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I live 2 hours away from a small international airport.  And by international, I mean that sometimes you have connecting flights in Minneapolis, Toronto, Denver, Chicago, Calgary etc.

Last Friday some friends of mine were moving furniture out to their new cottage in my town.  So instead of driving into Winnipeg to get to the airport, I opted for catching a ride back in their moving van.  All the way to Winnipeg I sat or laid on the flat empty floor of this big moving van.

The next morning I flew to Minneapolis where I waited and tweeted and got excited about my conference in LA. (I’m not cool enough to not get excited.)

When I arrived in LA, my cab driver kept telling me that he didn’t like marriage and that even though he was old he had young eyes.  ”I may be old, but when a beautiful young woman such as yourself gets in my cab, I know beauty when I see it.  Any man who is a man, knows beauty and enjoys it.  But my wife?  She keep sayingk to me… ‘ah you are so old! stop beingk a creep! lookingk at those young girls!”

He showed me signed pictures of all the famous actors that had been in his cab and got me to sign his fame book because he found out I was playing the Viper Room.

I stayed at a cute bohemian hotel in West Hollywood that had a rooftop garden and saltwater pool.  There I treated myself to dinner, enjoying the view of the hills, sipping wine - and was approached by a group of business men.  They started making conversation and made the old ‘Alanis’ comparison to ‘Alana’.  I must note here that they were young business men and didn’t know who Roy Orbison was.  How incredibly unfortunate.  Our future is in trouble!

I walked up the street to see the Viper Room and there were ridiculously hot people trying desperately to get in.  I quietly observed all this with a slight hidden smirk, because I didn’t even want to get in but would be playing there in two nights!  Seriously, this town is funny.  There was a guy that wasn’t driving a cool enough car and wasn’t allowed in the parking lot behind the club!  Hilarious!  He looked so dejected.

When I arrived back at my hotel, a bottle of wine had been sent to my room from one of the young business men with a card that read “Alana- call or text- Dan.”  So I read The Princess and Curdie by George MacDonald and enjoyed the wine without calling or texting.

The next day I rehearsed with some killer players.  Ian Walker, Josh Grange, Sasha Smith and Mitch Marine.  They are seriously great players and we had lots of fun telling dirty jokes and getting to know each other.  These guys play with KD Lang, Dwight Yoakum, Everclear etc… really great blokes!

Monday, I picked up my J-165 Gibson from the Gibson Showroom and got familiar with it.  (Ahem.. and the couple in the room next to me were keeping time to my tunes… for reals.)

Sound check went well once we were able to sound check, but because we were first on, we had barely any time to eat… so we went across the street and wolfed down some italian food.  I was probably the only woman in that whole crazy town eating carbs, especially right before a show!  Yikes.  Cardinal rules being broken, baby:)

I’m happy I ate those carbs because it gave me the energy to ROCK!!! We had loads of fun up there and got the crowd going.  Here is the REVIEW!

I’ll keep you posted as to what will come of playing that show, but good things seem to be in the works!

I flew home with a connecting flight to Calgary where I was caught in a snow storm.  Luckily, it wasn’t snowing in Manitoba.  Just a nice spring rain.  So transitioning wasn’t terribly hard.

Though I have a little fever to do some traveling just for the sake of traveling.  So you may get a journal from somewhere else soon!

Much love- alana

PS- A few things I learned from the Musexpo conference-

1. you have to be willing to take your clothes off and do anything to be a tried and true pop star… anything to be different… which has been the case for awhile… but I think now with someone like Lady Gaga taking over the world, at least you have to have TALENT and be willing to take your clothes off.  Of all the acts to come along in the last 10 years, I would say that if anyone is going to trump Madonna, its her.  The trouble is that with such high demand for content, she will have to work even harder to remain in the limelight.  No stopping.  No breaks.  But, my hunch is she is genuinely that insatiable.

2. I don’t want to be a pop star:) oh wait! look at the provocative photo below!

how shocking

3. I love music and want to make money at creating it and I love rocking out, performing and giving a memorable experience to a crowd.  THE END:)

I am in York tonight en route to Edinburgh tomorrow.

Last night I performed in Nottingham to support Carlene Carter.  She is such a lovely character.  It was wonderful to experience the whole evening, meet some new folks who liked my tunes, hear Carlene and play Nottingham for the very first time.  The crowd was fantastic.

Here is the review from last night’s show: Notthingham Review

I was in London on the 3rd of March spending time with very good friends.  We went to see Avatar as two of us hadn’t seen it yet.  I have to say, I have never cried at a science fiction film before.  Not that this is just any sci fi film, but it could be likened to the hype that Star Wars received.

I found myself getting angry and then I found myself in a state of mourning.  We know that we turn blind eye to the same types of actions toward indigenous folks here on earth.  I loved the film.  Loved it.  But I suppose the idealist in me wonders if at some point there will be the kind of peace that turns even the heart of the general toward God.  That despite himself, he will experience conversion… and that he has the same essence as the other people.

I recently attended an Evening of Stories in Nashville and one of the entertainers was writer Donald Miller, doing readings from blogs and books.  I received his new book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years and its gotten me thinking even more about story.  If that is possible.  And of course it is.

I think to myself… why do we humans seem to almost celebrate suffering?  What I mean by this is without the adversity, the conflict, without even the villainous behaviour of the general what would Avatar have looked like as a film?  If we had seen a bunch of beautiful carnal blue people blissfully living out their lives in harmony with the forest, would we have sat there for 3 hours?  Would it have felt long to sit there?

I’m not suggesting its okay to exploit native land because it makes the human story more interesting, but it seems humans sure want something to fight for.  We need someone to play the villain in our own lives so that things can be black and white.

Seriously, I was gutted when that tree came down.  Gutted.  It made me frustrated and it broke my heart that this movie is inspired by the corporate monarchy and by the moderate’s inertia.

And yet, it felt good to cheer for the exploited, to know deep down what I would choose.  To feel that I have an understanding of what it means to be a part of a brother and sisterhood.

When I was a young girl, I used to run through my own woods barefoot, and pretend to be a little spear warrior.  I would practice at not being a blundering human as Tolkien described humans compared to hobbits.  I could feel my fellow theatre goers wanting to “go back to the land” right after the film was over.  And when we set out to get to the double decker bus stop in time, we ran as though we were remembering how to be carnal creatures and I even cleared a stack of garbage like a wild cat.

I don’t really have a point to my thoughts on villains and conflict and adversity except that I wish for the villain’s sake they didn’t have to be one.  I also know that I have a little villain in me lurking about in dark places and shouldn’t judge other folks too much, but still push for what I know is right.

So- here I am in York.  I am so spoiled.  I walked around York Minster Abbey today, then had tea with scones and clotted cream at Betty’s and then attended Evensong at York Minster.  The Evensong was very beautiful as well as interesting because they are very traditional.  They do the service very much the way it was done in the Sixteenth Century.  There is so much history here.  Constantine stands outside the Abbey and I try to go back in time and feel what it might have felt like then.  I am never dissatisfied when I visit this walking city.  When I’m within the walls, I picture myself attending music school here skipping along the cobblestone in some unique, comfy little boots.

But back to the task at hand!  And that is to get my listeners and friends out there to help me let other people know about my album Lions and Werewolves!  Click here to tell your friends about me and get a free mp3!

Also- if you sleuth around online there is a password being passed around like a bad rumour!  If you find the password, you can download both my records Unsettled Down and Lions and Werewolves for 5 bucks a piece!  Here’s a hint: its called the “Be Brave” campaign. (wink)

I hope you are well wherever you are and that you are choosing to be the hero in your own story and not the villainous, treacherous, exploitive meanie!

much love,

Alana

Kelwood, Man. — From Wednesday’s Globe and Mail Last updated on Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2009 04:47PM EDT

For 10 days in the middle of the howling Prairie winter of 2008, Grammy Award-winning producer Ken Nelson worked in the tiny, frozen hamlet of Kelwood, Man.

Having followed the likes of Coldplay to record in exotic locales across the globe, the British music producer was accustomed to working at the edge of his comfort zone. But a 100-year-old wooden church, where the only billboards begged for volunteers for the ladies’ tea, was unusual even by his standards.

Pews were piled halfway up the wall to accommodate the mess of drums and keyboards that had supplanted the congregation. Thick bales of straw hauled straight from farmers’ fields were stacked around the speakers to muffle their massive sound. And as a pale yellow sun poured through the stained glass, Nelson – the superstar British-based producer of pop-music giants Coldplay, Gomez and Snow Patrol, among others – nodded in rapt concentration as local girl Alana Levandoski stood at the altar and sang what became the title track on her new album, Lions and Werewolves , released last month.

Levandoski, 30, was then in the early stages of recording the album, and later spent three weeks working on the vocals at Nelson’s Parr Street Studios in Liverpool. The album took a lot longer than expected, but she was prepared to sacrifice time for the sake of quality.

“I wanted this to be an organic process, however long it took. I’d much rather have something that I’m just ridiculously proud of, that I can go to the grave with, than have it come out five months earlier,” she said.

“I feel like I made a work of art, and nothing in this album was sacrificed in the name of making a single.”

Levandoski recently completed a tour of Britain and has dates in the West later this summer and Ontario in October. After a gruelling 12-hour video shoot in a Toronto boxing ring a week ago, she played the Edmonton Folk Festival this past weekend.

A slight, sweet-voiced singer-songwriter, Levandoski is a rising talent in the Canadian music scene. She had originally planned to record Lions and Werewolves in Winnipeg at the same studio used by the Weakerthans, but couldn’t book enough time. When the studio offered to move the recording equipment elsewhere, Levandoski thought of her hometown. Nestled in the gently sloping hills near Riding Mountain National Park, Kelwood is a shrinking town of 70 people anchored by a single stop sign, a legion hall and a curling rink.

When he arrived in Kelwood, Nelson stepped out of the car and into the cold, crushing silence of a still Prairie night.

“I’ve never experienced anything like it. It was so quiet I couldn’t believe it,” he said.

At first, he worried that the recording might be ruined if the rumble of passing cars leaked through the church’s thin walls. After several days he came to understand it could be weeks before another car rolled down the road.

Nelson and an assembly of musicians from across Canada became famous figures in town, as people stopped in the street to say hello or invited them over for a visit. The town’s unelected mayor even made a point of getting his picture taken between Nelson and Levandoski.

It’s been nearly four years since Levandoski’s first album, Unsettled Down , was released by Rounder Records in 2005. Since then, she has toured nine countries and played nearly 500 shows. She’s been to Muscle Shoals, Ala., where she wrote a song at FAME Studios while strumming on Otis Redding’s Gibson guitar, and travelled to Liverpool, where she set her sights on persuading Nelson to work with her.

“I wanted to work with him for 2 years,” she said. “You can tell he has a way of just going through a room and sweeping it all up.”

Nelson signed on. But the difficulty was that Levandoski and the musicians – keyboardist David (Soul Fingaz) Williams, bassist Milos Angelov, drummer Eric Paul and guitarist Murray Pulver – had just eight days to produce an album. By comparison, the album Nelson had just finished took 4 months.

“It’s exciting,” Nelson said. “If you’ve got 4 months to make a record, it’ll take 4 months. If you’ve got eight days, you can do it in eight days. I prefer working like this.”

When he’s at home in Liverpool, Nelson works from behind the thick glass of a recording studio, speaking to musicians through an intercom. In Kelwood, Nelson walked among them, encouraging and tweaking. Nelson said he was convinced of Levandoski’s talent as soon as he heard her sing, even if her country-music background contrasts with the pop musicians he typically works with. “Alana had heard of me and liked the work that I’d done. She sent me a CD with 12 tracks, and those are basically the 12 tracks we’re recording now,” he said. “I loved them, loved the songs, loved her voice …When I met her in Liverpool, I was blown away.”

Levandoski decided to return to her roots in Kelwood after living in Winnipeg for several years, part of a back-to-the-land movement of postmodern pioneers: young people who want a simpler life in the country. She bought her house there for $1. As a little girl, she never attended school, but would study with her mother and siblings in the mornings, leaving her afternoons free for horseback riding and artistic pursuits. Her father, a carpenter, built a curtained stage in her bedroom and her mother, a visual artist, painted the backdrops for the plays that Levandoski directed. Her writing began with trips to the creek, where she would sit with her dog and compose poems.

She laughs at the memory. “I wrote poems about adventures and tragic love/death, where they end up together but they die.”

Her sister now runs the local café, where the musicians gathered for breakfast and supper every day. The walls are decorated with photos taken by her brother. Levandoski pointed to her favourite image, a bleak winter landscape at dusk. “It’s honest,” she said. “It’s the landscape I grew up with.”

Honesty is what Levandoski is striving for in this album, and she thinks recording in her hometown adds to the authenticity. “I want the album to be true. I want people to believe me, that I’m being genuine.”

“The idea for the record is that I wanted everybody in the room to feel a little out of their element,” she added. “I didn’t think we’d end up in a pioneer church in my hometown, but I wanted something unusual.”

The new album will be a bit of a departure, and she’s conscious of managing her image in a way that suits her ambitions.

When a photographer suggested a picture of her standing in a wheat field to accompany this story, she flatly refused. She’s been there before, and she’s not just the girl from the Prairie any more.

“There’s only so many autobiographical songs you can write about growing up on the Prairies,” she said. “I didn’t want to corner myself. You can’t put a phone book on someone’s head and tell them not to grow. They want to keep you in a wheat field, and even though it’s vast, it can be a corner just the same.”

Eve Selis

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Joel Kroeker

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Lynn Miles

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