Pre-Game Briefing

There’s nothing worse than a late summer head cold, especially when you’ve got to start playing shows in a week. Everything’s muted in your head, it’s like casting notes into a giant sponge – just wonderful. Things are coming along though. I actually completely reworked ‘Pledge Of Allegiance’ for the acoustic yesterday and am quite fond of it, so that’s a plus. I’ve also been doing my damnedest to find away around ‘Weapon’, but it’s just not panning out. The transitions don’t sit well with me and the lack of growth isn’t appealing either. But at least I tried.

Given the fact that this tour is in support of a new album, it’s been tricky trying to balance new and old material. Given my back catalogue, the possibilities are obviously somewhat endless, and I want to make sure that I’m able to throw some fan favourites in the set every night as well, such as ‘The Fine Art Of Falling Apart’ and ‘Fated’, along with the usual songs that one expects to hear, such as ‘Apparitions’ and ‘Strange Days’. I’m also looking at starting some of the shows in a unique way by using the audio from, for example, ‘Girl Wedged Under The Front Of A Firebird’, and simply providing the vocal elements. While that’s the one I’ve been primarily focused on, I haven’t discounted trying the same thing with the ‘In A Coma’ version of ‘North American For Life’ either. Those two seem the best suited to the purpose to me, so we’ll see what happens.

There are actually quite a few songs that I prefer acoustically over the originals, such as ‘Ex Pats Of The Blue Mountain Symphony Orchestra’ and ‘Indestructible’, as well as some new variations on old songs, such as ‘Suburbia’, which I performed on the radio recently in Calgary.

As far as covers go, there are obviously the two off of the new record, though I’m not sure with what frequency I’ll be playing them given the amount of material I have, as well as Josh Ritter’s ‘Girl In The War’ and Simon And Garfunkel’s ‘Keep The Customer Satisfied’ off of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, which I wanted to learn for my father, as it’s one of his favourite songs.

Looking back at various set lists from the ’06 acoustic tour, they’re pretty regimented, and I doubt that that will be the case with the set lists this fall – especially in cities where I’m playing multiple nights. Given that on top of all of the material I was performing on that tour, and a few new reworked songs that I haven’t performed, there’s a whole new record on top of it to consider, so it should cause me routine headaches when I have to sit down and put lists together on show days. Of course, as things progress, you come to learn what’s working at the time and what isn’t, so that will obviously be a factor as well.

I’ve been doing a lot of press recently and have been asked on more than a few occasions who’s playing in my band on this tour – so hopefully everyone realizes that it’s just me and a guitar and, perhaps on occasion, some witty banter. That way you don’t show up wearing a beer helmet ready to jump up and down to ‘Hello Time Bomb’. Because even though beer helmets are a gas, you might look a little silly sitting in a theatre anxiously looking around wondering what the hell is going on.

Then again, if you did, I could probably go off about it for a good twenty minutes, so.