I've always been a city-dweller, and for most of my music-making days have lived in Vancouver. While I have also spent a great deal of time touring across all regions of Canada, I thought I'd focus on my hometown, which is where I end up doing most of my writing and recording.

Vancouver's urban landscape is a strange mix of ultra-modern condo complexes just blocks away from neighbourhoods full of houses more than 100 years old. In East Vancouver, we have the Commercial Drive area (where I live) and Strathcona, which are both communities with houses and buildings built primarily in the early part of the 20th century that have luckily survived, many of them restored to their former glory. However, if you look out your back window, and five minutes away, is Yaletown, perfectly visible because of the height of the ultra-modern apartments and condos that are springing up daily in one of the most densely populated per-capita areas in North America. This mix of modern/vintage styles is certainly reflected in the music that I write and play. Like the city of Vancouver, for better or for worse, these different aesthetics co-exist side by side. I tend to favour antique instruments that produce unique and strange sounds, and this combined with modern recording techniques and more contemporary sounds makes for an interesting mix in my mind. I'd like to think that the contradictions in the architecture and urban landscape here in Vancouver have been an inspiration to the music I write and record.