A few years ago I helped by father-in-law record and produce a CD in his own living room. He, my wife, and his guitar player laid down their tracks live over the course of a couple nights of recording. After we found a couple of people to lay down the bass tracks, we mixed our four tracks down and had the analog tape transferred to digital. Unsophisticated and raw it might have been, but the sound quality was far superior to anything he would have managed to produce in a studio within his price range.

The hard part came after the recording of course; without the support of even the smallest of labels trying to package and distribute a CD is next to impossible. He sold it at his concerts and to his friends and in the end probably covered his costs for making the CDs (not including the outlay for the four-track). A lot has changed in the six years since we did that CD and now there are packages that an individual can purchase with independent studios which get them recording and distribution. It's like the deals that self-published authors are getting with a number of the self publishing book sites.

It means that anybody with a few thousand bucks at their disposal can march into a studio and come out the other side with a CD and at least some distribution and publicity. Maybe not very much, but enough to get you noticed beyond your own circle of friends and acquaintances. Recently the Federal Express driver who delivers a fair number of my review materials asked me if I'd listen to one such disc. It was by a friend of his whom, like my father-in-law, had been kicking around the edges of the music industry for ages.

Aside from that and the title of his disc, Defining Moments, I don't know very much about L.W. Simms (the biography section of his Web-site is under construction). But you don't need to know very much about people to be able to listen and appreciate their music.

L.W. (Wayne) Simms' music follows a path that's been walked many times before; the country/folk sound that first started to become popular in the late '60s and that reached its peak in popularity in the mid to late '70s. I've always thought of the sound as being somewhat unique to Canada, but I think that's because the people who play the style of music that Wayne plays don't seem to get the big popularity of other types of music. It falls between too many cracks to be easily marketed by the corporations as it's not country enough to be country, rock enough to be rock, and he's not folk.

There were a slew of male Canadian performers who did this type of music 20 or 30 years ago with perhaps the most famous being Murray Mclaughlin, Valdy and Ray Materick. While they may have had little in common in terms of content, they all played music which was personal and emotional. What distinguished those three gentlemen from the pack was that on the whole they could write songs that were intelligent and never sentimental. They were honest and heartfelt without ever once trying to manipulate their listeners' emotions.