Hello everyone out there! The first thing that I would like to do is thank the Harsh.TV Team for this interview and then say that I hope to help everyone gain interest in me, my career and of course my music! The first question that I have been asked is to tell you who I am and what I do! Well my name is David Guitard and I am a, I am a musician! I have quite a hard story to believe that I am going to tell you! But it is one of truth and everyone should know the person I am! I grew up in both Jacquet River and Armstrong Brook which both became a part of the amagmated village of Belledune in Northern New Brunswick! I have had two fathers in my life and I say that because, my "daddy" passed away when I was eleven! My family at the time which consisted of me, my younger brother and my mother were very blessed that Nick Duivenvoorden, who is running for Liberal Leadership and then possibly for the Premier of New Brunswick, came into our lives as he married my mom becoming my, our stepdad, someone that eventually would call my Pop! You see my "daddy" had been his main man on his dairy farm where we had moved to!
So from the time I was eleven I was a farmboy and worked many summers through my vacation from school at other dairy farms in New Brunswick! l was president of the student council in my last year at Belledune school before going to Bathurst High School! Well after high school I decided that I wanted to go to R.C.C. which is the Radio College of Canada in Toronto Ontario for Electronics Engineering! This was not for me though and I ended up not finishing my course and went back to Armstrong Brook!
The next year I decided that I wanted to go to U.N.B. which is the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton New Brunswick for Psychology and perhaps eventually becoming a psychologist! After two years I dropped out of there as well getting a unionized job with Northumberland Co-op working as a shipper/receiver! I was there for over a year before being put on probation from my job because of a DUI, meaning that I would have to wait until I got my liscence back to start working there again! Well I started a landscaping business and did contracts in Fredericton until making a decision to move as my girlfriend and I had broken up and after talking with a friend had decided that we would move to Campbell River on Vancouver Island in search of something better! We moved out there, both having only a tent and sleeping bag and a few dollars! After a week out there I got a job for a contracter working on Little Dent Island! This place was like somewhere showing in a magazine being a few hours off the coast of Vancouver Island only being able to get there by boat! Our trip to get there was going through the tops of mountains that were at some points only two hundred feet apart and the water being three hundred feet deep! It was an absolutely amazing sight. This Island was owned by Bruce Burrows, a multi billionare who has the pattent for reverse osmosis. This was a very small island all interconnected by a small concrete pathway with a helicopter pad on the far side of the island. I was a helper on this island, or gruntman, for the contracter building three big buildings for what would become the resort, these are connected to each other by a ten foot walkways! After the first day I was nicknamed "mini-me" because that night I had shaved my head bald like the forman on the island! After a couple of weeks, Bruce Burrows himself was on the island and I remember him actually speaking to me, calling me "mini-me"! Quite an amazing experience! Recently I have found out that it became a high class fishing resort!
Then after this job I got a job insulating for a short while and then got a job on another dairy farm milking three hundred and thirty cows in a double-twelve parler basically meaning that I was milking twenty-four at once! I did this and finally the last job out there was in silviculture! This is when my life changed, hard to believe but after the season ended I was on EI and had started playing my guitar! I had been a singer all my life remembering singing on stage in front of the town of Jacquet River when I was only five years old, but I had tried playing the guitar a couple of times and it did not stick. In BC though after picking it up again, I was hooked. I was playing it eight hours a day and did this for about a month and a half and started writing a couple of songs, then on my twenty sixth birthday my whole world changed! I awoke in Victoria General Hospital after ten days in a coma, I had fallen almost ten feet and landed head first on concrete! It was caused by alcohol and stupidity! I had something called a fossa subdural hematoma, subarachnoid hemoraging, small shear hemorages, had blood in my facial air sinuses and damaged my C1 and C1 or a rotary nature! Basically I had a traumatic head injury and was lucky to still be here! After coming out of the coma with my mother right there beside me in the hospital, I did not know my own name. I had injured my brain! I was moved from Victoria General Hospital back to the east coast to Campbellton Regional Hospital. So I was a month in both hospitals and after two months in total in the hospital I had gotten out! It was like starting over, I was not the same person at all! I had to heal and let my brain remember, which took a long time to do. But I had my guitar, which my friend, while I was in the hospital in Victoria, had gone back to Campbell River, where my home was and had gotten my guitar for me to have in the hospital!
After the injury I had all day to play which is what I did, all day, everyday in my trailer across from my parents farm, playing and I had started writing music as well! My songs were about many different things, different then most because all I was doing was unique fingerpicking. One of my songs was about how I felt when the world trade centers disaster happened. I had my cousin and so many friends that would come to my trailer, we would play different music with them listening to me play mine! I am not sure of the exact time frame but I had completed ten songs which I recorded myself on my computer and then made a CD. I was still slow to talk to as it took many years to heal, taking time for me to be able to complete one sentence as I would have to think about what I was saying as I was saying it and having diplopia, or seeing double. I have wanted to do something with my life right from the beginning and had chosen to claim a partial disability instead of a full one!
I had started selling my CD's and getting signitures from people surrounding me, going door to door all around my home. Then I started doing very strange things like calling my folks in the middle of the night and saying very strange things, something was wrong! I, with my family made the hard decision that it be best for me to move to Campbellton to move in a special care home so I could also be close to the hospital and my doctor. It was found out that I had epilepsy and was having seizures and not knowing what was happenning, after a seizure I was calling my folks dissoriented! I lived in two different care homes all the time working on my music playing a few hours every day. Then after about a year and a half I met a girl that I moved out of the care home and in with her! Started singing at local clubs, driving my musical producer around and singing wherever he had gigs. Recorded my CD in the professional studio he had in partnership with someone else! Eventually fininshed my CD after almost a year and this is the one that I have released in January! My songs are about different things, the world trade centers disaster as I have said which affected so many people around the world including myself, this song on my CD is called "Twin Towers", I have another which after remembering the deforestation that I had seen while working in silvaculture wrote a song I called "Sea of Green"! This was because I remembered us flying to our worksites and in every direction as far as you could see everything was cut. We would spray around the newly planted trees so that the underbrush would not overtake them. My songs are about many different things but I wrote them to impact people in many ways. To have them feel when they listen to my music!
So this brings me to today! I released my indie CD in January of this year and in February found out that I have healed one hundred percent from my injury, the specialist has said that I have something called very mild epilepsy and now my family doctor has said that it there is a good chance that I will be off my last med very soon having healed from that as well, not having an episode in almost two years! So if you talk to me now and I tell you my story, well, their have been people that have not believed it, but it is as true as it gets! I am a survivor and I went through the injury! One sentence took me three times as long to say as anyone else to say, but talk to me now and you would never know it! Now I live alone in my appartment and am on my laptop or my guitar. Have not drank since July 18th, 2006 and live a clean life, I am not perfect but after all this I now have been posting my new songs for everyone to be able to listen to but it is only a sample of what is to come! Right now it is just me and my guitar but with the other instruments, it becomes such amazing music!
I now have two email addresses, both rocketmail and gmail but useDavidGuitard@rocketmail.com the most. I am on, I believe it's twelve different sights promoting, a few examples are facebook, twitter, youtube, myspace, musicclout, soundcloud, reverbnation, musicxray, and others as well! My website is up and running which is another place that I have my new songs and a few songs off my CD as well as a message for everyone who visits! I have been doing the online marketing/promoting for less than three months so far, have done everything completely myself and so far have almost three hundred friends on facebook, eight videos on youtube, just under a thousand followers on twitter, have followers on soundcloud! Now have my CD I did on my computer and two professional CD's, one that I have not mention yet as it is one with only a couple of songs recorded with a girlfriend in Belledune with just us singing and and me with my guitar! I am now known by thousands of people as a musician and the story continues...
The second question you have for me is to describe my music in five words! I would say meaningful, unique, soulful, entertaining and powerful!
The third question is to give my fans three fun facts about me, well one is that I have experienced things that you only hear about in magazines and see on television, second, I am a lover of life, animals, people and the things in our world meaning I pay attention to things happenning around us and want to make a difference, third, I have loved music from all sorts of genras all my life and it is inside of me to come out and because of this plan to make music for everyone to love and enjoy for decades to come!
The forth is what makes my voice stand out from other artists, well I have always had a very strong and powerful voice which helps people visualize what I am singing about and has people wanting to hear more! My voice has the quality of being able to touch people in a profound way! I can reach a wide audience of people who want to hear something new, someone they are searching for because of the wide range I have, the person I am and the life I have lived and learned from!
The fifth question is do I write my own material and yes I do, I have written everything I have completely myself and continue to do so! I believe it would be quite a while before I won't have something in me that want's to come out! It has been quite an interesting life till now! :|)
The sixth question is what are the current projects that I am working on! What I will tell you is that I have been working extensively to be recognized as a professional musician that can sell their music across this country, the U.S., Europe, the UK and others as well having one CD that can be released everywhere now and another one in the works! I have been marketing/promoting myself and my CD everywhere I can, whether it be in person or online to thousands of people! Have produced a video for "Twin Towers" off my professional indie CD and continue to record the works that I finish! "Dream of Lightning" for instance, where I have, I believe eight different videos of the progression of how it became a completed song and it is quite interesting, I have showed it to a few people and they were quite surprised at how it started to become what it is! I am also of course working on another new song right now trying to expand on what I can do with my hands and am very excited on what is to come! Also continueing to market everything and would like to start touring when my CD is released in stores everywhere!
The seventh question is where do I see myself in five years and that is a hard question, because in five years a lot of things can be done! I see myelf with two, possibly three CD's released, a million sold in Canada, the U.S., Europe, and the list goes on! Hoping to be touring all of these places and probably taking breaks to make new music! And having a number of videos on MuchMusic, MTV and again the list goes on! With of course more videos on youtube and selling my music also everywhere online, besides my CD's in stores everywhere! I also would like to have started my own charitable foundation by this time, it is something that I have thought about for many years as cancer and other things have struck my family and so many I know as well and I believe that their should be as much help as possible from the ones that can provide it! Finding cures for some of these horrible diseases still will take time and money to accomplish! Perhaps be working on a relationship throughout this, having a great woman beside me throughout my career! But that we will have to see, as it is something that is important to me as well, but it has to be the right woman to have that!
The eighth question is where do I get my inspiration and I will say that most of my inspiration comes from my family, not only did my Oma and Opa come over here from Holland many years ago and started working for priests on the dairy farm that they would eventually buy. Which through the years my parents owned, I worked on and now probably my brother will take over. The rest of my family on all three sides have been through so much greef and continue to strive in a world where there is so much pain but continueing to enjoy life and want to make a change! I have family across Canada with businesses, dairy farms with milk going to places like Northumberland co-op here in NB, one of my uncles is trying to make a difference in peoples eyes with what we are doing to our environment, our surroundings and ultimately to our health with an article in a few different newspapers! My Pop was the mayor of Belledune for two terms and is giving his knowledge and time to make a difference for people in New Brunswick, I have an aunt in Toronto who is a professional photographer that I remember helping paint one of her first studios when I went to R.C.C. and my uncle worked for "Factor" at one time and is a lover of music. With family everywhere who are trying to make a difference in peoples lives! In Belledune at twenty six years old I was technically like a child again, and god love them all, I was loved and supported in many ways by many of them, that I was not able to repay except give them my love and they stuck by me and is one of the reasons that I have healed!
The ninth question is who would I rather listen to and I will say that I have not been following musicians in the UK except maybe Nick Flavel whom I think is a great musician, this is because I have been so involved with my own career and have not really been paying much attention to these artists. Because of where I live as well it's the U.S. and Canadian music that is mostly promoted. So I will have to say for now that it would be U.S. musicians, but this is not taking credit from the musicians in the U.K. who are wonderful artists! I am from Canada and love music in general, if I believe that it is great music then I am going to listen to it!
The tenth question is what artist do I listen to and their are many that I have listened to. Right now the one I listen to the most is me! While growing up though I had listened to many artists, for example CCR, The Eagles, Def Leppard, Guns and Roses, Metalica, U2, The Tragically Hip being my favorite band, Nickelback is a great band, Pearl Jam, Our Lady Peace, Matchbox Twenty, Bruce Springsteen, Led Zeppelin, Blue Rodeo, John Couger Mellancamp, Bob Dylan and there are so many more that I loved to listen to but for quite a long while, what I listen to is what their is played on the radio besides my own!
The next question is what influences my music and I will say that many things have influenced my music, through the evolution of my music it started with the way I was feeling about things that happened in my life and the things that were happening around me! The situations that I went through were so influencial that they really had a substantial impact on me and my music! With my education, work experience, the places that I have lived and the tragidy that I have gone through is enough for five CD's but have been writing about other things that interest me! Like the other way that people heve felt about things that are happening around them which is what has happened with one of my new songs "Dream of Lightning", where someone I know was in the apartment next to mine and lightning struck close to him on the balcony and knocked him back into the apartment. It was the loudest thundercrack that I have ever heard and I wanted to write a song about the lightning. It eventually became the finished product that it did!
The next question is to describe my fashion in five words and I would say at home casual, when I am out it is clean, professional, stylish and tasteful!
The last question that I have been asked is how can people contact and collaborate with me and of course the easiest way is either email at DavidGuitard@rocketmail.comor many other ways online, you can go to my website and contact me through there athttp://deergee.wix.com/
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