Over on Straight.com I have been recommending music-related movies to stream at home in this time when live music isn’t happening.
Click here for Part 1.
Click here for Part 2.
-
-
Have I interviewed you? Did you enjoy the experience? Would you like to endorse my skills with a short testimonial?
I’m in the early planning stages of a new project. Stay tuned for details…
-
A belated Happy New Year! And yes, I realize everything I do with this blog is belated. Nonetheless, this is actually new news! Well, newish. The debut EP by my band, the Starling Effect, came out last year, but it took us a while to get it everywhere. And by “everywhere”, I mean Spotify, iTunes, et cetera. Hell, it’s even on Napster! Which is apparently still a thing! Who knew?
Click here to stream the songs from the service of your choice.
Oh, and we have a non-EP track coming out as well. The Starling Effect’s version of “Old Man Kensey” was originally released as part of a tribute compilation put together by The Blog That Celebrates Itself. We are re-releasing it as a single, and although it isn’t out yet, you can click here to get notified when it becomes available.
If you live in Vancouver (or plan to be here in early February), please consider coming to see the Starling Effect play at the Roxy. It will mean a lot to us, and this will probably be a really good show to catch us at, because it will be the first time we’ve ever played at a venue where everything is properly miked and mixed.
Click the image above to purchase advance tickets. Here’s a clip from our last show, which was at the Princeton, a venue that doesn’t mike anything but the vocals and that, in fact, doesn’t even have a sound person at all. And you can tell! The sound isn’t great, but the spirit is there. (Although the sound of my guitar, sadly, is not.)
That video was captured by Allan MacInnis, of the peerless Alienated in Vancouver blog, who also wrote this very nice piece about us for the Georgia Straight.
-
Want to hire me? Check out my ad on Craigslist.
-
Oops, I keep forgetting to post stuff here. But this one is pretty important to me, since I haven’t released any new music in a long time. My band the Starling Effect has just put out a self-titled EP, and you can check it out below:
-
I recently interviewed Erwan Larher, French novelist and author of The Book I Didn’t Want to Write, a literary account of surviving the 2015 terrorist attack at the Bataclan theatre.
Here’s some of what he had to say about his inspiration for writing the book:
It’s a huge question, how three French people—because they are not coming from another planet, they were just French; they could have been my neighbours or my colleagues at work—decide to commit suicide, killing 90 people. That’s a huge question; I think that questions a lot of values, a lot of things about the way we live together. So that’s how it began, when I made the switch between a personal drama and the collective drama.
Read the rest at Straight.com.
-
I have written a short fantasy novel aimed at an audience aged 9 to 12. I am just about finished polishing the second draft. I really want to get this thing published, but I don’t know much about book publishing. If someone could point me in the direction of an agent who deals with kids’ books, I would appreciate it. Any other advice is also welcomed.
-
I occasionally post photos I have taken on Instagram, and you can follow me right here.
For a taste of what to expect, visit my Photography page.
-
I was recently turned onto this impressive band by a friend. I’m a sucker for soaring tunes with elements of postrock and shoegaze, and this one definitely delivers.
Also, hey! My first post of 2016. What can I say, I’ve been busy.
John Lucas 