So it looks like I won't be playing my remaining BC tour dates. After my show in Victoria last Friday, I completely lost my voice. It was kind of amazing actually. I sang until the last note and then could hardly talk. By the next day my voice was totally gone. It's coming back bit by bit, as I'm ingesting Sage tea, zinc lozenges, cough syrup, vitamin C and any form of medication that seems to help - consequently, booze and cigarettes don't seem to be on that list. I'm staying with my lovely friend Jenn and her boyfriend Darren (who's also lovely). It's one of those lucky fate things that I'm here where they're taking good care of me.

Hopefully I'll be back in business soon.

Lara

BC is beautiful in May...and perhaps, all year 'round...but I'm here now and it's amazing. I drove here last week for New Music West (a music industry conference), which, with all respect intended, was a shadow of what it used to be. Though, it was lovely to meet other people in the industry, mostly it felt like a weird cattle call and really mediocre, forgettable music.

The people here in Vancouver are lovely and I found it particularly interesting, painful, beautiful and ugly to see the state of the street life on Hastings. Junkies, hookers, and middle class/working class sharing the streets - granted it was dominated in varying parts by one group or the other but it was amazing to see people shooting up unabashedly right in front of me. I had a radio spot at Vancouver Co-op Radio (Sky, the host, was very generous and sweet) and as I was walking out of the building, two women had just shot up on the steps and were in no rush to move on....I stepped over their needles and headed to my car, amazed, in love, and totally broken-hearted. It was hideous what they were doing but they were beautiful inside, though the beauty seemed very deep down and almost invisible - but not quite. I think because the city supplies junkies in Vancouver with their drugs (check that - at least their needles) that there is a sense (for me anyway) that they don't want/need to take from me with the intensity that would exist in a city where they had to find their own drugs. Amazingly the scene felt kind of laid back (I mean that in the most overall sense and definitely not in regards to specific people-there were lots of desperate people).