Current Affairs...

This site is a work in progress.  I’ve opened it now because there’s certainly enough content to be found here to make it worthwhile, but there’s so much I have left to post – lots of Flickr sets, links to the setlist collection sites – and material I’ve yet to discover, especially dates for the oldest gigs.  Shearwater is particularly hard to research on the net because you’ll get a plethora of pages about birds, sailboats, Nova Scotia, and I know from experience the only way to be exhaustive is to search for every performance date individually.  The site also needs a second round of proofreading and fact-checking.  Most of my information about gig dates between 2008-2011 is from Songkick, and some of them are most certainly wrong – if the band actually played Buffalo and London on the same date, it would be quite an achievement!   If you know of anything I’ve missed, or spot a mistake, please let me know.

I’m very aware that in constructing this site, I’m standing on the shoulders of giants.  As I mentioned in my first blog, in a sense I’ve come late to the game, and there are a lot of people out there with more experience and knowledge than I have.  Certain aspects of the site are a gathering of facts, but a lot of the content wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the dedication of supporters over the years.  (I think Michelle Hazuda’s calling in life must be to photodocument Shearwater gigs, and rather beautifully!)  What I can bring to the project is a perspective which is systemic, rigorous, academic, well, okay, anal-retentive.  I get to sort and organize the love which already exists.

I’ve tried to do my best to respect the work of content creators, which means that I’ve used a lot of links instead of reposting pictures, although I’ve made generous use of Flickr embed code.  Part of me feels that it’s the right thing, the polite thing, the legal thing to do, but the archivist in me says that it sucks because the internet is basically ephemeral.  I encountered so many broken links going through the old forum…that stuff is lost.  So if you have material you don’t mind sharing, give me permission and I’ll post it here, of course giving you full credit.  The more places it’s stored, the more likely it is to survive.

I did embed a lot of YouTube videos, but not all, simply for the sake of site loading time.  The pages are longish, well, okay, enormous.  That’s because the Weebly editor only allows for six free pages, and the price to go to “professional” increases the site cost by ten times.  Maybe if there’s enough demand, or enough material, I’ll do it…but the one thing I will never do is put advertising on the site.  Here’s where I reveal what a quaint old fuddy-duddy I am…I was on the internet before advertising was allowed!  And it was crude, clunky, silly, and all kinds of wonderful.  Sorry, kids, but the internet was ruined when it became about money (yeah, yeah, yeah, a lot of good things happened too – let’s just say that it changed, but something alive was strangled in the process).  In sum, I can’t get past my feeling that supporting a site through ads is tacky, so I just won’t do it.

Contributions?  Corrections?  Suggestions?  Please contact me at [email protected]