Kickstarter

My name is Jenny, and I sing and play the omnichord. I have just finished recording a new album titled "All Our Little Bones" With a full-band backing me! It is an album about impending babies, arrived babies, and coming to terms with changes and aging and the afterlife.

I wrote the majority of these songs while pregnant with my son Otis, and during that time I did a lot of traveling back and forth across the country. I decided to make my album art into a Cross-Canada board game - modeled slightly after an old antique one I found. It is similar to Steeple chase only instead of a horse track, you race across Canada. Starting in St. John's, Halifax or Charlottetown, you race other players to Victoria, Prince Rupert Dawson City or Yellowknife, each player traveling different routes along Canada's major highways. I've copied in a more thorough set of game rules below.

I made a map of the entire country out of fabric, cutting and hand sewing around the edge of every province and territory and lake. Then I traced a geography book's Canadian highways, and marked the major cities (and cities I like) as game spaces. I added extra spaces where there weren't cities to reflect the sometimes significant amount of time it takes to get through certain parts of Canada (I estimated these lengths from personal experience, and cross-referenced with Google Maps) I also invented my own font for the game, based on the original antique board game font.

The gameboard will fold, and double as a package to hold my vinyl record. Along with the vinyl, you will receive game peices and a die. You might wonder why I am hoping to press vinyl when I don't really have the funds to do it. The answer is this - I haven't been able to find an affordable way to print the gameboard on anything OTHER than a cardboard vinyl package. Crazy, eh? And I REALLY wanted to make this board game to go with the album. And it seemed silly to make the package and not put the record in it. And more importantly, vinyl stands the test of time - CDs will disappear or scratch or get stepped on, or become obsolete as technology advances, whereas vinyl sounds good even after it has collected dust. And it seemed sad to me to give you a tiny shrunken version of the art I worked so hard on, and have it hold a CD that you'll probably just import to your computer anyway. So I thought I'd give you a bigger, beautiful version that means a lot to me.

That being said, I am still making the compact discs, they just don't have packages. So if you really have your heart set on the CD format, we can work something out.

I really hope you will support my project. My goal is $4100, which is the amount needed to be added to what I've already saved. We can raise more than the goal (which would be AMAZING because more of you will get records, and I won't end up completely broke at the end) But if at least $4100 is NOT raised by my deadline, then no money changes hands, and none of your credit cards will be charged. The project will be deemed "unsuccessful" It is an all-or-nothing situation.

My main intent is to pre-sell you the album for $25, delivering it to you when it has come back from the manufacturer, but as you can see there are many other bonuses offered for donations above and below that of $25. And I'm open to other ideas too! So please write, and please back me and my project, and we will all be super happy together!

Here are the actual Game Board Rules:

The game can start at St. John's Newfoundland, Charlottetown P.E.I., or Halifax NS. It is recommended all players begin on the same space, to start the race evenly, but that is optional. Players roll to see who plays first. High roll picks a starting route, and every player thereafter must travel using a different path, except where only one highway is available. The first player to arrive at a fork in the road can travel whichever way they desire, unless they have landed on a space that directs them to take a certain path. When a player lands on a space telling them to take a specific path, any players already on this path must redirect at their earliest convenience. Because Canada's highways can be confusing, there will be times where it's hard to tell which spaces correspond to which highways. At these spaces you can use your discretion. The coloured spaces correspond to songs on the album, and when a player lands on a coloured city space, they get to roll again. It is recommended all players set the same city as the final destination, in order to keep things fair. Players can finish their travels at Victoria B.C., Prince Rupert B.C.,Whitehorse Y.K. Dawson City Y.K. or Yellowknife. The first player to the destination wins, but be careful, because
you might land on a space telling you you have to end somewhere else.

Track listing:

1: Bad Luck
2: Blankets and Bones
3: Pain of Maybes
4: All our Little Bows
5: Thinking of You
6: Randy B. Found Me
7: Mending Nibbled Wires
8: Lease in the East
9: Lifeline
10: And We Got Older
11: Skeletal Polyamory
12: Theoretical Love Song

Please note: Kickstarter is an American organization, and while anyone in any country can back projects, they require an American bank account to start a project. So my lovely American citizen step Sister set the project up with me - her name is Caitlin, and if you see that your credit card has been charged to her, that's why. So don't worry. She's so great! And it's all going to the project.

To hear tracks from the new album, visit www.myspace.com/jennyomnichord