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Home > Contact > Newsletter Archive Spring
2005 What's this? Ohmyliftin'Jesus!, Fearing's written a newsletter. Remember
three years ago honey? When we signed that e-mail list at Allright, allright.enough silliness. I'm sitting in my shed/office listening to Ray Charles, watching the last big snowstorm of the season and realizing that there has been rather a loooooot of H20 (frozen or otherwise) under the bridge since last I wrote to you. Forgive me for taking so long with this newsletter, I'm a married artist with hobbies, a busy-procrastinator, a social butterfly who spends large chunks of his life away from friends and family, a lethal combination to be sure and not one that lends itself to coming through on all those good intentions and grand plans for regular communications via cyber space. Ah well, as my friend Ciaran's Father used to say, "if it wasn't for the drink, we'd be sober"(!!) Predictably, there is lots to tell and to make it easy for you who are only after tour info or specific news on, say, my songbook, I'll lay this out in sections: -
Upcoming UK Tour Let me start with my upcoming annual tour to the UK. For those of you on that side of the Atlantic, here is the itinerary with as much venue information as I have. Many thanks to those fans in the UK and Ireland who have continued to pester me for dates and info. Your enthusiasm has gone a long way to helping me book this tour. Also thanks to Different Strings, my new UK agency, who put these shows together. See you in a few weeks!!!
Similarly, many of you have been asking about Blackie & The Rodeo Kings and possible recording dates, ideas etc. So here's the scoop (Betty Boop), B&RK are somewhere between the back burner and the front of the stove, so to speak. We are all in various stages of writing, recording and releasing solo stuff and so the band must wait until the planets align, the winds shift, the harmonics converge and we get our ridiculous schedules back in synch. I suspect that we'll be talking about another recording this coming winter and January seems to be the magic time for us to record. So who knows, maybe next summer we'll be back in the saddle, beating our guitars and sweating through our suits at a festival near you. I can't tell you how lucky I feel to be able to work as a solo artist AND be part of a B&RK. Thanks to all of you for coming out to the shows and picking up the recordings. Now
just in case you thought I was goofing off, trying to straddle
these two projects, I regret to inform you that I've been busy
working with another good friend of mine by the name of Andy White
and the collaboration is proving to be quite fruitful. Those of
you who read liner notes will known that in the past Andy and
I have written several songs together. If I Catch You Crying and
Born To Be A Traveler, are two of our collaborations on The Rodeo
Kings most recent release BARK, and there's another song - Trying
To See God - which Andy included on his last record - Boy 40 (along
with a version of If I Catch You Crying- available through True
North records in Canada). (www.andywhite.com) It's funny, for someone who's mostly known as a solo singer/ songwriter (wretched tag that this is) I've discovered the joys of collaboration in all its forms. Co-writing, playing in a band, even working as a sideman. It's all grist for the mill and I do feel that my solo stuff has come a long way as a result of all the work I've been lucky enough to do with other players, be they B&RK, Andy White, The Snipetones here in Guelph, or the odd recording that I get asked to play on. Thanks for listening. Now as many of you know, I've been working towards a songbook for several years now. "Working toward" is a very loose term, and I'll admit that the whole project has languished on my hard drive for many moons. However, as requested, you all sent in your ideas for songs that you'd like to see in the book and the results have tabulated, quantified, checked and cross-checked. and Nick Craine, my neighbour and illustrator par excellence is now working on drawings and illustrations that will accompany the final tablature and lyrics, so stay tuned, this thing ain't dead yet! Last summer I coughed up the coin for a digital camera (uh-oh!) and yes, I'm snapping away like a tourist. Suddenly everything's a picture. I know, I know, the world needs another celebrity "photographer" like a fish needs a bicycle (!), but what the hell, I get to see some pretty interesting parts of the world, I get backstage access and every now and then I get a pretty good shot. So I'm planning on archiving the decent ones on the web site. Right now we (my webinatrix and I) are compiling a gallery of the best stuff from 2004. It'll just grow from there so check it out from time to time. By the way, there is a truck load of stuff on the Blackie Web site, including a lot of photographs from the last US/Canada tour which will be on line ASAP- check it out @ www.rodeokings.com The real joy of having a web site (even a slightly stale one) is to stay in touch with your good selves. I LOVE getting those out of the blue e-mails. There's nothing that can cure the Monday morning "blah's" like a spontaneous "I've never written one of these before but." e-mail. Thanks to all of you who've taken the time to drop me a line for whatever reason, they're always appreciated. Unfortunately I also get an unbelievably large amount of spam. All the old standby's - enlarged organ opportunities, investments in Nigeria, generic drugs and heartfelt pleas from sickly widow's in Brazil. I get 'em all and in vast quantities. Well, it's reached epidemic proportions (several hundred a day) so I've decided to try some evasion tactics. As of now, stephen@stephenfearing.com will no longer be an active e-mail address. Instead, I will have instructions on my web site as to how to reach me by e-mail. We'll have to be devious to beat the spam-bots, but most likely it'll be fairly straightforward and well explained on the web site. Anyway this has to be done, my apologies, but don't be surprised when the old e-mail address stops working, just go to the web site and follow the instructions and please, please don't stop writing! OK that's it for now. Love to all. =SF= |
