Back in 2007, I wrote a song that I called, "When I Grow Old." I was just digging through some old digital folders while updating my website, and I discovered several photos from that time. So I decided to do a blog post here, based on things that I had written at the time, to save everything for posterity. I'll cut & paste most of this, as it was written in the context of 2008 ...
-----
People who visit my website because of my DJ’ing activities probably
assume that I focus almost entirely on “dance music,” or
progressive/tribal house EDM, for those who pay close attention to the
particular genre that I specialize in. However, I have a fairly broad
background in music (as my regular blog readers must realize).
Last
year, I wrote a track which I thought was pretty catchy. I'd
categorize it as "indie soft rock." I recorded a rough copy of the song
one Saturday evening before work at the Pub, and sent the recording to Mike Allison to listen to. A day later, Mike emailed me back to say that he really
liked the song, and had recorded a rough version himself. As soon as I
heard it, I decided that I would try to release the song professionally.
What
with all my other jobs and projects, it took a while for everything to
come together, but over the next eight or ten months, I finally got the
project moving forward quickly. We recorded the song partly in New
Brunswick, in my own studio, and partly in Vancouver at Fadermaster Studios, with Shawn Cole as a recording and mastering engineer. Mike did the lead and
backup vocals, and the acoustic guitar and bass. I played the drums,
keyboards, electric guitar, and the shaker in our new version.
I also enlisted the assistance of Deanna Musgrave
to help me put a video together. We did some filming last spring, and
more filming this past fall. Deanna has a lot of practice at putting
videos together, and has a really interesting abstract style for some of
her work which contrasts with the usual style that I’ve
used in the past to put a lot of videos together. Deanna put together
the first version of the video for me, and then added some additional
footage with the help of Julien Strasfield as a technical guru in Final Cut (since I’m used to Adobe Premium on a PC).
Learning from Deanna was a really educational experience for me.
It’s
interesting that this project has turned into a “Mount Allison
University Community” project. Mike is an alumnus at MTA. Shawn used
to be my roommate while we were at university, and he worked at the
campus Pub with me as the Student Manager (his mom, Filis, still works
at the university too). Deanna is an alumnus. Julien is still a
student, although he graduates this year. Ian Allen, another employee
at both the University and the campus Pub, did the graphic design work
for the CD, and helped with marketing. When we needed extra actors for
the video, we recruited Dinao (a friend of mine who worked with me as a
bartender last year) to act as Mike's supposed girlfriend. For the
older version of Mike & Dinao in the future, we were lucky to have
the assistance of Robert Campbell (MTA’s President) and his wife Christl
(a professor at MTA) as characters. In fact, the only two people
involved in the entire project who are not members of the MTA university
community are the two kids in the video – Evan (my nephew) and Mira
(Evan’s friend). I needed them to be in the "flashback" footage of Mike and
Dinao when they were allegedly still young. Maybe someday one or both of them will
decide that they want to come to Mount Allison.
Here’s the video, for those who want to watch it:
We
also put together a full CD with this song as the first track on the
CD, and I included eight of my favourite other Mike Allison tracks.
Some of the other songs have been released on his various albums before,
and some were not. The CD is called “Tilting At Windmills."
You may be curious about the name for the CD. “Tilting At Windmills” is a phrase from Don Quixote,
by Miguel de Cervantes. Basically, "tilting" was another word for
jousting (by knights) in Medieval times, and in the book, our hero
thought that a windmill was actually a giant, and so he wanted to attack
it by jousting. Essentially then, “tilting at windmills” has come to
mean “fighting a futile fight” or “fighting against imaginary enemies,”
or variations on the same theme. I suppose that you could infer that
since this song (and CD) are being marketed purely through guerrilla or
viral marketing approaches, rather than conventional musical channels,
we are “fighting the musical establishment.” However, we’re just doing
this for fun, so the “musical establishment” is not really an enemy. Don Quixote is the best-selling work of fiction of
all time (for non-political, non-religious works), so hopefully some of
that charm rubs off and makes the CD popular too.
Here are the lyrics to the song, written by Jonathan Clark on February 22nd, 2007:
Here are some photos that I found from when we were working on this project:
