Joel Fountain

Well, after a year and a half with the house band at Joe’s apartment, the club has decided to go in a new direction (more DJ, less band) and we are no more. It’s been a fun ride and I’ve loved playing drums and singing there every weekend, but I’m rather looking forward to having the weekends free to work on some new projects, both of my own and with some friends. Although it might take a while for my weekends to be that busy again!

I do have some new songs I will share with you soon….

I also have a few fun gigs this summer, most notably for the Vancouver Jazz Festival with the ribcage trio on Granville Island June 28th.
And also June 28th with Big Buck at El Barrio and June 25th with Steve Smith.

Here are a couple fun videos I found from a concert last year with Denzal Sinclaire, Chris Gestrin, André Lechance, and James Danderfer. Hope you enjoy them!

I just got back from a bit of a break visiting my family in New Zealand. Was great and a bit hectic as families often are, but always lovely to visit NZ in the summertime and hang with old friends.
Since my return I’ve been playing a lot of drums (Maybe too much?:). I’m still at Joe’s Apartment on Granville st singing and drumming Thursday & Saturday nights of course and I love it, but also lots more recording sessions for people both inside and outside of my studio Vintage Digital. I have finally launched my own ‘online’ or ‘virtual’ drum tracking business and here is a link to some details, or simply click above on “drum tracking.” I have a great set up here at my studio so I’m pretty excited about it. I’ve been doing a number of projects this month for various artists; from Jazz to contemporary orchestral to Punk Rock. It’s actually been a ton of fun and I really enjoy it. Now that I have written a lot of my own music and worked as a songwriter, I have such a different (and perhaps more economical) approach to drumming than I did say 10 years ago. I really enjoy working and coming up with the ‘best’ (or most musically fitting) part I can for a song.

MY next plan is to get some more content on the website and finish up a bunch of music I’ve been writing and working on. It all takes time I guess and the balance between practical (paying the bills) and creative projects (songwriting- which I WISH payed the bills) is continuing to be somewhat elusive, however I AM getting better at it! I never quite realized how much work it is being a musician until lately. Keeping up with practicing, writing, recording, business, websites, video, content, media, press, gigs, and taxes!
There is that word again. Every year it haunts me. There is nothing more I love to put off doing than taxes. Part of it is the accounting and part of it is the realization of just how little income I make relative to the price of real estate (or rent) in Vancouver.

So….that is all for now, and I hope you are getting better at it too. The balance between heart and mind, that is. 🙂

Joel

It’s been a really busy August here with lots of cool gigs with the awesome band headwater, and with the house band ‘The Roomates’ down at Joe’s apartment on Granville street every weekend.

I’m pretty excited about September though as I will be starting my own weekly gig at a little pizza joint called Goldies. It doesn’t look like much from the outside but it’s a really cool venue as they have a whole basement area with a grand piano and a stage and nice couches and tables, and they serve great pizza and drinks of course! I’ll be there every Tuesday starting in September and continuing for the rest of the fall. If you ‘like’ me on facebook I can keep you better informed of all the details!

Other than that, I’ve been very busy working with Columbia on their new track ‘the time’ for their upcoming music video, and also getting busy beginning to promote my new album!

Thanks for stopping by. Here is another track from ‘Lindsay’s song’

I just returned from playing a few music festivals up North (Atlin BC and Whitehorse in the Yukon) with the great band headwater. It was a lot of fun and the weather up in the Yukon was beautiful! We have not had much sun over here in Vancouver (unlike the rest of North America right now), probably one of the coldest/wettest summers on record. A bit strange really.

Atlin is a great place to visit and there are a few cool pictures of the show here.

I’m getting started posting my music on youtube. I’ve been meaning to post more live footage but caught a bit of a bad flu after returning home from gigs so had not had much of a voice to sing unfortunately. but soon there will be plenty!

As always…check out the CD!!!

OK, so after an incredible wait my CD is finally here in my hands! It’s a pretty big deal. For me at least.  You can listen to samples of all the tracks for free right here on this page! Or if you like you can go here right now and check it out and you can listen to full length songs and Buy the CD. Just promise me if you listen to a song ALL the way through you will buy it. 🙂 Or even better, buy the whole CD, simply because It was really designed as a total work to be listened to all the way through. All the tracks ‘crossfade’ into each other, so if you just buy just one song you will hear the intro/outro of the previous/next song. Sorry, but this is how it is, and how I like it. 🙂 Also, the CD looks flipping amazing! Better than I ever could have imagined. The pictures were taken by the wonderful Laurence Winram and they look ridiculously good and you NEED to see them printed on the CD. In fact I hope to get some t-shirts soon with the print as I love it so much. Ok just to clarify, I don’t only love it because it’s me standing there on a beach in Scotland in a suit holding a cool archaic looking megaphone, it’s just a great photo that he made using an improvised tilt/shift lense, which is basically a lense that he used duct tape to attach to the camera so he could freely manipulate the angle of focus.

Check it out! Do it now! Do it!