Last weekend I air miled my way out to Brandon, Manitoba for the Brandon Folk Festival - 3 days of amazing music, new friends, and some good adventures including kitten attacks, cruising in a car with no brakes, frisbee trash-talking, drunken bonfire jams, and a lot of people obsessed with jetpacks...

Check out my blog page for the whole story...

After a bizarre week (Wednesday: Engagement Part, Thursday: Wedding, Friday: Bachelor Party) my friend Terry asked me to sub in as the last act of a show at the Renaissance Cafe. It's about five minutes from my house so was hard to say no to... I've played some amazing shows there... but also some miserably empty ones so I wasn't particularly looking forward to it, especially since I'd barely had time to let people know and I was playing last.

A nice suprise when the place was relatively full the whole night. A friend of my wife's (& a friend of Marty on catbook) came by with a couple friends. Other friends I hadn't seen in a while came and a crazy man clapped throughout my set. Plus, another friend, Darryl was playing that night and rocked out with his recently purchased Madonna mike. Good times. T-shirts and CDs were sold and the crazy man told me that his producer had 39 gold albums and that I could work with him for free. Score!

Two nights later I was musical guest at The Chemist's weekly improv show at Grace O'Malley's - a surprisingly great Irish bar downtown. I'm always a bit wary of playing comedy shows - I've done a ton in my time, but I always feel like the crowd wants me to be hilarious - and I'm generally a pretty-voiced sensitive singer/songwriter.

But TONIGHT, the crowd was pleasantly drunk and I was comedy-gold. I decided to only play funny stuff, starting with Stagefright as a request, and then trying out a new tune called "Where's My Jetpack?" which everyone sang along to. My new favourite. Then Dear Aunty Emm and Guilt Trip Song ("My last song, unless I get an encore, in which case I'll do a Christina Aguilera cover."). I got an encore, sold out of CDs (dumb, dumb singer/songwriter - next time bring WAY too many CDs...), and the bartender asked for a presskit to maybe play back there later.

Hooray for low expectations!