Wednesday, February 29, 2012

From Keynote Speaker to Indie Opener

Saturday was an interesting day. I started off bright and early for Cornwall in a pretty nasty snowstorm, to give the keynote speach at the Ecofarm Days conference. I was rather impressed by how many people made the trek through the inclement weather to make it.

The topic I was asked to speak about was Beau's experience in using company culture to turn employees into teammates and customers into fans. I know, very sporty analogies, but I had a lot of fun and Jordan made lots of funny slides to show along side. The translator was way more animated than I was, and I think that was the highlight was watching him say in French what I had just said in English, but with the most expressive and animated gestures imagineable. It reminded me of the Simpsons episode where the English soccer broadcaster very calmy tells the audience that the player is holding the ball and the Spanish announcer is going nuts over the same thing.

Rather than describe it in too much detail, here is an article on the talk: http://www.standard-freeholder.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=3483672

After that I went back home, changed out of the suit and into jeans and a workshirt, and started loading up gear to play the first gig in my new band, Audio. I've been writing and playing with two of our brewers, Kevin James (who used to play bass in Trigger Happy and Bender) and Andrew Bartle (from the Natural Shocks and a bunch 0f other bands). We were playing at one of our accounts, The Dominion Tavern and opening for K-Man and the 45's, fronted by my good friend Kristen McNulty.

The turn out was great, we played pretty good considering it was our first show (I broke a string and made a few mistakes, but no showstoppers) and got a pretty favourable reaction. It was a really fun event and was really cool to be belting out tunes again. Also fun was being on two different stages for two very different reasons (also funny was I was drinking beer on stage while playing music and was not drinking beer while on stage talking about beer).

I'd add the link of the newspaper article on how awesome our show was, but for some reason, I can't find any ;)

Cheers!