Mike Aubé Music

This song is about a small ray of hope in a small town during hard times. You can see those rays all around if you look for ‘em.

Shot at home with a Zoom Q3 camera in not enough light, so the video quality is poor, but the sound is good. Enjoy!

Hey Y’all! Got a few fun shows coming up. Tomorrow night (Thur, Oct 20) I’m hosting the open jam at the Spitfire Arms Alehouse in Windsor from 7-11. An “open jam” is a hybrid between an open mic and a jam. You never know exactly what’s going to happen and it’s loads of fun.

Then Sat, Oct 22, I’ll be at the Wolfville Farmers’ Market from 10-1. Food, drink, crafts and music. Try to beat that as a way to spend Saturday morning!

And finally, next Fri, Oct 28, I’ll be going on down the “Chester Road” to the Trellis Café in Hubbards. This is a cool little restaurant that is a great supporter of live music. They have wicked food too, and Nova Scotia microbrews on tap (Propeller and Garrison).

$5 CDs? Really? Both Aberdeen Street and ClusterFolk can be bought for $5 each when you buy as part of CDBaby’s $5 Sale. You need to buy any 3 or more CDs from the sale bin (they will appear at regular price until you get 3 in your shopping cart). There are hundreds of titles to choose from.

Details here.

Aberdeen Street can be found here and ClusterFolk here.

Spent a fantastic weekend playing and listening to music at the Deep Roots Music Festival in Wolfville, NS. Highlights for me included Danny Michel, Digging Roots and sharing the stage on Sunday morning’s “Rise Up Singing” with Ryan Roberts, Michael Jerome Browne, Lake of Stew and Unisson. Super fun even on three hours of sleep!

Thanks to the committee and all the volunteers who made it all happen, and especially to Valley Mushroom Company, who were my sponsors for the weekend.

Dear Rich Investors,

I’ve heard that the “global financial crisis” (TM) has you in a bit of a pinch these days. As much as I’d like to help you out, I’m in a bit of a pinch too.

But I thought I’d give you a little moral support in these, your times of trouble:

All my love,
Mike

RidgeFest has officially tanked. No word on how Blue Rodeo is taking the news that they don’t get to close the show for Mike Aubé. But if they work hard and stick with it, I’m sure they’ll go far.

In other news, we have five newborn kittens at our house. Any takers? Hehe. Also, the garden is mostly weeded now. Beets are plentiful, carrots nearly adult-sized, sugar snap peas and beans are coming on. The 11 meat birds (aka the Chicken McNuggets) are three weeks old and growing like mad.

We’re going to take some of the scheduled time from RidgeFest to get into the studio this weekend. But I’m also hosting at the Wick Pub Open Mic Friday night and the performing at the IncrEdible Picnic in Summerville Sunday 12-3. Mmmm…gardening and playing venues with great food. My life is looking pretty delicious.

Writing for the album has been stalled at that excruciating “almost done” stage for a while. I have a whack of half-finished songs that don’t seem to want to get finished. But some of them have potential, I think, so we shall see. I seem to be leaning towards more story songs, and they tend to take a little longer ’cause you gotta figure where the story’s gonna go.

If you follow me on facebook or Twitter, you’ll know that this weekend I’m helping to open up for none other than Blue Rodeo at RidgeFest in Windsor! (Sat, Aug 6th, my set starting at approx 5:15pm) Blue Rodeo is one of the biggest influences on my style, so you can imagine how excited I am about this chance to play before my heroes!

But that’s not all on the festival front. I’m also going to be doing four performances at the Deep Roots Music Festival in Wolfville Sept 23-25, including late-night at Paddy’s Pub on Saturday, September 24th, with Danny Michel, Erin Costello and the Dungaree Brothers. Woohoo!!

I rarely ever do songwriting exercises. I spent 20 years in school and university doing exercises. When you write songs for the joy of it and to communicate with people, you want it to come from an honest place and an intuitive place. There is definitely, however, a need for songwriters to work on their craft, so when I get in the right mood, there is one exercise that I like to do.

I learned it a songwriter’s workshop organized by a national songwriters’ organization. I won’t name the organization, but the workshop was overall a dreadfully boring and contrived affair, with much talk of how to structure your song for radio and how to write a great “hook”.

But the exercise I loved was to take a well known song and keep the music the same and re-write the lyrics, or vice versa. You can take it one step further and re-write the variable you didn’t change in the first step. And the result will be a completely new song. Though the cadence and phrasing might still roughly match the original song, the melody and words are both new.

Any time I’ve ever done this, I went into it knowing I would throw it the trash immediately, because I would always know it wasn’t a truly original composition. But I did it as an exercise.

A few years ago, I put the exercise to use when I was asked to perform at a wedding reception. As I often do with weddings, I offered to do a few special songs requested by the bride and groom. We agreed on one request, but the other request was a big soaring ballad I knew I couldn’t pull off with an acoustic guitar. So I made the bride and groom a deal, I would re-write the music to something more suitable, but I’d keep the lyrics. They were game, so I went to work. I turned the soaring ballad into a kinda rock-a-billy thing, and to my amazement it actually kinda worked. And I’ve always really dug the chord progression and guitar riff in it.

Flash forward five years, and that chord progression starts nagging at me. I really like it. So I’m actually starting to write words and I’m halfway through and I really like that.

So for the first time, I think this exercise (or maybe I should call it an experiment) isn’t going into the trash.

I’m in a contest to win a spot at the Stan Rogers Folk Festival. Please vote for me by clicking on the stars above my video (e.g. to give “5 stars” click on the rightmost star)

>>> Go to my video here <<<

I think my inner child just won some sort of immature internal battle. I now have stickers! The design is below. I think perhaps your inner child wants one.