Mark Hamilton Overcame His Shyness To Bring You Woodpigeon

12/15/05 7:30pm

by Elizabeth Chorney-Booth (CHARTattack)

Mark Hamilton has been kicking around the Calgary music scene since he was a teenager. Most music types knew him for his work as a DJ at CJSW, Calgary's incredibly strong campus radio station, and as a writer for FFWD, the city's free weekly.

While most everyone who crossed Hamilton's path recognized that he had a penchant for romantically inclined pop songs, few people had any idea that the soft-spoken music fan had a canon of his own songs bubbling around in his head.

After spending a couple years in the U.K. getting to know himself better, Hamilton returned to Calgary. He formed an instrumental music project called Woodpigeon / Antelope = Squirrel while living in Edinburgh, and once he got back to Canada he was itching to continue his musical explorations. About a year ago he started putting words to his melodies and slowly started to invite other musicians to play with him.

While the response to Hamilton's songs was positive, the songwriter was terrified to share them with the outside world.

"It's taken literally three years to manage the idea of singing in front of people," Hamilton says. "The first two months of Woodpigeon rehearsals were ridiculous — my shyness entailed singing my parts into a minidisc recorder and then playing that to everyone during practice instead of opening my own mouth.

"Whenever I'd try, nothing would come out. I think the final change took place while playing some U.K. shows. Instead of me hiding behind a group of other people on stage, suddenly eight terrified Scots were hiding behind me and I had no choice but to get on with the show without crutches."

Woodpigeon have come a long way since Hamilton's first forays as a frontman. In the last year, he's put together a huge band of multi-instrumentalists.

"Woodpigeon is indeed a proper band," Hamilton says, refuting the idea that he's essentially a solo artist. "The members involved are all extremely dedicated and consistently surprise me with their additions to the material."

Woodpigeon have recorded, among other things, a full album called Songbook (due in early 2006), a split seven-inch with Remote Kid (also due in early 2006), and a split EP with this writer's husband, Aaron Booth, which is available online through Woodpigeon's MySpace page.

While Songbook will likely be launched via a full-scale release party, Woodpigeon's current task at hand is a December 17 Christmas show extravaganza at the Unitarian Church Of Calgary. In addition to including Christmas carols in their set, Woodpigeon will use the festive occasion to introduce horns to their live show.

As for the new year, Hamilton plans to play Woodpigeon's local hype down and branch out to a larger audience.

"I expect us to maybe calm things down a little bit in terms of playing live locally — if we said yes to everything right now, we'd be playing twice a week all the way through to the end of February," he says.

"I've got the next album written and sequenced, and we're starting to bring those songs into practice. That's also going very well and quick. We're hoping to jump in a van and play a few different places. Several members of Woodpigeon also have other bands they're involved in, so taking off to play a few shows with them at least cuts back a little bit on the number of people coming along. The core group of us alone could play four sets of all-original material, which is an exciting idea and keeps things really interesting and exciting for everyone."