The opening track from Marvelville. Soon after we locked down here in Ottawa (in the spring of 2020) the gigs dried up and boredom was setting in, and we needed a project to pass time. So I asked everyone involved in the tune to grab their phone and lip or finger sync their parts to video. Then we sent our files to Dave at studioNINE and by the summer we had a nice little song vid to share.
Starring the indefatigable Michael Curtis Hanna
I wrote this song in the summer of 2020. Recorded the song in the winter of 2021 and produced the video late summer/early fall. Many of the usual suspects participated with one notable addition – my old bandmate, bassist, actor, race car driver and raconteur Richard Nash, who plays the Pharaoh in the video. And Peter Beaudoin does a disturbingly great job as He-Who-Shall-Remain-Nameless.
A socio-political dissertation on crazy women through time, featuring a New Orleans brass band, sexy cave women, a beautiful burlesque dancer, and a man in a nun suit, with a cameo appearance by Amelia Earhart. Narrated by the Ol’ Professor.
In February and March 2010 I was privileged to be a part of the “Task Force Afghanistan Show Tour”. I played guitar in the band that accompanied the headline acts. We played evening shows in Kandahar and Kabul and spent a part of each day touring the bases and mingling with the troops, Canadian and otherwise. At the Kandahar Airfield the members of the show troupe were split into 4 groups, each group being assigned a military chaperone who drove us around the base. One of the more poignant moments of the tour [and there were many] occurred when the driver of my group spoke briefly about a “ramp ceremony”, performed for a good friend killed in action, before his casket was loaded on a cargo plane to be repatriated. That story inspired this song.