It was fun moving to the country in the 90s. I bought a blacksmith shop 40 minutes past Hamilton. Sam Larkin bought it first for hardly anything and schemed to fix it up and sell it to an artist who might want to live in the country but not too far from Toronto. His plan to do that and sell it for 40k. Then his relationship fell part and he had to unload it and find a sucker. My relationship fell apart too. Living with someone after you broke up is not much fun. The timing was excellent the second time he offered it to me. The first time, two years earlier he had done half the fixing up. I drove out and found the idea preposterous but now buying something for the cost of only about one years’s rent in Toronto was a no brainer. He needed less than 20k quick. I bought it. For the first four years the property tax was $50 a year. It was amazing having the stars at night and getting judged by neighbours for letting my cat come in from the cold. I learned many things. I recorded Danny Lanois one time. He brought a small amplifier with him, the now famous Bernie Raunig but that was before the who’s who of Canadian Rock knew about these converted 16 mm film projectors. I was nervous recording him, he was the big bigshot and me the tiny pipsqueak. Instead of yelling between floors as I usually would I went to Radio Shack and bought a two way speaker system. There was a lot of feedback. I think he regretted saying he would come, however, he played amazing. That is what I like most about Danny Lanois, his guitar playing. I was interviewed recently by a guy from a guitar magazine about my Bernie amp and how I got it. That amp always puts me back into that blacksmith shop, into that lifetime with my seven neighbours unevenly split between racism and evangelism.