Tom Thomson's famous painting The Jack Pine. Oil on canvas. 1916.
It’s the stuff of Canadian legend. Artist and avid outdoorsman, Tom Thomson, paddles out into Canoe Lake just as he has done countless times before. This time he disappears. After days of searching, his body – bloated and bruised – surfaces. It doesn’t make any sense.
More on the extraordinary story after these extras we’ve put together for you.
While the official coroner’s report claims that Thomson’s death was accidental there are many conspiracy theories – and for good reason. Tom was a strong swimmer and experienced outdoorsman, he even had a license to guide in Algonquin. It seems quite unlikely that he just fell out of his canoe and drowned on a clear day. In addition he had a bruise on his temple and there was a piece of fishing line wrapped around his ankle no less than seventeen times! There also wasn’t any water in his lungs, an indication that he died before he drowned. These facts, and many others, have raised questions surrounding his death.
Tom was just entering his prime as a painter and was starting to get recognition for his work. He grew up in Owen Sound but had moved to Toronto to pursue his career. He spent his summers in Algonquin park doing small oil sketches that he would transfer into larger works at his studio in the section of Toronto now known as Rosedale.
The best site I found for research is Death On A Painted Lake if you’d like to do some of your own digging. For a more entertaining read you can check out ‘Canoe Lake‘ by Roy MacGregor.
Winhara in mid Hugh-hazing about to hit up Toronto's Resevoir Lounge
Last weekend we took our best friend and bass player of over 5 years out for his exit hazing.
Hugh dropped the bomb on us as soon as we had all regrouped from New Years. He told us that while he loved making music, for many reasons (all of which make complete sense), he is moving on. I can’t say we weren’t shocked. The four of us sat around our kitchen table in complete silence until Steve said “I feel like you guys are listening to me chew.”
It is one of many massive changes that has happened in the last month, and while we’re sad to have Hugh leave, we are extremely excited for what is coming up.
So what is coming up?
A new website is live right now. Go to winhara.com to check it out.
A new album that we’re going to give to you while we write it! (More on that later, make sure you sign up for our mailing list at the bottom of this post to get updates).
We’re putting the finishing touches on the first song, Tom Thomson, which will be available for download next week. (Again see winhara.com).
Needless to say, Kent, Prevost and I are going to continue fighting the good fight. We won’t be getting a new bass player – the dynamic wouldn’t be right and we don’t have money to hire someone. So how are we going to play live? We’ve done it once already and let’s just say we get pretty creative with samplers and trading instruments!
We’re about to head up to Kent’s cabin, nestled into the woods beside the Muskoka River, for a focused four day writing session. One thing’s for sure… moving forward won’t be the same, but we absolutely wish Hugh all the best with his future endeavors.
You can barely walk through it, but we're getting things done. (click to enlarge)
I will be the first to admit it. I like it when things are neat, organized, logical. But there is a sense of finality to organization. You clean up. You say “There, I’m done”. And then you go watch TV. Progress, I have learned, is varying levels of chaos. The same can be said for Creativity. Now maybe this is not universally applicable. I am quite certain that my university lab instructors would disagree. But I can tell you that our ‘band room’ has been in a state of barely navigable flux for the last month and we have written more songs, come up with more creative and ambitions ideas and learned and programmed more MIDI than we have in ages. If you are trying to make the song lyrics look pretty instead of just getting them down, you’re missing the point.
August has been, and will continue to be a crazy crazy month. We are not playing any shows until September, but are busier than ever working on the set, live show, writing and all sorts of thing I don’t want to tell you about. Just come to a show in September. I promise it will be worth it.
Starting NOW until August 30th we are running The GREAT Hold Back Light Show Scavenger Contest. Up for grabs is the new HOLDBACKLIGHTSHOW t-shirt (pictured below) and a $20 gift certificate to iTunes or HMV (your choice)! It’s easy! Here’s how you get into the fun:
Hidden on the backs of 10 of the photos you see there are items of information you need to find and send to us. Some of these things will test your wit (answering questions), some will let you show off your life experience, some won’t prove anything at all but we hope you have fun!
Once you have gathered all you can, e-mail your snippets of information to winhara@winhara.com.
You’ll notice that for some questions you have to include some visual evidence as well – pictures and/or scans for example – and you can do this any way you like: attach it in an e-mail, give us a link to your Facebook or Flickr page, you can even snail mail them to us if you want. Have your answers in by August 30th. The winner will be announced shortly thereafter and sent the most excellent grand prize mentioned above (we will get in contact with you about sizing etc.).
We hit the Queen and Spadina neighborhood last night armed with acoustics, glockenspiels and electronic gadgets to busk for the NXNE concert goers.
Before we had even settled in to play a tune, a traveling minstrel struck up a conversation and told us he had been playing the streets since 1984. He thought it would be a good night if the rain held off. He played us a song about skinny-dipping in Halifax and in exchange we played him ‘Science’ which is not about skinny dipping or Halifax at all.
At times we had a crowd cheering for us and sometimes we were playing to each other and curious passers-by. But all in all it was a great night. Plus we sold CDs which was completely unexpected. We were mainly out to promote our upcoming show at the Mod Club (event details).
Perhaps this was the highlight:
An excited young gentlemen raved, “These guys are better than Lady Ga-Ga… and they’re free… and they’re all mine!!! (We had set up next to a MMVA party hosted by Lady Ga-Ga which makes it a little less random).
Hugh snapped this shot while taking an all-natural iced tea break.
With Earth Hour coming up on Saturday, everyone is trying to ‘unplug’. As you may have noticed, a Winhara show is usually on the other end of the spectrum and is quite ‘plugged in’.
So how do we ‘unplug’? Enter the Battery powered set.
Okay so it’s not totally unplugged – we play using a toy keyboard and drum pad playing through a toy amp, all running on batteries – in addition to acoustic guitar and glockenspiel. But we’re getting closer. This summer we hope to perform running the electronic instruments on solar or human power (but more on that later).
Rock Talk airs from 6-7pm on Sundays and is hosted by Blair Packham and Bob Reid. They had us on on March 8th, leading up the Mod Club show during CMW. You can listen to the full interview below as well as see video of “Science”.
Doing the show was very cool; Bob and Blair were great – made our job easy. Lesson #1 of the day: pay attention to when you’re ON air and OFF air. No major gaffs – this time – just a joke at Prevost’s expense.
We were strewn across the internet, fragmented into little social networking sites, links like telephone wires randomly assigned, a mini and tangled web in their own right.
We haven’t condensed, we have organized, we have syndicated. The corporate head is at www.winhara.com. It is one simple page. All the essentials are there, but it is only the start, it is where one can branch out from, it is the first page of a choose your own adventure book.
This song is a bit unsuspecting, hidden at the end of the album. It isn’t complicated or flashy and it was basically two song ideas that were put together to make one. But somehow it is one of my favourites. Here are some facts about Won’t Be Missing You:
At Byron’s suggestion, the lyrics of the finale changed from “I’ll be missing you again” to “I won’t be missing you again.”
There is an amazing cello line in the verses that we didn’t include on the album because it made it a little too pretty.
Hugh plays his bass through three (count ‘em) three distortion pedals for the outro which is why there is that crazy distorted squeeling going into it.
The beat in the final verse is made by a 70’s drum simulation pedal that we found randomly in Byron’s place and just had to use it somewhere (I think it’s used in the background of Baby Steps as well).
This is the first song that Hugh started playing keys on.
The “ahs” at the end actually started as an arrangement idea we recorded so that we would remember it. We ended up just using those vocals. Once we doubled and repeated it at the end of the song we knew it would be the album ender.
Spring 2007 – we were trying to bang out five more songs before we went into the studio for creative sessions.That winter Hugh’s parents were kind enough to let us take over an amazing apartment above their garage, which they rented out during the summers.I worked early in the morning and Kent worked late at night so we would meet there during the day to write, arrange, (and argue a lot) before Steve and Hugh got there for rehearsal.
One day was going particularly badly and nothing was getting done – just a bunch of false starts and dead ends.It turned into me dejectedly napping on the couch while Kent continued to tinker on an acoustic guitar.An hour later I heard a strange, bouncy, lick through the half sleep.I decided I loved it and ran bleary eyed to the piano.From there, most of the song just fell together.I do remember writing the bridge which turned out to be one of my top 3 favorite moments on the album.It was Hugh’s idea to rotate the melody through the three instruments.He plays a bass note on the first beat, then Kent hits his guitar on the second and I finish the line with my keyboard played through a POG, one of the coolest pedals in the world.
Also, some of you (drummers especially) may have noticed the strange mixed time signature that happens.The whole song is in 4/4 except where that original lick appears.It starts on the third beat of the bar and the chords are evenly spaced, but there are three of them and the last one doesn’t land on the first beat of the next bar (as it would in 4/4).In fact it lands a fraction after where the last sixteenth note would be.If any of you music theory buffs can tell us what we have done here an explanatory comment would be much appreciated.
Since the four of us have known each other for so long we have become good at a few things.One of these things is being diplomatic but brutally honest with each other; another is realizing when this is happening and understanding what the person is actually saying.So when I played Kent this song idea and he said he really liked the verses I knew he did like the verses but was also saying that the chorus sucked, which, (looking back) it did.The challenge, then, became to write a new one.
I wouldn’t say that writing a chorus is harder than writing a verse.I would say that writing a chorus to a verse is harder than writing a verse to a chorus (follow me?).I think this is because choruses (at least in commercial music) have got to be at least 50% more important than verses.Unfortunately, about nine times out of ten we seem to do it the hard way.Baby Steps was not the exception.*
Two heads are better than one.Four heads are better then two… most of the time.But during Baby Steps’ chorus writing session it was beginning to look more like a Mexican standoff. To avoid this, Kent and Hugh went to develop some ideas on their own, leaving Prevost and me staring at each other from behind our respective instruments.I should look at Steve more often when writing because I immediately got a vision of him thrashing away… complete with audio.I attempted to break the singer/drummer language barrier using the appropriate “bah-bah, kah-kah’s” and he did an unbelievable job of make sense of the jibberish.After some fine tuning, Steve came up with the rhythm that is in the final version of the song.If I remember correctly, Hugh and Kent were sold as soon as they heard it.
[Listen to Baby Steps]
(* Footnote: This is indicated by the fact that the words “baby steps” don’t appear one single time in the entire song.Those lyrics, from the original scrapped chorus idea, just sort of stuck.)
