Created by Linda MacDonald and Rebecca McIntosh
VIDEOS
Linda has always dreamed that the music that she and Bruce created would be able to find people who would appreciate and enjoy it. With the help of some technology and hard work, hopefully these videos will expand the audience for this excellent music.
VIDEO: ANIMUS FUGIT
Album: ...Being of Sound, Mind & Spirit...
This song was an experiment, of which we did only one take, because when I asked later, Bruce said, How am I ever going to remember or reconstruct what I played? What an interesting guitar part! It was lots of fun spontaneously singing my poem to that! I thought I was calling this poem, “life flies” (including the arthropod pun in translation), but it turns out my Latin is not very good - Animus Fugit means “My Mind Fled”. That mistake was a keeper!
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VIDEO: SASKATCHEWAN SONG
Album: The Road
Convalescing with a serious long term illness in AB, yearning for a holiday of my own while family took a holiday to Bright Sands Lake Saskatchewan, some good old memories of living and travelling in SK as a (healthy) child combined with the fanciful names I could see on the SK roadmap - Unity, Reward, and Forget!! My dramatic imagination listening to some of Bruce's riffs and sound clips during that late night thunder storm turned it all into this story. The word Saskatchewan comes from the Cree word for the Saskatchewan River, and means "fast flowing water". I hope people from Saskatchewan will hear the tribute in the bridge: Home!
Album: Well Healed
VIDEO: TROUBLED TIMES
This is the one of three songs I have written as a direct response to my experience of social isolation due to being severely chronically Ill. Yes, I tend to write in a way that allows the song to be generalizable to other people's situations. Be it poverty, illness, unemployment, disaster, or any other reason for extreme vulnerability, what can I say? Love me anyway! And love each other....please.
VIDEO: JONNY K
Album: ...Being of Sound, Mind & Spirit...
I often write songs with more than one event in mind, and intend many possible interpretations by others. This started out as a tribute to a brave young UK man who allowed the last weeks and months of his painful life to be filled to the documentary about a rare and terrible skin disorder called EB. His name was Jonny Kennedy, he lived and died in England a short few years ago. This is also a song which I would like to see serve as a tribute and comfort to soldiers and others who have been victims of PTSD due to the terrible emotional effects of war.
VIDEO: FOR THE LOVE
Album: Life Behind These Bars
“All creation still unspent, Blithely sings her song of Lent To the gold, bird-whistle dawn Only for the love of You” A song for anyone sacrificing something important for the sake of something precious which few could be expected to comprehend. Vaughn Edwards (Halifax) is doing that luscious guitar-playing; Jonathan Edwards (Ottawa) lends mystical electric guitar for effect. I told these talented brothers that together they constituted “the Edwards Effect” - a special effect indeed.
VIDEO: THE TOKEN - NO. 2 SONG
Album: Past, Present, Tense (sic)
Sometimes we think that a great opportunity is presenting itself, if we can but find the point of compromise, when really it is just another stranger taking a cab. Imagine this song as I did when I wrote it - with a full arrangement including an English collier band!
VIDEO: SARAH SAID
Album: Behind These Bars
Sarah Said is from the solo album Life Behind These Bars by Linda MacDonald. "I had a historical CD by songstress Sarah Vaughn and it was entitled “Trouble is a Man”. I heartily agree with this statement (- gotta love ‘em)! Three of the duo songs were recorded by me with musicians I enlisted while Bruce was on hiatus. I subsequently dubbed the virtual group I had enlisted, the Trans-Canada Express! Musicians in Edmonton, Sherwood Park, and Ottawa contributed, on recording equipment in their own locations. There was no live take! Love modern technology and the internet!" - Linda MacDonald
VIDEO: ALL OVER THE WORLD
Album: Age of Everything
Darfur was in the news; I was watching a lot of Doc Zone independent films including one about a project in Thailand which taught children of prostitutes how to use a camera, perchance to become photographers, and sought to develop the self esteem needed for them to choose other paths in life. Bruce started spontaneously playing chords and singing this haunting melody at one practice. It inspired these lyrics, an anthem to the disenfranchised and vulnerable everywhere.
VIDEO: PEOPLE CAN'T HELP IT
Album: Life Behind These Bars
“They say the same thing every day; the same distractions in a different way – they say ‘it’s going’ but it’s going too slow, ‘cause people can’t help it you know!” This song speaks for itself: Everyday life interacting with fellow humans, in a nutshell. Bruce Matichuk sings scat and harmonies, and plays guitar and bass on this one.
VIDEO: ANOTHER LIFE
Album: ...Being of Sound, Mind & Spirit...
Inspired by life stories told me by Alin Rogoz, a brilliantly creative and masterful multi-instrumentalist originally from Romania, whom I met at a jam session on my birthday in April 2000. He had brought his fret-less electric bass to the Celtic jam, so I invited him to accompany me as I sang a Scottish Gaelic song, Alainn Dunn, otherwise sung a Capella. At the time, he was (amazingly) writing songs that sounded like Pink Floyd (a group he admitted he had not heard- younger generation) and adjusting to complicated family life in Canada. Meanwhile, totally amazed at his creativity, I had no inkling of the song-creating career ahead of me. In another life, I would have been in a band with Alin, I am sure! 😉
by Carlos ZGZ - Click for Flickr page
by State Library of New South Wales
by Evelyn Berg - Click for Flickr page
VIDEO: PARALYZER
Album: Life Behind These Bars
I wrote these lyrics with images of the mid 1990's war and genocide in Bosnia-Serbia-Croatia in mind. Out shopping for hair conditioner one day in the early 2000's, I was served by a woman with an accent distinctive to the language and geography in question. I recognized it because I had taught English as a second language pronunciation for three years in the 1990s. The war there had been happening during that time, and we had heard a lot about the atrocities. One of my teaching coworkers was from there, as well. So when the woman who served me seemed unusually distracted, with closed body language and perhaps inexplicably grumpy, I could not help but let my imagination run freely over the creases on her aging, once-pretty face, and merge it with the familiar accent I heard. The result was a grim and dramatic salute to those - and indeed all - victims of rape and violence in war.
VIDEO: TRIUMPH
Album: Past, Present, Tense (sic)
A fresh take on an age-old theme: this time the lovers thwart the queen and her army, the young man abandons his duty and the war fought against his love's family, and they run off to be together! Much fun was had by all in the making of this song and its video! For,the video: Special thanks to my nieces Erin and Laura, and to Agnes and her son Lars, and my parents Marie and Lloyd (who acted as drivers, stagehands and more)! Without each of them, these charming role-playing video clips could not have been made! A real family and group effort! The beautiful garden shed we used as a hideaway for the young lovers was created and built without a blueprint by Agnes Melax; the "queen's" tree house by Agnes, her sister Hannah Noerenberg and their father Harald Noerenberg; and the queen's costume was created and sewn without a pattern by Marie MacDonald as a Renaissance costume for Linda in the 1980's. "The Northern Hemisphere autumn night sky in velvet" backdrop was created by Linda MacDonald. This video brought together decades of art and creativity, and engaged three generations of family and friends!! A triumph indeed!
VIDEO: RADIO SONG
Album: Chaos Chronicles
Who's even heard of a radio? Indeed... It got me thinking, all the new technology, new media options, whether the newer generations would use radios. So I delved into the radio, from its science and history to its popular social and even secret uses. Turns out it's not going anywhere! Love Bruce's cool casual chords!
VIDEO: SEARCHLIGHT
Album: Past, Present, Tense (sic)
It was 2014 and I was listening to the news, reflecting that what had started out as a hopeful peaceful, popular revolution inspired by the orange revolution in Ukraine several years before, was now an all out war in Syria. I was - and remain - aggrieved. This is a song for the people of Syria but also for all the people in the world facing violence and uncertain futures due to geopolitical conflict. The Crescent and the Cross are the Red Crescent and the Red Cross, respectively. Though like most of my lyrics there is more than one meaning engineered into these lines. - Linda
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VIDEO: IT'S BEEN TOO LONG
Album: Chaos Chronicles
Like so many of these videos, the music is a homegrown take from a practice session. The original intended genre was: Have you ever seen the movie "the blues Brothers"? Remember Aretha Franklin saying "Think"? It was my intention in this song to create a "scolding song". :-) The intended genre was originally heavy metal, or hard rock, but it could also be done justice in a blues style or else as a country song. Strangely, the only style I was not thinking of when I wrote my lyrical response to Bruce's sassy sound clip, is the one we used when we sang it: folk! Like so many of these videos, the recording is a homegrown take from a practice session, not a studio recording. Rebecca did her usual brilliant job interpreting the lyrics and feel into something very entertaining! A friendly scolding in the folk vein! What Cani (sic) say? Life is "ruff"!
