I hope the first week of 2025 has got your year off to a good start.
I spent New Year’s Eve the same way I spent Christmas: playing a show in Whistler, B.C. I’ve had this NYE gig for the last 3-4 years. It’s an acoustic quartet show, in a multi-floor venue, for an audience of 50 children. Our music is piped upstairs to the adults who enjoy a roast dinner while the show happens on the ground floor in front of the macaroni and cheese table.
The kids wander into the room, full of restlessness, gravitating toward the tables piled high with various size and pitch of party horn. In their plastic top hats and oversized glasses with the coming year bursting like fireworks from the frame, they totter around the room, sometimes wandering, sometimes chasing, sometimes doing what resembles a wild and highly personal style of breakdance1. And as we play our versions of pop and RnB classics, they blow loud, avant-guard party horn solos over every ensuing number.
It might just be my favourite gig of the year.
Kids let you know pretty quickly if they like what you’re playing. When they like it, you are no longer the show—the show unfolds before you:
Complete inhibition; shy fascination; budding social dynamics; lonely corner kids; light-beams of joy; and wrestling…there is a lot of wrestling.
So that was a good chunk of my New Year’s. And to fulfill another New Year tradition, I wanted to once again ask you, dear reader, to request a song you’d like to hear me play/cover. A song that will cheer you up, or keep you in a good mood if you are already there.
Some of the fulfilled requests from previous years:
Chicago - Sufjan Stevens
Somewhere - from West Side Story (Bernstein + Sondheim)
With A Little Help From My Friends - Beatles
Late Night Talking - Harry Styles
Say Say Say - MJ and Paul McCartney
Admittedly, I wasn’t as productive with request fulfillment last year so I hope to remedy that.
The request line is open! ☎️
Leave a comment with whatever it is you’d like to hear. I can’t promise I’ll get to everything but I will do my best. I look forward to receiving your suggestions.
Wishing you health, peace and joy this New Year.
love,
David
And yet, somehow, the worm never falls out of fashion.
Wind Beneath my Wings. Sometimes a person just needs to cry and this one always does it!
Follow The Sun by Xavier Rudd - a song that comforts me with its simple reminder.