Even church musicians need their professional space • November 9, 2023, 2:28 PM

Sometimes I wonder if church environments subconsciously call for us to throw common sense out the window when it comes to treating professional musicians.

Tony Robbins teaches a concept called the Six Human Needs—not needs such as shelter, food or that kind of thing, but emotional needs. Two of them are certainty and uncertainty. If we have too much of the same thing, if we have too much certainty, we get bored—or if it's carried to an extreme, we roll our eyes on a "here we go again" level, or even become agitated. It's in that moment that we need a certain amount of uncertainty, a certain amount of variety, to shake things up and restore balance. Similarly, if we have too much variety, we start feeling there to be a lack of unity, and so we need a certain amount of certainty to bring things into balance. These two needs may seem mutually paradoxical, but they actually complement each other. You cannot have too much of one at the expense of the other.

I'll give you a good example. If you appreciate a church musician's work, it's fine to say so—as long as you don't make that adulation a week-after-week thing after the first instance or two. When you make your point, your point is made. Anything beyond that is harassment. You're meeting his need for certainty too much—and the more you do it, the more agitated he may feel toward you, especially if you're the only one feeding him that adulation to that extreme. (As Babylon 5 showrunner J. Michael Straczynski once put it, "Harassment usually pushes people in the opposite direction than that intended.") Fortunately, this doesn't happen frequently, but that it happens at all is disturbing.

This is not too dissimilar to a situation involving an overzealous Star Trek fan who won a trip to Paramount Pictures in 1992. Having heard that actor Michael Dorn had recently acquired his private pilot's license, the fan decided to buy a rather expensive flight suit for him. When he got to Paramount, Dorn was nowhere to be found. So the fan decided the best he could do was leave it at the studio, along with his name and address so that Dorn would know where to send a thank-you card. No such acknowledgement came, even after the fan's repeated attempts over fifteen months to ascertain whether Dorn actually got it (some of his efforts even included a letter-writing campaign involving several fans). Paramount remained silent for a while until one day they wrote him back, asking him to cease and desist. When Dorn came to Ottawa to do a convention, the fan approached him about the flight suit, and Dorn gave him an annoyed look that the fan interpreted as, "Did you really think I'd send a thank-you card to a nobody?" The fan wrote to one of our local papers, claiming Dorn had no respect for his feelings, and that Star Trek was nothing more than an acting job for Dorn.

The letter found its way to Star Trek production associate Eric Stillwell, who wrote a letter to the same newspaper chastising the fan for his selfishness, saying that when you give a gift to a family member or friend, you do so without expecting anything back. The fan should have paid the same respect to Dorn. Stillwell went on to say that all of the Star Trek cast, not just Dorn, are the nicest bunch of people you would want to meet. The actors take time from their busy schedules to make convention appearances: they are not required to do it, and Paramount doesn't pay them to do it. They do it because they care about their fans and because it allows them to see first-hand just how big the show's appeal is to them. On the question of whether a secretary could have sent the fan an acknowledgement, Stillwell pointed out that Paramount doesn't provide personal secretaries for the actors; the actors have to hire such people themselves.

What is more important to consider here is the performer's point of view, whether it be an actor like Dorn or a church performer, especially in terms of how an incident like this might affect his performance and, by extension, the company he works for. A secular performer's job is to entertain people; a church performer's job is to help maximize the spiritual impact. Regardless of the nature of the job, the performer is there to provide a service and must do it to the best of his ability. To do anything less is a betrayal of the people he works for—not just his employer but the people who enjoy his work, who are indirectly the ones paying his salary. In order to work to the best of his ability, he must be free of any worries of being made uncomfortable by people who don't respect his need for professional space. If he's being fed certainty to extremes, having the cloud of worry over his head that he may be fed it yet again may interfere with his ability to do his job effectively. How is this going to affect the performance—or, in the long run, the company's ability to stay afloat?

At the time of the flight suit incident, Paramount was investing $1.5 to $2 million per episode into Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. With that much money at stake, the studio has to keep its performers safe from harm of any sort. If the actor's work suffers, the show suffers, and by extension its potential to stay on the air. Michael Dorn was hardly in a position to go to the producers at a time when the show was not scheduled to be on hiatus and say to them, "Look, guys, this overzealous fan is getting to me. I'm going to have to take a breather for a month or two." That would have either stalled production (which is a no-no: as Straczynski put it, "The moment you begin shooting, the clock is ticking. SAG regulates the span of time you have the actors, equipment is rented...on and on."), or forced the writers to write Dorn's character Worf out of the show for the time being. Without Worf, part of the show's appeal would have been temporarily lost, especially considering his Klingon nature served as a constant reminder to the audience that this was a space show set a few hundred years in the future. If Dorn wanted a few episodes off to do a movie, he could have been written out for those episodes to accommodate that, but not for two straight months to recover from the antics of an overzealous fan. That would simply not have been practical.

The same should be the case with church musicians. After all, to the extent they do their job well, the spiritual impact will be maximized—but if a musician is being harassed, it threatens his ability to help maximize the spiritual impact because it creates a shadow hanging over his head that the harassment might occur again, and the larger that shadow, the more potentially adverse an impact on his ability to stay focused on his work. If his focus suffers, his performance suffers, and the spiritual impact goes down. If people's spiritual needs aren't being met, they won't come back, and the church's revenues go down as a result. Is this the fate we want to see befall churches, especially at a time when church music has already been deteriorating for decades?

Don't believe me? A few centuries ago churches always invested in pipe organ installations that would cost millions today, and paid their organists proportionately better salaries. In those days, there was no recording industry, and people had a better sense of what music was truly worth. In those days, there were only two ways you could have music: a) you had to be wealthy enough to hire your own musicians, or b) you had someone in the household studying music. Then recording technology came along, and with it the ability to make musical performances available on a mass scale for less than a live performance would have cost. Over the decades, this has created a shift in thinking when it comes to how much to pay for the consumption of music. Radio has created the illusion that music can be heard for free, when in actual fact consumers are contributing to radio stations' ability to pay licensing fees to play that material by purchasing goods or services from companies that pay the stations for advertising time. It doesn't help either that the recording industry and recording technology have evolved to the point where Gene Simmons believes there will never be another Beatles, another Kiss, another Elvis Presley—in fact, ever again an artist who will stand the test of time because the prevailing attitude among fans is that the artists are making enough money that they can afford losses of revenue caused by fans who make unauthorized copies of the artists' work. In more recent decades, the ability to copy that music has become much easier with the rise of digital technology and MP3 compression. This shift in thinking has adversely affected the way church music is approached: the more technically demanding material that used to be prevalent in the old days has become superseded by more contemporary material that is harmonically simplistic enough that it can be played by guitarists who bring their own instruments. So now there is the prevailing attitude that a church's music budget doesn't have to be as proportionately large as it was back in the days before recording technology was invented. There is so much of this attitude going on that if a church is lucky enough to acquire for a rock-bottom price the services of a performer whose musicianship and work standards are high, but he is not in the public eye to enough of a degree to serve as a constant reminder to the public that he plays material other than church music, people who see him do nothing but church music week after week may get the mistaken impression that church music is all he wants to do and/or all he is capable of doing. And they may well get the idea in their head that the musician is not as worthy of professional respect as the bigger-name performers in the world.

I believe this lack of respect for the musician's craft and its worth has progressed to the point where people, at least in my experience, have a tendency to think that "just good enough" is good enough when it comes to church musicians—that is, the mere ability to sing or play an instrument, regardless of technical level, is qualification enough to be a church musician—and that it is therefore not necessary to hire an "outsider" to provide the musical service. I beg to differ with this attitude, however: Colossians 3:22-25 basically tells workers that since their ultimate boss is Christ, they are to do their best, and not merely do the minimum that will get them by—the implication being that if they can't do the utmost job required, they should step aside for people who can. They are not to think their faith alone is going to get them a "get out of jail free" card, as it were, when it comes to being judged on shoddy work.

This is why I feel there is no logistical difference between a church service and a secular show. Every element of a church service has an allegory in musical theatre, for example. And as a result, there is no difference in the professional responsibilities involved between a musician who plays to entertain people and a musician who plays to help people worship God. If Kevin Sorbo were doing a religious film, would he lower his acting standards from what he upheld when he played Hercules? Of course not. So why should a church musician be expected to hold low standards? Do you think the spiritual impact can be maximized with an attitude like that? All right then, so why do some people think it's okay to mess around with church musicians' heads through harassment?

Consider that most church musicians are not big name musicians themselves, though there is no reason to suspect they have no aspirations for higher things in the music business. If they are fed too much certainty to the point of extremes and don't do anything about it right away, it might undermine a later attempt if and when the stakes get bigger. This, by the way, is not the kind of judgement call an overzealous fan can make. They are not responsible for the musician's career and should not interfere with it in any way.

Cynthia Sayers, a professional musician and stalker victim, wrote an article for the September 1992 issue of the American Federation of Musicians newsletter International Musician on the subject of stalkers. She questioned as many delusional experts as she could find in order to determine the best course of action against her overzealous fan. Most of them agreed that total evasion is the best possible answer. This is why Paramount stayed out of the Dorn situation until they decided that the situation was getting out of hand. This is unfortunately not always possible for church musicians, who deal with largely the same people all the time. In addition, unlike film and TV actors, who have the luxury of working in front of cameras, church musicians almost always work in front of live audiences. For some church musicians, the gig they're doing may be the only steady job they have. Even if there is someone harassing them, they may be reluctant to leave that music job because they may not have anything else to fall back on financially.

So if you're a big fan of a church musician's work, make your point and leave it at that. Feeding that musician certainty once or twice at most will suffice. Don't increase that certainty to the point where it will destroy whatever enthusiasm he might have for you, because even a church musician needs his professional space. If he decides to leave his post because he does not want to deal with you any more, the parish may not be able to find someone of his caliber to replace him. And then where will that parish end up financially in the long run?

In the last month or so I've become the victim of extremely poor customer service (if not outright fraud) and the recipient of spam. So I thought I'd take the time to write to have you beware the entities responsible.

First, though my BlackBerry has been a rather faithful mobile time management tool, I quickly saw that I needed a way to synchronize it to Google Calendar. My BlackBerry's web browser is too old to be compatible with Google these days, and so I needed some kind of PC-based liaison software for it. I thought I had found it in Amrak Software's PhoneMiner app, which reads your BlackBerry backup file and extracts your calendar data from it for import into Google Calendar. I paid for a registration key via the middleman they use, Digital River, but never got the key—and before long I was past the point where I could request a refund. Over the following days and weeks I wrote a few e-mails to Amrak Software, but they went unanswered. I have since learned that of the 24 customer reviews of Digital River on the Better Business Bureau's website, every single one of them is one star out of five. Amrak Software is not listed on the BBB website. As a result, I decided to cut my losses and issue a warning to you to beware dealing with those people. Whether they intended to be shady or not is debatable, but as those old Head & Shoulders ads say, you never get a second chance to make a good first impression.

Instead, I recommend Elcomsoft's Blackberry Backup Explorer 10.02, which requires no registration key and allows you to export your BlackBerry data in a plethora of formats. Though those formats unfortunately don't include the iCalendar format compatible with Google Calendar, I was able to write a program in QBasic to get around this limitation: if you use Blackberry Backup Explorer to export your calendar data to a comma-delimited ASCII file called "calendar.csv", this program will convert your data to iCalendar format. Feel free to modify the program to suit your specific situation.

More recently, my business e-mail addresses at both jamiefraser.ca and bell.net have become recipients of spam messages. My jamiefraser.ca account has received a number of messages regarding Louis Vuitton products. More recently, both my business accounts have received spam messages from the .asia top-level domain, all claiming I've been interested in some product offered by some Chinese company—products such as wine or merchandise display racks. I believe that if you're in business and you want to be taken seriously as a company, the best way to advertise is via normal channels such as newspapers, magazines, websites, TV and radio, not unsolicited bulk e-mail.

Speaking in general terms, what is it that prompts certain entities to be less than honest in their dealings with actual or potential customers? To the extent that they do a good job and provide good customer service, the satisfied customers will refer others, and that will help keep the entities' companies going. But if these entities do anything to destroy their customers' enthusiasm for their companies—or worse, not even establish enthusiasm in the first place—they will fail sooner or later.

With that in mind, let me make you this promise: I will never be shady in my dealings with you. If I advertise, it will be through normal channels, not unsolicited bulk e-mail or cold calls. If you book me to do a gig, I will not take the money and run. I will provide you with the service I say I will. And I will strive to provide you the best value for the money you're spending. That I have been performing for over fifty years is testament to that.

As I've stated in other areas of this website, I use Tony Robbins' OPA Life Management System as my time management tool (he has since renamed it RPM). An overview of the system can be seen in this video, which was produced when he was still calling it OPA. In a nutshell, this system involves planning time proactively by breaking down your life into various categories and deciding which categories you will be spending time in in order to increase the quality of your life. The mechanics of the planning process involve brainstorming stuff you want to do into a "capture" area for a given project, week or day so that when you get to the actual planning, you can group these things by natural relationships, or "outcomes". Sometimes you don't need to do all the items in an outcome in order to achieve it, and so this process can save you time in that you can cross off items you don't absolutely have to do. In this way you're thinking in terms of outcomes rather than individual "to-do list" items.

I use an old software version of this system, which I'm running on my laptop. However, since the laptop is somewhat bulky to carry around, and I don't want to spend a lot of money on ink and paper printing out my plans, I've revived one of my two old BlackBerry Torches, mainly to use as a time management tool because its memo area sorts memos alphanumerically. In this way I can have memos such as "Week of 2023 04 09", "Week of 2023 04 16", "Week of 2023 04 23" and so on. In each of these memos I place not only my week-specific captures, but also my profound musts as well, such as appointments and televised events, and reminders about preparatory logistics for certain things (for example, I have a doctor's appointment coming up in a month for which my mom will have to take readings of my blood pressure for a week).

Though my initial intent was not to use the BlackBerry as a phone any more, I ended up having to revive my old Toronto phone number last week when I tried logging into my CRA account to check the status of the processing of my income tax return and found that they wanted to send a text message to that number. When I set up my current Toronto number in January, I didn't entirely abandon the old one; for some reason Rogers wouldn't let me do that online, and now I'm glad they didn't. For all I know, I could have other accounts I don't log into all that often that are set up with my old Toronto number. Besides, since the old Toronto number is on the 416 area code, and such numbers are scarce, I had in the back of my mind the idea to buy airtime for it again anyway, but only once every few months, just to keep the number alive and keep it from being snatched by someone else.

Then it occurred to me that since I was now carrying three phones anyway—my two iPhone 8's and my BlackBerry—it made sense that I should simply take the SIM card for my old Toronto number and put it into the BlackBerry. Unfortunately, the SIM card had had to be trimmed down in size to fit into the iPhone, and as a result I needed an adapter to use the card in the BlackBerry—or so I thought. I tried what turned out to be an inadequate adapter, and ended up breaking the middle of three prongs that need to make contact with the SIM card in order for the card to be read properly. When the tech guy I spoke to told me about this, he recommended that I instead take the SIM card to be copied over into a full-sized card.

Fortunately, I had my other BlackBerry as a possible backup, but here's the rub. The BlackBerry I had been using, the one with the broken prong, had an app called Kool Sounds that allows me to assign certain sounds to certain system events such as my sliding the phone open and shut, turning the LCD on and off and so on. (I wish such an app existed for the iPhone!) Normally, during the BlackBerry's heyday, app installation could only be done by logging into BlackBerry World, which later shut down in January 2022. This meant I couldn't simply copy the app over to the other BlackBerry. There are apps on the Android market that allow you to copy apps to other Android phones, but assuming such an app ever existed for the BlackBerry platform, how would it be possible to get it now that BlackBerry World no longer existed? So now I was faced with the prospect of having to take that BlackBerry in for repairs. Or was I?

Last night I thought of connecting my BlackBerries one by one to an older computer that had the BlackBerry Desktop software. I thought perhaps I could simply back up the phone with Kool Sounds and "restore" the backup onto the other phone. But this had the effect of transferring just the data, not the apps. I then discovered that the Blackberry Desktop software includes a "swap device" feature. What that does is copy all the data, apps and all, from one phone into your computer so that you can take another phone, preferably initialized, and transfer all that stuff into it. So that's what I did. I did have to reprogram the sound assignments in the Kool Sounds app on the "new" phone, but for the most part I've got a fully functional phone again! And the bonus is that the "new" phone is in better shape than the "old" one, SIM card slot prongs and all. So all I need to do now is get the new SIM card programmed, and I'm good to go.

So it just goes to show that just because something is old, it doesn't mean you throw it away.

While going through my Facebook memories, I came across a post that I wrote five years ago today. It seems well worth sharing in its entirety:

Sometimes I wonder if I'm way too technically overqualified to do church music.

My background is in pop and jazz and to a lesser extent musical theatre, and the foundation of my experience has come from working in environments where the musicianship is high. On one occasion I was even compared with Jeff Healey and Ingrid Jensen—and I even got to work with them under none other than Tommy Banks. That kind of experience, that level of expectation that I have of the people I work with, is all part of my training, my instincts.

And yet here I am, doing a church music job that the people I work with—and even some of the congregation—seem to think does not require high musicianship. I beg to differ. If you don't give your all, you are doing a disservice not only to the people who hired you, but to God as well.

Ten years ago we had a choir director working in our parish who had observed that church music had been deteriorating over the previous several decades. As an example, he cited the less-than-reverent material of Reverend Carey Landry, particularly the material from his first Hi God! book, in contrast to more classical stuff such as Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring". But I think the deterioration of church music is for a broader range of reasons than that:

• In recent decades there has been a shift toward hiring amateur musicians, particularly guitarists, who can bring their own guitars. This is cheaper for a parish than paying for a pipe organ installation, which can cost in the tens of thousands of dollars, and then paying the continuing stipend for an organist.

• Contemporary church music tends to be written with "dumbed down" chord changes designed to cater to guitarists who know little more than the principal I-IV-V chords. In my view, such simplicity results in the music making less of a spiritual impact than it could because the chord changes are less musically interesting than they could be. I'm not saying church music ought to go all avant-garde harmonically—chords such as 13(♯11♭9) or the slash chords used by Randy Brecker, for example, are as much out of place in church music harmonic structures as Judy Collins would be in a heavy metal band—but there is some room to push the harmonic envelope a bit.

In my capacity as church organist I feel it's been my mission to reject these simplistic limitations and try to maximize the spiritual impact. This means making efforts to raise the musicianship bar and keep the musicianship high. Some people have come to me and said I don't need to do that, but I beg to differ. I don't want to do church music for the rest of my life—I have skills as a musician that church music by its very nature will not allow me to use—and so I have to consider my career as a whole, not just the church music aspect of it. If I lower my musicianship even a little, won't that undermine my musicianship level when it comes to gigs and services outside the church?

No one would ask a firefighter to dumb down and use a garden hose when the right tool for the job is a proper fire hose. No one would ask a soccer league to dumb down and use $20 soccer balls when their standard calls for balls costing much higher than that. No one would ask a producer of episodic TV to dumb down and hire unproven, un-agented writers only capable of writing dialogue so wooden you could fashion a Pinocchio puppet out of it. By the same token, if a musician has high standards, no one should expect him to lower them.

Given all that I have said and done, why don't I see people following that example? Time and time again I see guitarists leaving their guitar and/or music stands set up, or leaving loose sheet music lying around, or whatever, as if teardown were not as important as setting up. If and when I retire from church music, I'd love to see someone take over who will have the same commitment to maximizing the spiritual impact as I've had. Otherwise, the parish from which I retire as a church musician is going to find itself in a Big Yellow Taxi moment—"don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone?"

At that point I'm sure there will be comments along the lines of, "Weren't we lucky to find him?" Luck has nothing to do with it. The American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada and the Royal Canadian College of Organists have plenty of organists on their rosters who have high musicianship. All it takes is making calls to the right people—and being able to afford their services.

The only reason I'm still doing this church music job, even though its pay is not very lucrative, is that there's not much else out there for a musician in terms of steady work. There are local orchestras, sure, but they only have so many positions available, and anyway I've never been into orchestral music from the standpoint of playing it professionally. I've got original songs I've recorded and want to sell to the public. I want to experiment with synchronizing my music with MIDI-programmable lighting systems. I've got some musical ideas so "out there" that no church music environment would ever accept them (simple rhythms played visually via stage lamps anyone?). Where is the opportunity to grow as a musician when there's an erosion in people's expectations of the level of musicianship you should have?

Sorry if it seems I'm rambling here, but I feel there's more I should be recognized for than simply me showing up week after week to play the organ. There's a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff I do too, and a lot of stuff I'm capable of doing that too many people are unaware of. If I don't keep my standards high, then the quality of my music suffers. And I don't want that.

It seems I have one medical appointment after another these days. First, before the pandemic began, I developed an ulcer in my right foot, which I've been seeing a chiropodist to treat. It closed in January 2022, but this past January there was drainage again. I had an appointment on Tuesday to have the dressing changed. Then in recent weeks my legs have gotten swollen due to venous insufficiency; I had a followup appointment about that yesterday and now have to wear Coban wraps on them. As a result, I have to make arrangements to have them put back on every time I take a shower; this will be somewhat problematic given a high school reunion I have this weekend, but perhaps we can come up with a good plan in that regard when I get my dressing changed again tomorrow. In September I went in for day surgery to have some kidney stones removed, but the largest one turned out to be far too large and too compact to remove via the urethra, and so I went in for surgery in November so that my urologist could temporarily move my intestines aside for better access to the stones. The largest one turned out to be 21x16x13mm; my urologist said he hadn't seen a case like mine in over a decade, and would write up my case in a medical journal if he had the time. I have an appointment tomorrow to get a followup CT scan done: if the remaining stones turn out to be calcium oxalate and uric acid, I'll be given an outpatient nephrology referral.

I'm just hoping things will get back to normal soon. The medical community's tendency to plan time on a reactive basis is kinda at odds with the OPA Life Management system that I use. I prefer to have the "profound musts" set in stone for a given week before I do my time planning for that week, so that I can work everything else around them up front, rather than be given a new "profound must" at the last minute and then have to scramble to figure out how to squeeze it in. Unfortunately there's no "adherence" to guideline #2 when it comes to medical issues...

Well, after five or six weeks of going through tens of thousands of pages of old diary entries looking for old gig dates, I've finally completed the "past events" section of my website. The list there consists of those secular gigs for which I had dates on file already, or whose dates I was able to infer. Because I wanted it to emphasize my work outside the church, it does not include any of my church gigs except for those very few that either involve notable individals—e.g. Jean-Guy Villeneuve (Ottawa's first heart transplant recipient) or former Ontario MPP Yvonne O'Neill—or are otherwise notable for being of an unusual nature (such as a three-night retreat for which I did the music).

My primary outcome in having such a long, detailed list is simple. In my experience as a church organist it appears that the prevailing attitude is that the mere ability to sing or play a musical instrument, regardless of level of technical proficiency, is qualification enough to be a music minister. I have never accepted such a narrow view, feeling instead that professionals should always be hired in order to maximize the spiritual impact. I have long come to suspect that those who know me only for my work as a church organist are under the mistaken impression that church music is either all I'm capable of, or all I want to do. As a result, they are likely to be unaware that my background as a musician, and my aspirations thereas, are much greater than that, and that the standards I set as a musician are far higher than they suspect. This listing is intended to set the record straight. I've had people approach me about doing their wedding or their social event and then turn me down when I quote them my fee, which I've usually kept close to union scale. If they are among the group I just mentioned, it's hardly surprising. And it doesn't help that over the 140 years or so since the dawn of recorded music we as a society have become so conditioned to the "crutch of recording" that we have forgotten what music is truly worth.

A Midas Mufflers radio ad that aired in the Maritimes in the '80s made a good analogy: "If you need a plumber to do a nice, neat, water-tight job, you want a man with savvy, a man with experience. Same thing with mufflers," they said. It's also the same thing with musicians. With fifty years' worth of performance experience under my belt, this is the kind of musician that I am. It's not just the performance you're paying for—it's also the preparation the musician puts into it and all the administrative overhead he has to pay. I wrote a whole blog entry on that back in 2009. (And that was long before I created this website, which alone costs me US$140 a year. That kind of money is not going to grow on trees.)

A secondary outcome I have in presenting such a detailed list is to impress upon clients that there are times when I might have my hands in several pies, as it were. Back when I had my website on netscape.net, I included in it a set of guidelines for working with me, which started with an urging that I be booked early. As you can see in the 2013 section of my "past events" listing, for example, I was working in four ensembles that year on top of my work as a church musician—and it wasn't always easy for me to keep my schedule straight given that some of my bookings tended to be made close to the last minute. The more lead time I have available to prepare for a gig, the better my performance in the end. Time and time again I've had people come up to me at the last minute to provide me with vital gig information, which is rather unfair when you think of it. As J. Michael Straczynski, commenting on Claudia Christian's departure from Babylon 5, wrote, "You can't whipsaw the writing back and forth—is she in, isn't she in, maybe she is, maybe she isn't—and hope to have anything in shape to shoot." The same is true of repertory or logistical changes when it comes to a musical performance.

I'm looking to add a couple of sections to the website in the coming weeks. One of them will be a revival of the "Guidelines" page I just mentioned. Another will list a good sampling of the cover material that I do, although it will by no means be as detailed as it was on the netscape.net site. Given that I spent several weeks almost non-stop on the "past events" data, though, I want to take things at a slower pace again. Stay tuned!

As you can see, I've launched a new website—and a new domain! This will give me a lot more flexibility than webs.com was able to give me. Whereas before I was only able to update my old pages once in a blue moon, I intend to update this one at least once a week, generally on Thursdays. This News page includes all of my newsletters from prior websites going all the way back to February 2003, mainly to keep them all in one central place.

New entries will always appear first. Links to older websites or to their archive.org equivalents have been provided, except in cases where they were not archived fully on archive.org.

The Covid situation has hit musicians hard, and I am no exception. Though I collected CERB and CRB for several months, I consider that personal income, not professional. The pandemic resulted in St. Elizabeth's suspending their music ministry and subsequently starting up a guitar-based choir for their 10:30 mass. As a result, I have been playing at St. Augustine's exclusively ever since, primarily doing the 9:00 mass on Sundays while occasionally subbing at the 4:30 mass on Saturdays. When the Ontario government shut down nonessential services at the beginning of the pandemic, our choir at St. Augustine's was forced to go on hiatus for two years, but started up again in March of last year. Gradually, as restrictions were slowly lifted, things started returning to normal. Today, attendance is back to pre-pandemic normal, with some parishioners opting to continue wearing their masks. I wore mine for a while, but stopped once mask restrictions were lifted. I've since been tested for Covid and tested negative.

In the meantime, as a Type 2 diabetic, and considering a callus situation I am still nursing in my foot, my mom, a former RN, would not let me go around town on local transit. With secular music venues also shut down because of the pandemic, I decided to make the best use of the downtime by continuing on my digitization project—which I would have done anyway, pandemic or no pandemic. I finished processing the LPs, spent 67 weeks digitizing my videotapes, and then processed another batch of LPs that a friend of mine gave me after his parents died. I just completed that process just before Christmas, and am now doing my income tax prep for 2022. In the meantime, I've begun doing a general cleanup of my work environment, starting with shredding some old papers that I digitized years ago.

Still, I haven't been entirely inactive musically outside the church. Last spring I finished and fleshed out the arrangement for a new song called "So Surreal and Yet So Real", which is about the relationship between a human and an artificially intelligent chatbot. The future of artificial intelligence is here. Once I have my income tax prep done, I'll resume work on my music more or less full time.

I have also changed my Toronto phone number. Because the pandemic and my foot situation have kept me from travelling to Toronto, my old Toronto number, on a pay-as-you-go plan, accumulated lots of prepaid airtime over the first several months of the pandemic. However, it then started getting more and more phone spam from scammers, with the result that my airtime balance gradually dwindled down to just below $50. My plan at the time cost me 60¢ per minute of talk time or portion thereof, or per text message, and if a scammer left a message, not only did I have to pay to receive the message, but I would also have to pay to play it back. For a while I felt I had to hang onto the phone number for prestige, as it was in the 416 area code, phone numbers for which are rather scarce. But then I began to think that pretty well every assignable number in the 416 area code has been or will likely become the victim of phone spam at some time or other, and I had to face the question of which was more important, prestige or a reasonably spam-free phone number. So I set up a new number in the 647 area code on a different carrier with a different pay-as-you-go plan, where for just $5 more per month than I was paying before, I get 100 minutes of Canada-wide calling and unlimited texts. This, I feel, will provide far more value than the old plan. My old number will still remain active until February 15, after which point I will shut it down. So all in all, this is a time to start fresh. Stay tuned!