Canada #1 – Fancy a room like this?

It’s permanently set up for live music, with drums, piano, guitars, amps, a double bass (yes John Parker) and a pool table. Speaking of pools, there’s actually a swimming pool under the stage which they don’t really use. The trapdoor is under the drum stool…

If there’s one thing they have here in Canada it is space. It’s not much more expensive to build a big house than a small house, so they figure why not make a room like this? After 20 hours of travelling to a foreign country, this is what you want to see when you arrive.

I’ve been working on a song forever now called Watch Yourself, it’s been the source of a lot of love and stress for me, perhaps too much. I even broke down into a sobbing mess about it last week, not much of a cryer so that came as a bit of a surprise. Anyway I made a bit of a breakthrough on the plane journey, writing some new words on a sick bag (hey even if the lyrics are rubbish it’s gotta be a better destiny than the sick bag was expecting). So feeling a bit better about that.

If there’s one thing they… ok one sec if there’s two things they have here in Canada it is space and extremely lovely people. I’m staying with a wonderful family, who are friends with many other wonderful people, all of whom seem to smile warmly, show genuine interest in other people’s lives, and have interesting jobs like “geo-technical engineer” and another long job title I heard which basically consists of walking in the woods with your dogs. I’m starting to see what all the fuss with Canada is about.

My gig at Coldsnap Festival tomorrow night has sold out now, and it’s a lovely room, so the scene is certainly set. Dala, Derek Joyce and I did a songwriter’s workshop today where we talked about songs and played songs in an independent bookstore (was just the right side of hippy). It was hosted by CBC Radio One which is the equivalent of BBC Radio 1, only they have fewer banging beats. Dala are lovely, have exquisite voices and songs that people love on first hearing. They’re very popular in Canada, and had the crowd eating out of their hand at their gig tonight. Compared to them I feel like my stuff isn’t as easy for people to like, which initially gets me down, but ultimately I’m cool with it. Everyone has to be themselves right? I don’t mind if my music is less accessible.

If there’s one thing… ok bored of that joke now. Another thing canada does is snow. This is proper snow, not sunday league amateur dramatics snow. Snow where you could accidentally walk into a wall of it and never find your way out again. Tomorrow I’m going snowshoing, which I’d never heard of until I got here. It’s basically walking, only with big shoes to stop you sinking in the snow. Something like #jakemorleysnowshoeing was apparently trending on twitter here, tho I think the person who told me that was exaggerating because like everyone here she was really friendly. Or maybe she didn’t know the threshold of how many tweets make a trend. Still I can’t wait, tomorrow we’re walking on snow, doing two more radio shows then a sold out gig . Yes. Yes please.