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Plays: 1659
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Official Site: www.joelmusic.com
iSound Site: www.isound.com/joel_van_vliet
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| Joel sat in the Pearson International airport clutching a CD player. Inside the player spun Tom Waits newest album Real Gone that Joel had just purchased. Just slightly overshadowing the excitement of listening to his favourite artists new creation, which promised to be uniq |
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Joel sat in the Pearson International airport clutching a CD player. Inside the player spun Tom Waits newest album Real Gone that Joel had just purchased. Just slightly overshadowing the excitement of listening to his favourite artists new creation, which promised to be unique, eccentric and raw, was the anticipation of the flight to British Columbia, a place Joel had only been once before.
The attendant requested the seniors and mothers with small children to board the plane. Joel was a bit annoyed that she interrupted Tom Waits, but forgave her knowing she was only doing her job. As Joel watched the oldest and the youngest of the passengers enter the gate, he knew he would soon follow them onto the plane that would take him over 5000 km away from home.
The flight was relatively painless. Joel flipped through the in flight radio stations disappointed that he couldnt find any David Bowie, T Rex or Ryan Adams, so he just enjoyed the songs he found by The Beatles, Leonard Cohen and Cat Stevens. The problem with listening to music on a plane, Joel found, was that he started wishing that he was home in his studio, paper strewn around him on the floor, creating something sweet and timeless, strumming his acoustic or pressing the white/yellow keys of his old stalwart Heintzman.
As Joel exited the plane in Vancouver International Airport, he wondered if this new world would be an inspiring environment for the recording of his long awaited debut album, Stand. The beautiful landscape that greeted him, the glistening water, the looming mountains, were a strange new backdrop for him to develop himself and his music in strange new ways. The way that the rural areas turned into city streets and the city streets turned into mountainous tree lined roads with such flawless transitions, paralleled Joels desire to move in and out of genre and mood smoothly and still maintain autonomy.
As Joel traveled around British Columbia, he never could find any familiar places, though he had been there once before. In 2000 Joel joined a choir group known as the Canadian Continentals, which traveled across Canada and to Australia. After an evening of auditions for solo parts, Joel walked away with one of the main solos in the show and a duet. Joels memory of the tour is bittersweet. His love for performance made each night exciting, yet his creative longing to write and perform his own material in his own idiom proved to wear on him.
After the tour, Joel used his experience as a performer to acquire his own shows where he lived in the Niagara Region. Niagara Falls kept him busy with a great number of shows, sometimes 6 nights a week allowing him to be exposed to tourists from all over the world and hone his performance skills musically. Joel also developed his ever-present offbeat sense of humour, which he combined with his diverse selection of cover songs to create a one of a kind, quirky brand of showmanship.
Now back in BC, with all that behind him, Joel began work on recording his album. With the help of a resident BC drummer, bassist Greg Zack of Oliver Black and mixing artist Bill Buckingham, Joel created Stand, a collection of great songwriting up till that point in his young life.
A year prior to the recording of Stand, Joel had visited Elaine Overholt in Toronto. Elaine was the vocal coach to Richard Gere, Catharine Zeta-Jones and Rene Zellwegger on the remarkable film Chicago. Elaine fell in love with Joel and his music upon hearing such songs performed in her studio as Rockets, Heaven and Yay-yo. She enjoyed it so much that when she was interviewed for an article that appeared in the Globe and Mail she said about him, I had a guy in here last week. . . incredibly developed. Plays piano. Sings like a dream. He had an inner voice I'd never heard before. A huge heart. A record company would love that package.
With such accolades afforded him, Joel continued to write with his out of the box mentality. Finishing the albums track listings with songs like Little Johnny Paint Can and Drugs his first strange new work could be realized.
The months in BC very quickly became heavy in Joels heart. The gray skies that never poured, but always dripped and the sun that hid itself behind the great gray blanket of cloud made him feel depressed at times. The winter months that rarely snowed, Christmas without his family made BC feel like a cold tomb in which his inspiration was doomed to die. This feeling of loneliness and isolation brought to him some beautifully sad songs and one or two lovely odes to home.
Through those months Joel worked on his forthcoming piece Rockets, a conceptual work based on the popular track on Stand, about the end of the world and having to go on when everyone you ever knew is gone. He also finished work on his next album, also a conceptual work called Mad Scientist PHD the story of a Scientist who was misunderstood and considered insane by even his closest friends. But not only sobering ideas came through this time, wonderful songs about change and home like Ontario Snow and Bring us Springtime which will be found on Melodycka another album in the pipeline.
Joel left British Columbia knowing that the experience had been one that he would never forget and that it had brought with it incredible growth and fantastic fortune. He longed for his own space, quiet intimate moments with him and his piano and that beautiful Ontario snow.
Back in Ontario Joel has been recording the over the top, semi theatrical Mad Scientist PHD, in his home studio. Hours upon hours are spent pouring over electric and acoustic guitar parts, piano tracks, digital noises, layers of vocals, constantly changing tempos and keys, the smashing of electric appliances and the telling of one insane story. See www.myspace.com/madscientistphd for pictures and stories.
Joel has begun appearing again on the patios of Niagara Falls to keep up his performance muscles, but is concentrating more on his original creations, instead of interpreting other peoples. Check out www.myspace.com/joelandhismusic for a schedule of his performances.
Dont forget to visit www.joelmusic.com the official Joel van Vliet website with song clips, tons of pictures, lyrics, contact and CDs for sale.
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