Year: 2001

In further news of the surreal, Jen in Nova Scotia clarifies for me that our little jamming group has been in fact played on two stations in Halifax. I had some data about call letters and frequencies a bit mixed up, but now I have it straight and this is the skinny. We’ve been played on:

• 96.9 CKAX FM, a small independent station, privately owned. This is apparently the one where we got actual calls!
• 97.5 CKDU FM, a radio station affiliated with Dalhousie University. Also small, as one would expect of a college station.

We still think this is all very strange and surreal. Jen is still claiming her friend Garth who owns a pub is swearing he wants to pay us to come play — but we have yet to hear on that. At the moment, we’re still planning to remind him we’re a pack of amateurs. ;)

Hi! If you’re reading this, you’ve found the website for Three Good Measures. We’re a jamming group in Seattle, Washington; we get together every other week or so to play Celtic-flavored folk music, and afterwards, we eat pie. Because mmmmm pie.

Originally, we got into doing this because several of us are raving fans of a group from Newfoundland called Great Big Sea, and also because several of us are musicians who hadn’t done anything about it for several years and we missed it sorely. Plus, the fine folks who regularly post on Greatbigsea.com’s chat board had gotten an idea they called the Kitchen Tapes Project, for which the plan was that a bunch of folks would do fan-produced versions of Great Big Sea ditties and share them with one another. We thought this was a cool idea, so we decided to try to contribute.

So we started jamming. And recording ourselves. Just so’s we could try to polish up what we sounded like, y’see. And I started keeping chronicles of what we were doing, to share with the folks on Greatbigsea.com.

Then, tentatively, we started sharing MP3s around with friends and loved ones.

And people started making alarming noises at us, which can be summarized like this: “Gosh, you guys are GREAT!” A friend of one of our members told us we were even good enough to play at a coffee house in Pullman.

Then, on the chat board at Gruntland.com, I met up with a girl named Jen. Upon discovering that we were both musicians and science fiction fans, we hit it off quite splendidly and traded MP3s, one of her band’s for two out of our last jam session.

And then the sneaky wench took said MP3s to a DJ friend of hers, who told her he wanted to play them on the air. After hasty consultation amongst ourselves, we told her to let him go ahead and do it.

And so, as of this writing, Three Good Measures has been heard on the air in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the radio station 96.9 CKAX FM. According to Jen, we got several calls requesting us — and at least one person asking us where she could buy our CD (which we don’t have). Also according to Jen, the station wants MORE music from us, and furthermore, there is a pub in Halifax whose owner claims he’d pay us to play there for a week if we’re ever in the area.

When we haven’t been running around squealing “We got played on the RA-DI-O! We got played on the RA-DI-O!”, we have all been finding this extremely surreal. Because this is one heck of a mind-blowing situation to be in for nine people who are mostly making music for fun!

Aaaaat any rate, having received another call over on Greatbigsea.com for us to put out a web page, we’re finally trying to get our collective act together and do so. This here is the result of that effort, the official place to be if you want to get what little music we have available, and find out how to hunt us down and hit us with Nerf bats for i–ahem, er, tell us how much you like it (yeah, that’s it!).

We hope you DO like what you find here. And think of us, when you eat pie.

— Anna