A little over a month ago, I got a Facebook message from Shamus Hannah – a young singer-songwriter from Cobourg ON whom I'd met at the OCFF Conference and the Shelter Valley Folk Festival a couple of years back. He told me he'd just written a song that he really wanted to record on the Six String Nation guitar and would that be possible?
Well hey, for me the whole idea here is for people to feel exactly the kind of attachment Shamus was talking about so sure I'd love to make it available. The question was when and where and the fact that I don't have a car so I've got some expenses to incur and I'm already deep in the hole so....
Well then the stars just seemed to align. I had a meeting coming up in Ottawa and wanted to spend some time with friends the weekend before and since I'd have a rental car for that weekend anyway, this would be the right weekend to do it. And then I said, Look, Shamus, if you've got me and the guitar there anyway, why not try to set up some public event on the Friday night and Shamus did just that. He pulled together a fundraiser for a local home for teen moms and got the wonderful David Newland to come and do an opening set. It was a nice cozy night at the Meet @ 66 King Cafe in downtown Cobourg that raised about $800 for the charity – plus I shared my visual presentation with the folks and got lots of questions and interest. An evening well spent.
This morning we've come out to Jacob Hamayda's new studio in Baltimore to lay down the guitar tracks for Shamus' new song "Canadian Dream" (which I'm thinking Shamus may have to tweek the title on to avoid confusion witht the Sam Roberts song). Jake's studio is in an old slaughter-house he's much of the way through converting into a comfortable, spacious studio in an idyllic setting by the river. It occurred to me that – except for the CBC sessions the guitar has been part of with Madagascar Slim and Don Ross and the TV appearances – this is the first recording session for Voyageur and the very first in a dedicated recording studio. I'm sitting in the control room while Shamus runs through the song and Jacob does his thing. He's a talented young engineer/producer and he's got the guitar sounding warm and ringing running into Logic. I'll do a little interview with the two of them after the session and post it as a podcast.
Special thanks to Shamus, Jacob and Leslie Benson, whose marvelous Folklore B&B we stayed in last night – me, Sarah, Voyageur and Leslie's three cats.
Posted at 2:47 PM