I don’t know how long ago it was that Matt and I started the Lazybones project. I just remember a nice springish day that was probably over two years ago that I happened upon Matt on St. Clair Avenue in Toronto. We were surprised mutually to find out that we’d been living a block away from each other for quite a few months. Neither of us knew the other was in Toronto. Anyway, a vague commitment was made to jam on some acoustic guitars one day. And we did.
It was more about drinking a few beer and playing music than about reenacting the tired musical cliché of a goal - “conquering the world” with our vicious band. So we just wrote a couple of songs – “Slowmotion” and “Perfect Life”. We were pretty happy with them. But coincidentally other people were too and within a few months we had garnered enough support from those to record a CD. And we did.
We wrote some songs we liked. I recorded my tracks. Matt recorded most of his. I took off for Central America for a few months. I remember Matt calling me about ten times one day when he had managed to rustle up some musicians in Newfoundland – the Panting brothers – to do some banjo, accordion, and Mandolin tracks. He and Laurence Currie were recording them in the living room of Matt’ mom’s house in St. John’s. I heard scratchy tracks being beamed from the house to some satellite in some orbit to me in some little town in Guatemala. Matt asked excitedly how I thought they sounded. “Awesome” I replied – I had no idea. I couldn’t hear because of the incredibly loud fireworks that were going off all over town to celebrate a patron Saint, or the winning of a soccer game, or a birthday, or a new flavor of ice cream or something. Matt screamed through the phone, “are you ok? You sound like you’re in a war-zone”. “No I’m ok” I said, “its just ... Guatemala”. “Cool”, he said, “I’ve also got Jill Barber and Huey Lewis”. An incredibly loud rapid-succession “bomba” was, unfortunately, going off near my room. I couldn’t hear a thing. “Cool”, I said. Then I believe the satellite must have gone plummeting to the Earth. Or I had forgotten to pay my phone bill perhaps. Matt was gone.
I arrived home that September and was ecstatic to discover that Jill Barber and Huey Lewis were on the CD. We liked the CD. A lot. Sometimes with a new project you really don’t know what you sound like until you hear your first CD. It was like that. We were happy that we didn’t suck. It sounded surprisingly good to us actually, so we began to get excited. Still it took a while to get the thing released. We wanted the music to be for us and our audience, not for radio program directors, hip weekly entertainment tabloid editors, or nervous, about-to-become-extinct, major record label executives. We also wanted to release it according to some of our deeply felt ethics. Remember those? They were popular in the 1980s for a while but then people became more interested in video games and mass-produced “alternative” music (I could never quite figure that one out). Anyway we teamed up with Warchild Canada for the release, and felt good about what we’d done.
Unfortunately with all the deliberating about how most ethically to release and market the CD, by the time we were set to release it, I was in Guatemala again. So we had two simultaneous release shows – Matt played one in St. John’s Newfoundland, and I played one in Quetzeltenango Guatemala. We wanted to simulcast video feeds but unfortunately there was another birthday, or election, or grand opening of a tortilla factory in Gutemala and I’m pretty sure another satellite was knocked out of the sky by the “bombas”. But the CD was out in the world and that made us happy.
Since then we’ve played a bunch of shows all over Canada. And we released our first single for “Perfect Life”, which smashed its way into the top 100 country charts for an hour or two. Yes I said “country”. Now it is set to be released to “non-country” radio. So we’re excited about that. We’ve been adding members to our live show and refining the sound for our next CD as well. Lots of harmonies – sort of bluegrass-style – with help from our friends Alex and Sonja, and thick percussion thanks to Danno – a hippy we know. A bit more Latin style has seeped into the songwriting – I have no idea where that came from. We’ve got about twenty of those songs written now and are about to start pre-production and to do some preliminary recordings. We love the new songs. And we think the new CD will be a doozie. I hope we get it out quickly. I’m thinking of going to Venezuela for a while.
Tim from Guatemala: June 25, 2009Today the release date for Songs from Here was announced in Canada. Given this, some people have rightfully asked me why I am in a ramshackle town in the highlands of Guatemala instead of working to promote the CD in the majestic beauty of the corporate cultural playground that is Toronto. There are a few reasons for this. First, the majesty and beauty of Toronto has been brought under question numerous times via accounts of people who are actually there. Second, I have it from reliable sources that the city currently smells of garbage. Fourth, Leafs suck. (I realize this has little relevance in June, but I just had to get that off my chest). Careful readers will realize that I have missed a reason. I will address this now. To avoid any controversy, I will call this reason # 3. This reason requires careful reflection on my part. It also requires a snappy title.
Reason #3, by Tim MacNeillOK, the title thing did not work out as snappily as I had hoped. But here is the deal. The story really wraps around the concept of Slowmotion, the first single from the CD. I began writing this song on a beach in Guatemala just after I had decided to leave the music industry behind a few years ago. It is a metaphorical piece about my relationship with music. In writing it, I was promising myself that if I were ever to re-engage this relationship it would be on my own terms, not the industry?s. Matt and I found that we both had this outlook as we began to work on the Lazybones CD, so finishing Slowmotion was easy. And the decision to give all proceeds from its release to WarChild Canada, instead of to a record label, or to line our own pockets, was obvious to us.
Now, especially since the release of my last solo record in 2004, (still available online a www.sonicvalley.com/tim), I really started to take the idea that life can revolve around more than writing songs and releasing CDs to heart. That there is more to life than being a rock star. I began working with social movements in Central America that are struggling against all odds to reverse the effects of centuries of colonization and racism, and trying to formulate new and creative global and local socioeconomic operating systems. The peoples with whom I work (indigenous groups with varying languages and cultures but a common Maya ancestry) have survived multiple attempts of exploitation, assimilation, and genocide over a number of years. These offences were first inflicted by Spanish colonial powers in the 16th century of course. But they continued and perhaps even amplified in their ferocity throughout the 20th and into the 21st centuries. This story involves the US multinational and CIA backed forced replacement of democratic government by corporatist dictators, and the ensuing genocide of the 20th century. More recently it has been Canadian mining companies that have infiltrated the Guatemalan government, polluted local ecosystems without speaking with local people, and have had entire towns relocated and burned, amidst the obvious protest of the townspeople.
This is neocolonialism driven largely by Canadian mining companies. Many of the local people know this and are rising up to fight for their rights, their livelihoods, their homes, their environment, their culture, and their humanity. It is important for Canadians to take up their cause since the perpetrators of this violence are so often Canadian companies. I have the opportunity to help tell the story of these people through the writing of various publications and, obviously, through music. This summer, I had to make a decision whether to stay in Canada to do television, print, and radio interviews in an attempt to promote the new Lazybones CD, or to come to Guatemala and continue my work here. I am immensely proud of Songs from Here. It is a labour of love. And I am excited to return to Canada to play shows and write more music with Matt. But for now I have to be here. This is all a part of a promise I made to myself to only take part in the music industry in a socially responsible way, on my own terms, or on terms that recognize larger social realities and the relative smallness of the life of any one Canadian songwriter in comparison. This is the philosophy that I put forward metaphorically in the Lyrics of Slowmotion. It is due to my commitment to this sentiment that I am here. It is also due to this sentiment that Matt and I are giving all money made from the sale of Slowmotion to Warchild Canada. Having said this, I will end by reproducing those lyrics below. Muchas gracias, y hasta Septiembre mis amigos en Canada. A los negocios de Canada, Ya Basta!
su amigo, Tim