People have been asking me for a long time why I don’t have an album out. Or a couple of albums. Or, say, eight or nine albums. It’s a really good question, since I’ve been producing other people’s projects for 15 years and constantly writing my own songs, performing them… even recording them. Man, if I had a dollar for every time someone asked me “Is that song recorded?”…

Well, it recently dawned on me that I could have a dollar for every song I record, and that I’d rather make my living with a guitar in my hand, telling my own story instead of someone else’s, traveling with my family instead of sitting in a studio all day (and all night). The last time I saw Carlos Santana, we had just performed together and he said, “when are you going to stop hiding behind guys like me?” (How’s that for an Artist’s Way moment?) Anyway, as usual, the man had a point.

I’ve been working on my own project, on and off for about four years. It started out as a basement experiment in a little backhouse we rented on the outskirts of Los Angeles, continued throughout our year in Mexico and really picked up during the dark, rainy winter on Vancouver Island. I started finding sounds and lyric ideas unlike any I’d created before, and for the first time I felt like my music felt like more than the sum of its influences… I could hear the Saskatchewan prairie boy in there, as well as the multicultural West Coast experience that was my life for a decade. It felt like the truth was coming out.

Actually, LA figures highly in the theme of this record… at least leaving LA. I had reached a point in my life where the noise of the music industry was louder than the music in my head. It was time to get out of that environment for awhile and be around something completely different, be unaware of the Billboard 200 and who was hired and fired at which record company. I found a lot of things to love about that city, and spent a lot of time unearthing every shred of authenticity I could find there, but it was time to move on.

That word: authenticity. The search for it is pretty much the subject of the whole album. All the songs are in some way about getting out of a haze of ideas that come from who-knows-where, and finding that authentic core that feels like home… even if in my case ‘home’ meant not having a home for awhile.

So to answer people’s question: why no album all these years? Honestly, there was no album because I found creative ways not to do one for a long, long time (more on that later). And now there’s an album. All the support from loved ones and colleagues, and from myself, is paying off. I’ll keep posting as it gets closer to release… right now I’m doing a few extra guitars and getting ready for the final mix. Shouldn’t be long… hold me to it!

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