Hey Now, The Fair's a-Filling

For the last little while I've had my nose to the grindstone, working on the music I'm writing for Ben Jonson's play Bartholmew Fair, which will be running this coming season at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival of Canada. I love working there - this is the third play I've scored - but it's a ton of work. We start meeting before the previous season is even over, and spend months going through the text alone and with the director, Antoni Cimolino, coming up with ideas for musical themes, styles, and where the cues will happen. Then, I sit down with guitar, keyboard and computer and start procrastinating. Well, it's all come to fruition now. Over the past several weeks, I've been out in Stratford at least once a week working with the cast on the songs (there are three songs built into the text, plus I've written incidental score music to help with scene transitions, and to play underneath other sequences as well), and we go into the studio next week to record all the instrumental score tracks.
I've posted one of the songs, in demo form, on both my Facebook page and on Last.fm, so you can get a taste of what I've been doing lately. Hope you enjoy it, and I hope you can make it out sometime this season to see the play, along with some of the other great productions going on this year.

Some Of My Favourite Things (Live)

I've always wanted to make a DVD or a playlist with a collection of my favourite live performances I've seen over the years. I guess that's what YouTube is for. Now and again, I'll just post some of my faves here instead. This is Little Richard from John Lennon's Live Peace In Toronto concert in 1969. Played insanely fast, I've always found this clip incredibly exciting.




On another note, I've always wanted to be able to share iTunes playlists. Anyone know if this can be done? I imagine a world where I could post or email a playlist (just the playlist, not the files), exported from iTunes, and if you don't have any of the songs on it, it would skip them, or you could buy them from the ITMS, and if you did, they'd just play. Thoughts?