How Was Everyone’s Summer?

Last Updated on: 15th September 2019, 05:34 pm

Serious question. How in the hell is it Seppa-tebby-tebby already? No, scratch that. How are we already half way through it? I’ve learned especially in the last few years that what older people have always said to me about each year going faster than the last is true. 2019 is absolutely the fastest one yet. It doesn’t even feel like it’s really gotten started and yet here we somehow are, three months from the end of it.

Hopefully you all got to enjoy your summer, quickly as it may have gone. We certainly tried to get the most out of ours.

Here’s a crazy stat. In the entire month of August, there were only two days that belonged completely to us. Anything that wasn’t a work day involved us either being somewhere or someone being here. June and July were only slightly less insane. And we didn’t even see everyone we would have liked to! But it was good to catch up with some people we don’t see often and everything was fun aside from that one funeral, so I won’t complain.

I won’t run through everything we did (even I don’t care enough about me to want to read that), but here are some highlights so that I’ll be able to remember them later.

We went to a few good shows, but that’s not really out of the ordinary for us. We go to lots of stuff, so much that I hardly ever write about it anymore. The out of the ordinary part is that we got to see this much good music in the summer. I find things tend to slow down a bit this time of year, so this was kind of cool.

• First up was a show called Songs and stories. It was an all acoustic show that featured Art Alexakis from Everclear, Chris Collingwood from Fountains of Wayne, Max Collins from Eve 6 and John Wozniak the Marcy Playground guy. It ruled. I liked all of those bands growing up (especially Marcy and Fountains) and it was neat to see and hear them in a different environment than normal. Each guy did a set of his own songs mixed in with all of them playing covers together all topped off by a Q and A at the end where each ended up playing even more songs. My major takeaway is that I could listen to Woz play all night long and I hope I get the chance to do that one day.
• Lowest of the Low was a good show screwed up by bad sound. Not sure what was going on, but when it’s hard to understand the words to songs you know by heart, something ain’t right. Still glad I went, though. For a while there they were kind of like the Barenaked Ladies used to be.
• A collection of random blues dudes at a bar in Kingston because our friend Barb is a friend of one of them and got invited to sing a few songs. It was free, but they were definitely good enough that I’d have paid for it if asked. They had a guest sitting in playing a Hammond B3 organ (or a ham and beef organ if you’re Carin), so that was extra nice. I love that sound.
• Kim Mitchell outside at Victoria Park. I hadn’t seen him before. Don’t ask me how. It was definitely worth the wait, and a good reminder that I need to try to be around for Bluesfest more often because it’s fun.
• 54-40. Another band I somehow hadn’t seen before now. Hell of a show. They’re one of those bands where you go in knowing that you know like 100 songs, and then come out realizing that it’s actually closer to 115.

I was even involved in a concert of my own at the start of August.

One of the coolest things we did was go busking while we were in Kingston. The aforementioned Barb has her busking permit and decided that the four of us (her, her boyfriend, Carin and I) were going to go out and sing during a street festival. It was awesome. The two of us have played music together a few times, but never like this. It was so much fun and I wish there were recordings. I often don’t like the sound of my own voice even though everyone else seems to, but even I was impressed. The public must have been too since we made a couple hundred bucks in about three hours and got asked a few times if we had studio recordings people could check out. Would love to do that again sometime.

Another major highlight of the season is that at long last, after a big round of system maintenance in July, the frigging website finally works properly again! Thank the sweet baby Jesus! The problems ended up being out of my hands like I suspected, but that hadn’t stopped me from trying absolutely everything I could think of to make things better. So if you happen to know anyone who stopped coming here because of all the damn errors and general wonkiness, let them know it should be safe to come back. Beg them to, if you must. I’m sick of looking at some of these sad ass hit counts.

If I have more to say I’ve forgotten it, so I’m going to go for now. Enjoy whatever might be left of the summer-like days. You’ll miss them when they’re gone.