MAJICAL CLOUDZ

June 14th — Toronto — NXNE, first show

The show we played last night was in Toronto at Sneaky Dee’s. We were on the bill at 2am, listed as a “special guest” whose identity was not revealed until 10pm.

In the morning the announcements were made for the Polaris Prize long list, and we were nominated. I was watching a live feed of the announcements and the signal lagged right when they were about to announce bands beginning with “M”. After we had flown to Toronto and were waiting for the ferry to cross over to the mainland from Toronto island someone turned and asked me, “are you the Majical Cloudz?” and it was Steve Jordan, the founder and director of the Polaris Prize. Canada is indeed a small world.

We were in the city walking around and killing time from about 5:30pm onward. At 9pm I went to see my friend Matt’s band Psyche Tongues perform at Blk Box. I wanted to see some other performances but didn’t end up making it anywhere.

As the night went on I could feel my voice slowly deteriorating and by the time we went on at 2am I knew my voice was not going to last the entire performance. My feeling about the show was that it was less of a legitimate musical performance and more of a spectacle, where the audience gets to witness the physical destruction of the singer as the set goes on. The audience sat on the floor and I sat with them and it felt better, less like I was bombing onstage and more like I was just doing the best that I could for people who didn’t seem to mind whether I could sing or not.

My voice has been impaired with a constant cold for nearly a month now. The more difficult it is to sing, the less it feels like I am a “singer” when I am onstage. It feels more like my job is to translate emotions onstage for the audience — having a working voice means I can do that by hitting the notes, but when I don’t have a working voice I need to find some other way of doing that. Maybe this is a mistaken idea of what it means to be a musician, but when I’m onstage and can’t sing I’m not really a musician anymore — I’m more like a general “performer”.