Verity's Blog

Voting starts today for Future Owners....

If you are a Future Owner of my album then this is the moment you have been waiting for. It is finally time to vote for which of my songs I should record on the album! We are in preproduction already but now is the time for us to know exactly which 12 songs are going to be recorded!

The only way to vote is if you are already a Future Owner as you will the receive the voting link to have your say!  CLICK NOW to buy your Future Copy before the project is over and you missed being counted as one of the visionary people who made it happen!

Here are the song titles you can choose your favourite 12 from:

1. Shine
2. Raise
3. Take Me Back
4. Forever In Me
5. Wherever Love Goes
6. Miracle
7. Love Is
8. Angel
9. Afraid
10. Going Your Way
11. Don't Look Back
12. Devastation
13. 18 Holes
14. Tomorrow It'll Change
15. Fix It
16. Box Of Photographs
17. Careless
18. Perfect
19. Would You Still Love Me
20. Sweet
21. Good For Me
22. Will I Still Be the One
23. Live Forever

Take a listen HERE & remember that award winning producers Brian O'Shea and Paul McIver are producing the album...

Production Count Down...

Well - two years to the week since my website went live with the Lucky Packet Project I find myself getting ready to pay the deposit for eight weeks worth of producing and recording the album! I sat in a rather daunting meeting yesterday with Peter Lacey from Musketeer Records while he advised me on the album budget and how best to stretch it to the limits.

(By the end of the meeting I was lying down on the floor wrapped in a blanket trying to get my head around everything - Very glamourous!)

But - even though it is frightening throwing around big figures, the miracle is that we actually have all the cash we need to get started because of the over 1450 Future Owners who have each chipped in R150 towards it. I am overwhelmed with gratitude for all their generosity to make this possible. It just goes to show what we can achieve when we all put a little bit in. Not to mention that we have also given nearly R22,000 to POWA and Live Your Dreams in the process!

Ideally I need to sell 500 more copies to cover all the costs (see the scary budget I have included), so if you feel inclined, please jump onto www.iamverity.com/order.htm and buy your copy and get voting on which songs we should record!

Their voices...

Here are some pics from the documentary "Our Stories, Own Voices" that I worked on with film maker Lungiswa Sithole for the SABC2 series Our Nation In Colour. The song I wrote with the four teenage girls from Atlantis was featured on the program including footage of them coming to Cape Town to record the track the live their dream of being in a recording studio. Their local radio station picked up "Our Voices" for their playlist which has made the girls celebrities in Atlantis and given them a voice against drugs in their community.  I really hope to work on more projects like this, where I get to use my music to make a significant difference in people's lives - I love it!

Thought for the week...

Music should not divide,
But unite human spirit
As it tries to give meaning to life.
Music is not about hearing,
But, about learning to listen with your soul...

                   Verity

Pre-Production in full swing

I am back in Cape Town after three incredible days at The Farm Studios in Jozi  working with Paul Mc Iver on four more demos for the album. It is the most amazing process to witness my songs grow from simple piano and vocals to a full production in a matter of hours. I am in awe of the magic that happens when we create anything. We have had so much fun finding drum grooves, tweaking bass lines, sprinkling in percussion and layering guitars and piano parts and watching as each song takes on a life and voice of its own. Every moment that I am in the studio is another minute of living this dream I have spent the last two years building. I am so clear that the time it has taken to reach this point is perfect. It is not something that could have been rushed and the music we are creating now is a result of the journey I have been on.

I will be adding the new sounds onto my songplayer soon so keep an ear out. If you aren't a Future Owner already then now is the perfect time to become one and be part of the voting process when it starts next week!

Thought for the week...

   Let not my words disturb,
   Or make profane the sacred recess of your mind.
    But rather let them pass over,
   As swallows in the autumn,
   And in their passing leave a memory
   Sweet in its remembrance
   That fills a place I do not know.
   For in my speaking,
   I would you would remember
   Not empty words, but pregnant feelings
   That birth happy memories in the face of sadness
   And leave the laughter of their children
   To ring through your life when I am gone.

                              Verity

Great idea for Album Cover!

I have written quite a lot about Chaeli Campaign and the amazing work they do assisting disabled children. A few months back they ran an initiative for people to pledge R100 a month to help them pay the bond on their new office and I am a proud pledge partner and was thrilled to go to their office warming the other night and sing a song to everyone gathered.

As a gift a friend had drawn a beautiful sketch of the new house but what made the picture spectacular was that all the shading is made up of every name of each  pledge partner. I was blown away at the ingenuity and then realised with a flash that it is the perfect thing for me to do for my album art as a way of incorporating each future owner's name into the album! 2000 odd names is going to be a lot of work for whoever designs the cover, but I am convinced it will be stunning so will keep you posted!

Woman in business...

Who would have thought two years ago when I started the Lucky Packet Project to sell my album way before it existed, that the subsequent journey would result in me becoming a speaker on innovation and thinking out the box?  Well that is how it has unfolded and on the 1st of August I found myself as one of the main speakers as the Women In Business Conference run by the Graduate School of Business at UCT!

I shared the stage with women who are CEO's of companies (Yolanda Cuba, Patricia Norris), MBA graduates (Ziggy Owei) and national media icons (Patricia Glynn) - it was daunting and so exciting at the same time to realise that my story is worth of such great company. Delivering my 40 minute talk on thinking out the box and doing things differently I became aware of how powerful this journey has been. That it has not just been about creating an album, but has actually become a flagship project for possibility and innovation to inspire other people to see how they can approach their dreams in a fresh and new way. I finished my talk with "Shine" and had the 200 women attending the conference up and singing "I'm going to shine" over and over again. It felt amazing to hear them all affirming that right for themselves!

The MBA students that organized the events blew me away with how they pulled everything together and at the end of the day they had raised R70,000 for a bursary fund for women who cant afford MBA fees. I loved every minute of the event and gained so much value from the other speakers as well. I am thouroughly enjoying all this speaking at the moment and it awesome that every event creates the opportunity for more people to become future owners - 30 more who joined me after this one!

Thought for the week...

The bumblebee newborn,
Not knowing it should not fly
Spreads its wings and takes to the air
And flies in the knowledge that it will,
And it is that unwavering belief
that makes it so.
If we could but for an instant,
Believe in a fraction of ourselves
As the modest bumblebee of itself does,
We to could do what science says we cannot,
And the sky could not contain our potential expressed,
As we spread the wings of faith,
And flew high and far.

                       Verity

TV or not TV?

Some exciting news on the acting front for me is that I have just landed a small role in a new MNET Mini Series "Ella Blue". What is great is that I play a pianist so will get to combine music and acting for the first time ever!  For those of you who have ever seen me play live you will know it is a rare occurance, so this is going to really stretch me to bring out my old classical training tricks! The series is being shot out in Arniston and is set in 1960's SA dealing with the reclassification issues that mixed race families dealt with on the west coast. It is being directed by Daryl Roodt and I am excited to be a part of the story they are telling.

Life is amazing in that it never rains but pours, and shooting starts on Monday so I have had to reschedule our pre-production rehearsals which I was champing at the bit to begin. It was a tough call - do I take the part the mess the guys around, or lose the part so we can get the album going?

Brian, Paul and the band have been amazingly flexible and I will let you know when we get things back on the road for the rehearsals. Paul is still flying down though so I will have a full day tomorrow working on songs with him so not all is lost!  Here's to movies, music and magic!