O'mally successfully grilled a tender rack of lamb (raised on Meg's family farm) on a sailboat moored off of Pender Island! We hopped on board a leg of The Stowaway's wind powered tour, starting out at the Campbell Bay Music Fest, where our friend Jen hooked up a propane fired deep fryer and made deep fried vegan coconut ice cream in the field. The deep fryer ended up on the three-boat sail tour, and kept us all well greased. By day three O'mally had reverted to quinoa salad, and had also spotted porpoises, been spun around in a whirlpool, and learned some new old-time tunes.

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Some mushroom tarts, fiddleheads, braised lamb and fresh grilled trout later, I'd say we're back in the game. Good work, North Ontario! We've been augmenting our rich dinners with endless spinach salads and spinach salad wraps in the car. We're headed to Montreal tomorrow, for a show and a video shoot, and we're picking up David Simard to share the Maritimes portion of the tour with us...

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Well, O'mally's culinary adventures have mellowed out considerably since hitting Manitoba, which is probably a good thing in the long run. As good as the seared scallop croquettes, caviar, bourguignon and homemade perogies were, we... actually never mind. Western Canada rocks. Eastern Canada, I have high expectations!

We ran around a ghost town in deep south Saskatchewan, accidentally got jobs on our day off, got to see a great convocation of touring friends in Saskatoon, and spent a night in our friends' cabin half an hour hike in from Falcon Lake, MB. We're three weeks in and a little tired, but taking our time across North Ontario with lots of shows on the way.

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We are on day 4 of our 2-month, cross-Canada spring tour, and we've already been fed fresh goose eggs, wild mushrooms and seriously the best grilled salmon. Things are going well. We had to say goodbye to our beloved Westfalia, and are now touring in a grown-up car that eats the Rocky Mountains for breakfast. The new car has sweet modern features like heat, and the old one has a love song dedicated to it that's been recorded for the next album...

Our video of Timber Timbre's song Demon Host is on the photo & video page for your viewing pleasure, and there are a whole pile of new show dates up over here. Go check 'em out!

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O'mally congregated on Mayne Island in early March for a photo and video shoot with Rob Alder in Meg's beautiful wooden shack/house building project thinger. We were over there during the recording of Dave Newberry's new album at Fiddlehead Studios, and there may or may not have been a party. Now we're counting down the last month before heading out on our spring coast-to-coast Canadian tour, and looking forward to seeing old friends and visiting some new places on the way! Elise recently bought a viola, and is trying to figure out how people who normally play multiple instruments make it through doorways.

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Meg and Elise went on a field trip to a very pleasant oyster bar at the tail end of December, where we had teensy local bay oysters, fresh grilled trout, a saffron-laden boulliabase and brandied chestnut soup. Earlier in December we played a great show at the Biltmore in Vancouver, as a trio with Adam Iredale-Gray on guitar and upright bass. Dear Biltmore, we love your big 'ol sound system!

January 2011 saw us exploding into a five-piece band for some really fun shows at the Railway Club in Vancouver and the Fort St Cafe in Victoria, adding Colin Nealis on upright bass, and Nick Stecz and Jake Jenne on drums on their respective landmasses. We're headed back into Fiddlehead studios in the first week of February to track some new songs with Jake and Colin, which are building upon the live recordings we did in November.... Meg recently learned how to make pho, and Elise created some vegan sausage rolls, or so she says.

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Autumn 2010 was the Tour Of The Borschts. We dined upon Jesse Dee's marvelous borscht in Toronto, Zachary Lucky made us Zumma borscht in Saskatoon, we had another shredded beet variety in Saskatchewan and my grandpa served us a tasty homegrown one when we stopped in unexpectedly in Salmon Arm. On making it back to Mayne Island I found a couple of scraggly beets that had survived the rains in my garden, and made a rich caramelly version of my own.

Oh and we played shows! Some highlights were opening for Rae Spoon in Peterborough, and a Halloween show at the Standard in Winnipeg that our friends in the Totally Bodacious Inland Surfers of Manitoba threw. We convoyed with Scott Cook for a couple of Northern Ontario dates, and had pancakes at the Hoito on the way out of Thunder Bay. Hoito pancakes = best reward for a long hard drive.

-Elise

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Upcoming radio dates!

We will be performing live on air on CFFF 92.7 in Peterborough on October 22nd at 5:30pm local time. We'll play some new songs, talk about the tour and tell y'all to come to that evening's show at the Spill with Rae Spoon.

Also listen for us around Saskatoon at 2:30pm local time on November 3rd, when we play on CFCR 90.5 FM...

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Before starting the tour proper, Meg and I spent a few days cabin-hopping in lake country around the Ontario / Quebec border. One one stop a friend of ours went out fishing in a rowboat, and came back with a fine fat lake bass in a bucket. He had always been a catch-and-release fisher, and none of us had ever killed a fish, although it was agreed that you probably should do it yourself if you were going to go around eating them. Eventually I declared that if someone else would kill it, I would gut it. It took a couple hours of intermittent approaches to the bucket, but in the end the deed was done, and there I was with some vague knowledge of fish anatomy and a very dull knife. I turned the impossibly irridescent thing over a few time, finally rallied around the memory of a very good lake bass meal recently eaten in ottawa, and cut its head off. Well, attempted to. The very dull knife didn't get me very far, and </gory details>. Suffice it to say Meg and I both had some gory times, and wound up with beautiful fillets - it was late night by then, so we saved them for morning, dredged them lightly in flour and fried them for breakfast. Great success!

-Elise

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October 19th, 2010

We had a blast at OCFF, and are currently recovering in Toronto before trucking around for some shows between here and Montreal with Faye Blais. Then we're picking up Adam and Ryan of Fish & Bird in Ottawa, they'll be with us on upright bass and electric guitar for the westward leg. Excited to have a full band sound for this tour! We'll be going into studio on Mayne Island once we hit the coast, to record some new tunes we're polishing up on the road...

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The summer tour involved more of me pushing the van around than the spring one had... a small problem stumped us and a series of Western Canada's finest mechanics for a while, but we beat it in the end! We jumped in some nice rivers (Ashton Creek wins for best jumping bridge), drove through Rogers Pass three times, played some great shows - some of them shared with our friends Sarah Burton and Faye Blais - and have regretted not trying the Coffee Crusted Elk Tornadoes in Field ever since we drove away.

-Elise
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The spring CD release tour is over, and we're busy booking the summer trips... Speck was very well received everywhere we brought it, even hitting #3 on the Earshot NATIONAL Folk/Roots/Blues charts (week of May 18)! Windsor and Lethbridge kindly bumped us to #1 on their folk charts, and we promise we'll come visit next tour.

Bass Player Dan had his first ever poutine in Montreal, and Fiddle Player Elise had her first ever steak in Calgary. O'mally invented the Meatarrito in Toronto, but we won't go into that. We did a radio interview over the phone while pulled over in a mucky field at the side of a Saskatchewan highway in a windstorm, were well fed by wonderful people, got snowed on in our shorts, spoke a lot of bad French, listened to a lot of sweet music, and travelled with three different varieties of maple syrup. Favourite destination goes to Palmer, SK, pop. 20. If you're ever there, go to church! The green Westfalia was remarkably well-behaved, and I only had to push it around the corner once...

-Elise