Keyboard Confessional

After my trip from Toronto, I was back to remote working in Ottawa with a daily walk around the neighbourhood. I have taken to listening to audiobooks on my stroll to drown out the car noise. Since last year, I've realized that Ottawa was a dirtier city than Toronto. I saw litter everywhere, and not just bags of chips or pop cans, piling up on sidewalks, parks, and even lawns and driveways. The lack of public garbage receptacles and city staff cleaning up were likely the main culprit. But perhaps something about Ottawa turn people into jerks: strewn detritus only steps from people's homes; multiple encounters with people who threw empty containers to the ground; and dog poop (and bags of dog poop?!) left in the grass (and once on a tree branch).

I decided to pay for whole-life insurance after a lengthy meeting with my advisors. I accepted their main argument that it was essentially a better-than-average GIC. Later in life, I could access the cash value or simply leave any gains tax-free for beneficiaries. As someone who left their money under a digital mattress for more than a decade, I'm not exactly a poster-child for aggressive investing. The rest of my money was now invested in the stock market, and the volatility was shocking. At the end of April, my market value was thousands of dollars in the red. Now a few weeks later in May, I was thousands in the black. It was all "unrealized" gains or losses but what was real were the fees. So I was currently in the red for the year.

As my mom was in Toronto this Mother's Day week-end with some friends, I decided to go to a concert at the NAC 4th stage on Saturday. The first and only time I saw opener Mikhail Laxton, he was supposedly living in Toronto and collaborating with artists like Lydia Persaud. But tonight he told the hometown crowd he has been in Ottawa for 8 years. I liked this set better than the one at The Drake Underground. Instead of cliché songs about exes and new flames, he sang about his alcoholic absentee father, the rough worker's hotel in his Australian hometown, and working-class life.

I hadn't seen headliner Maia Davies in a decade. It turns out after 7 years, her all-women rock band Ladies Of The Canyon called it quits. Ms Davies then became a professional songwriter, penning a dozen top-ten hits for a variety of artists. She also released 2 solo albums in French. But leaving her abusive partner, who also gave her "access" to studio work, left her at rock-bottom mentally and professionally (blacklisted from the corporate music industry). Maia drove cross-country to L.A. to stay in Venice Beach. During the pandemic years, she holed up with her bubble of artistic friends in California, where the genesis of her new album Lovers' Gothic was formed to address all the trauma.

These details came out in long stories during a set that Davies said was both a performance and a healing/therapy session from "TMI Maia". It was no surprise that her idols included Tori Amos and Kate Bush as her new songs had similar musical intricacies and vocals that swooped and soared. A lifetime of choir practice and classical music training as well as her experience as touring musician, producer, and songwriter were evident. There was a craft to her music that, without compromising its emotional heft, could be lacking in younger musicians.