and liberation, that led to her fantastic success.

Finding Emo

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They say you can’t go home again.

I’ve never been one to listen much to them.

Living in the Annex now gives me a chance to be stumbling distance from so many of the bars and clubs that held my weekends together throughout high school and university.  One such place is Sneaky Dee’s.  And this being a music blog, we’re not talking about downstairs Sneaky Dee’s, in all its nacho glory, but upstairs Sneaky Dee’s.  You know the place.  You’ve been there.  Every city has a Sneaky Dee’s.  It’s where your friend’s band played, LOUDLY, and the beer was super cheap and afterwards, outside, your friend came up to you and asked you how you enjoyed the show and you looked at your watch and replied with the time because the combination of the ringing in your ears and the alcohol in your eyes was confusing you and then you threw up on the sidewalk and only half noticed that you threw up on top of someone else’s throw up, adding to the mosaic on the street, and the next morning the first thought you had when you opened your eyes was that you knew exactly what time you puked.

You’ve been there.  Sneaky Dee’s.

One Friday night last month I had a friend coming in from out of town and we hadn’t been to Sneaky Dee’s in years.  It was a Friday night and apparently on Friday Nights Sneaky Dee’s is home to night called Homesick which is billed as an “emo night”.  This particular Friday night was going to be a special show as there was another… um… emo crew?… called Emo Night Brooklyn who were coming all the way from… yep, Brooklyn.

Two emo crews, one stage.  We couldn’t believe our luck.

Well, more accurately, we poured countless pints of the newly tapped keg down our throats, invited another friend along with my girlfriend, and set to work figuring out exactly what was in store for us.

Now, I’m not good with labels, and emo to me conjured up kids in heavy make up who cut themselves just so they can feel something.  It’s a standard emo joke, I know, but one that seems to fit so well I can’t resist using it as a descriptor.

After some drunken googling and youtubing, we stumbled upon a bit of a setlist from previous shows and the bands on there were surprising to me.  Blink 182, Taking Back Sunday, Something Corporate, 30 Seconds To Mars, My Chemical Romance… now, to me, I would never really have registered those bands as emo.  Emo in my mind was something a bit sadder, that slow wah-nah-nah music that you kind of lurch alone to on the dance floor like those half-zombie people I accidentally ran into that one weird night at the Dance Cave in 1997 (an establishment also now within stumbling distance from the new place, I might add).

I would have called all these bands pop-punk or, if I wanted to get even less cool, mall-punk.

But apparently they were emo.  And apparently I like emo, and not-so-secretly either as these bands have popped up routinely in my playlists over the years.

So we figure there is a DJ of sorts playing this music and this Brooklyn crew sounds interesting (based solely on the fact that I spent New Years in Brooklyn this year and LOVED it) and, at the very least we know it will be loud and the beer will be cheap.

We were not prepared for the kind of show this was.  Not at all prepared.

Inside the bar for five minutes and already each of us was double fisting the $3.50 beers and worrying we had made a big mistake.  The crowd was younger than us, on average, by at least a decade and on stage there are no fewer than ten guys all standing in line behind a table that had two laptops on it.  Their girlfriends were standing on the stage too, off to the side, but very visible, and they were all just kind of… hanging out.  This is Homesick meets Emo Night Brooklyn.

The music IS loud, the beer IS cheap but there is no DJ.  There are no performers.  There are no musicians.

I kid you not, the ENTIRE show consisted of seven of these guys taking turns hitting a button on the laptop to play the next song while the other three jumped around the front of the stage in a coked-up panic BEGGING, PLEADING, FORCING the crowd to sing along.

“Wow… Blink 182!  You guys know this one.  SING IT!”

“Come on guys, who LOVES this song!  You know the chorus.  SING WITH US!”

I could go on, but you get the idea.  And I’m not even exaggerating… that was the entire show.  No talent whatsoever, just a group of guys bludgeoning the crowd with their screaming lyrics, pleading eyes, pumping fists and bouncing bodies.

This is apparently a thing.  A show that hinges solely on preying on your nostalgia and fills the room with happy, catchy pop-punk emo lyrics that everyone knows and loves.

I have mentioned this a few times (foreshadowing!) but the beer is CHEAP and here’s where the story turns unexpectedly on us.

We start to SING.  While many songs are unknown to us, there start to be some real classics.  We start to dance.  We start to bounce.

When the jacked up cokies – a term that sounds much cuter and nicer than cokehead, no? and fits better with the “we’re all friends” atmosphere of the night – do a call and response, we RESPOND.

And, we MOSHED.  For real.  I was in a mosh pit with my girlfriend.

I am 38 years old.

At one point, towards the end of the night, we actually made our way onto the stage itself and were dancing right next to friggin’ EMO NIGHT BROOKLYN themselves.

I don’t know what happened… I don’t know at which beer we decided to just give into the idiocy of the show, but dammit we had a good time.  When we were deciding to leave it was a bit of “suddenly realizing how embarrassed we should be feeling” mixed with a pinch of “Awww, do we have to go?”  I’ve never been to another show quite like it.

So there you have it – emo night.  You will need to be drinking, but if you can get yourself just past the point of caring how ridiculously untalented the organizers are, you’ll have a great time.

Sneaky Dee’s – Homesick Emo Night – Every Friday Night

emo night

* * * * *

Song of the night for me – Taking Back Sunday – Make Damn Sure
I may have lost my voice a bit to this song…

The point in the night we felt the oldest when hardly anyone else danced or sang…
Wheatus – Teenage Dirtbag

And the hungover rehashing the next day…
that led us to deciding our Halloween costumes this year, not realizing that the Internet, being so damn good at everything, had already thought them up…

finding emo      tickle me emo

Pearl Jam

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A friend of mine has seen Pearl Jam 20 times in concert.  On one of those occasions it was the second last night of their tour.  Eddie Vedder told the crowd that night, “You might think tomorrow night, being our last show on the tour, is the craziest show on the tour.  Well what you don’t know is, when it’s the last show we all just want to go home, which means TONIGHT is about to be the craziest show on the tour.”

This only heightened my anticipation for the May 10th show at the ACC, the second last night of their current tour celebrating 25 years since “Ten” was released.

Why would one see Pearl Jam 20 times?  It was not something I would have ever thought of doing with any band, honestly… until I started to learn more about how each show is a uniquely crafted experience completely designed to please both the casual fan as well as reward the most faithful Ved-heads.

I think I just made that term up… it fits.

My Ved-head buddy is texting me through the whole show.  He has already seen them on this tour in Quebec City and Ottawa and has tickets to both Toronto shows.

vedhead1

vedhead2

vedhead3

I had only heard some of the songs off of Binaural before and so the fact that they were playing the album start to finish was lost on me at first.  As I got the text third song in informing me of this, when Eddie drew a parallel to what was happening with the fires raging in For McMurray, my appreciation for how the band crafts a show grew tenfold, and then even moreso after reading how it was their third full album performance on the tour.  Not to mention some of the best banter and audience interaction I’ve ever seen in a show.

From the fires in Alberta (and the promise that money from the tour was going to help those affected) to political jabs at Donald Trump to just guzzling down bottles of wine and encouraging front row superfans to sing into the mic, it was one hell of a show.

And for those of us aching for the classics and the covers, well, we had our fill in an amazing 33 song set.

SET LIST

  • Go
  • Do the Evolution
  • Mind Your Manners
  • Breakerfall (Binaural begins)
  • Gods’ Dice
  • Evacuation
  • Light Years
  • Nothing as It Seems
  • Thin Air
  • Insignificance
  • Of the Girl
  • Grievance
  • Rival
  • Sleight of Hand
  • Soon Forget
  • Parting Ways (Binaural ends)
  • Corduroy
  • Once
  • Rearviewmirror

ENCORE:

  • Imagine (John Lennon cover)
  • Let Me Sleep
  • Comfortably Numb (Pink Floyd cover)
  • Even Flow
  • Down
  • Better Man
  • Porch

SECOND ENCORE:

  • Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town
  • Given to Fly
  • State of Love and Trust
  • Black
  • Alive
  • The Real Me (The Who cover)
  • Keep On Rockin’ In The Free Word (Neil Young Cover)

My Top Five Moments In The Show:

5.  Elderly Woman… played facing everyone who was sitting behind the stage.

4.  The insane, insane, insane, insane guitar during Even Flow.

3.  Soon Forget – a song that was new to me and an instant favourite.

2.  Closing the show at the three hour mark with the house lights up and everyone wondering if we were ever going to be released from the band’s magical hold during an amazing cover.

1.  This.

Pearl Jam Imagine

My first Pearl Jam show is now behind me and, while I’ll never catch up to my buddy at this point, I won’t miss another opportunity to see them live again.

Further Reading – This show in context of the entire tour.

10 Reasons Why Pearl Jam’s 2016 Tour Was Their Greatest Yet

Prince

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It’s been a week now since I heard the words “Prince died” while away on vacation.

I had been determined to stay off of social media and the internet while away and was doing a good job of it.  Reading books, swimming, drinking, relaxing… everything I needed to unplug from the world and recharge my batteries after a particularly gruelling last six weeks.

It was over beers when one of our group said it and there was a quiet that followed as we all took in what that meant.

For me, it wasn’t a question of what to say… I just didn’t have the words… any words.  You see, unlike a number of music blogs I read where everyone professes to have been the hugest Prince fan yet quick searches of their site reveal they have never written anything about him before, I’m just… not a fan.

Now, let me clarify, pretty much everything I have heard from Prince – and that is a lot more in the last seven days – I love, so I guess I am becoming a Prince fan.  I have just never made the effort to listen to him, to read up on him or to follow his random exploits until now.  Prince to me was an artist who I knew I’d respect if given the time, I just never gave the time.  Out of over 6500 songs in my iTunes library, there is only one Prince song – “Cream” – and that was likely off a compilation I burned off of CDs back when that was still a thing.

My first social media reaction was to post the link to that time on the Dave Chappelle show when Prince killed on the basketball court then made everyone pancakes.  I mean, this was pretty much the first thing that came to me as I tried to run my mind through any Prince connections I had in my life.  It’s a hilarious story and back when it first ran I thought it was just a sketch.  Only now am I realizing that it was based on a true story.  Hear it here from the man himself:

And then to read how Prince gets Chappelle back by putting his picture on the cover of the Breakfast Can Wait Single… honestly, he’s kind of the best.

From the Nextshark link above:

The Troll Prince

I have spent a good deal of time over the last week bringing myself up to speed on everything Prince and if ever there was a rabbit hole to dive into, man, this is it.  The more you dig, the weirder the stories get and this whole time I am kicking myself for how much I have been missing out on.  This whole post will reek of Johnny-Come-Lately if I share everything I’ve been reading (wait, he wrote “Manic Monday”???), and by now we’ve all seen the Jimmy Fallon and Questlove Prince Ping Pong story, but this other story by Questlove below I haven’t yet seen posted anywhere else.  To be fired as a DJ and replaced by the movie Finding Nemo… you just can’t make this stuff up.

Honestly, if I ever were to do anything worthwhile that helped me attain the notoriety of a Prince, I would love to pull the same kind of stunts, just for the joy of absolutely messing with people and having them afterwards, for the rest of their lives, thinking… did that really happen?

* * * * *

There is one other story worth sharing here…

Last August I went on a 60km trek across Iceland and saw some of the most beautiful landscape I have ever seen; it’s a trip I will remember for the rest of my life.

We arrived at our final campsite, many of us bruised and battered (I myself had done two thirds of the trek on a badly sprained ankle) but all of us in good spirits and just elated to have made it through the trek.  Being Canadian, we asked if we could have a campfire; this was something we hadn’t yet had due to the lack of trees and burnable wood along the route we had taken.

Our guides knew of a secret stash of wood at this final campsite and there, as the sun set and drew long shadows under Eyjafjallajökull herself, we made a campfire.

Iceland 1

The liquor flowed freely and we all started to sing and tell stories from the trip.  All we needed to make the picture complete was a guitar.

Fortunately, there were a group of Icelandic hikers staying at the campsite as well, and as campfires were such an anomaly, they eventually wandered over to us and we invited them to join us.  We were especially excited to see that one of them had a guitar.  The Iceland folks sang a couple of national songs but then quickly moved onto a slew of campfire classics that had everyone singing along – Brown Eyes Girl, American Pie etc.  We sang for some time before the guitar player keyed up one of the most unusual campfire tunes I’ve ever heard.

Purple Rain.

A song that everyone knows, even if they don’t know they know it.  We sang at the top of our lungs.

Iceland 2

It wasn’t until way later that night, after most people had gone to bed, that one of our guides told those of us still up that the guitar player was actually a member of Iceland’s Parliament.  That made us love the night even more.

So, in summary, that time we sang Purple Rain to an acoustic guitar played by an Icelandic MP at a campfire at the base of a volcano ranks as one of my top travel moments of all time.

And from everything I’ve learned in the last week, that’s a story I think Prince would have appreciated.