Lesley Choyce & the Surf Poets

Lesley Choyce & the Surf Poets have recorded two CDs: Sea Level and Long Lost Planet. The band also released four spoken word music videos. Their most recent recording is Courage at Midnight.Click here to view Surf Poet videos on YouTube.com.At the heart of the Surf Poets was a creative cocktail of three great elemental forces of the universe: music, poetry and surfing. While we did not emulate old surf music from the sixties, we did have an underpinning of surf language, surf stories and surfer philosophy that carries the intellectual weight of the band's "message." And I decided early on that our songs should mostly have just two or three chords repeated over and over. I get easily confused by too many chord changes.Like all bands, ours has evolved. We began in the basement of a recording studio on Gottingen Street in Halifax, six blocks up from Halifax Harbour. Halifax is the biggest surf town on the east coast of Canada, even though many people in Nova Scotia will still state with inaccurate bravado that "Nobody surfs in Nova Scotia." Some ideas die hard and I think it's a generational thing. What they really mean is, "Nobody surfed in Nova Scoita in the nineteenth century." Which was probably mostly true -- the exception being the odd Mi'kmaq canoeist who put to sea and then caught a wave back to the beach on a warm summer day.But people do surf in Nova Scotia and they also create surf poetry and record it on CDs for public consumption. This occurs even though there is a minuscule audience of surf poetry in Canada and in spite of the fact that many Nova Scotians believe there is no surfing in Nova Scotia. In truth, most Canadians would tell you that there is no surfing in all of Canada. The problem there is that most Canadians live hundreds of miles from the three oceans.If you'd like to pick up a copy of the Surf Poet CDs, they are distributed by Nimbus Publishing. To order with your credit card, you can call them toll free 1-800-NIMBUS9 (1-800-646-2879).Lesley Choyce is a writer, poet, musician and playwright in Nova Scotia, Canada. He is the author of more than 65 books. ... Lesley Choyce.comOther sites for Lesley Choyce: MySpace.com/LesleyChoyce || LesleyChoyce.blogspot.com

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