Daniel Sky

Engaged in a conversation with an Englishman on a bar stool in a pub somewhere off the coast of British Columbia, it was the end of the summer of my 20th birthday, the last leg of a cross-Canada theatre festival tour and the first time (in the Kerouacian sense of the term) that I was ‘on the road.’We were talking about music; and it was conversation that changed my life.“Ya man, I think I wanna learn to play guitar,” I heard my voice echo in the pint glass. The words fell out of my mouth like the island rain wrapping on the stained glass window, and with the precision of one of Apollo's arrows my English friend revealed a guitar in a dilapidated case that he had resting by his feet beneath the bar.“Hey mate, you can have this one if you want. I picked it up in a pawn shop in Saskatoon and I'm flying back home tomorrow, I really don’t want the extra baggage. I have one at home you see. How about sixty dollars?”Lightning flashed and a smile streaked across the landscape of my face as I sunk my hands into my old jeans pocket like little hungry naked toes nestling themselves into dry warm sand, and fished around for what was left of the take from the days performance at the festival.“Hey man, is fifty okay? Its all I have.”“Sure, mate. Sounds like serendipity to me.”I thanked him and I think he understood.“He said, “remember mate, life spirals.” Then he disappeared into the august rain and I have never seen him since.I love the theatre, the way it smells, real magic lives there. You go in feeling one way and come out feeling another. Sometimes elated sometimes heavy but different. Like magic. I remember childhood dreams of being an actor. So I went to theatre school in the big city and it was in Toronto (the year before that fated barstool conversation) where I was inadvertently turned on to the alchemy of songwriting by the folk blues duo, The Undersirables. I would go and see them play at near by college street bar. The images they conjured and the passion they exhibited spoke to my soul, it was just like the theatre, but it was rock n’ roll.So I learned. And I wrote. And I played. And I wondered.I left the pub that night with a new destiny. I was going to become a songwriter. I have had many adventures on the road since then and eight years, 3000 miles, and a few guitars later I recorded my first record “On The Round” (in the Kerouacian sense of the term) produced by David Baxter at Knob and Tube Studios in Toronto in the summer of my 29th birthday.I was born in Winnipeg Manitoba, I've lived in the Rocky mountains, and on the west coast (and off the west coast) in small places and big places. I currently reside in the west end of Toronto, a Canadian musical mecca, and I am happy to be working on my second album to be produced by Derek Downham called “Phantasmacoeuria” (a word I think I invented meaning, ghosts of the heart).Remember mate, life spirals.