In this installment of "10 things" we talk with Jennifer Castle, otherwise known as Castlemusic about Lansdowne and Bloor, water towers, Toronto Island, patience and impulse shopping:

1. The release the new Castlemusic LP, You Can't Take Anyone, coincides with Castle moving to a new place in the Lansdowne and Bloor neighbourhood are she's already living in and loving: "I love the water tower on Wallace Street, and there's lots of space up here."
   
   


2. After releasing her previous work completely independently, she's ecstatic to be putting this disc out through Toronto's Blue Fog Records: "It's home to Rick White [Album] and Andre EthiĂŠr; just some Toronto people."
   
   


3. This new record has been a while in the making: "We did it slowly over a couple of seasons, and then it took a while to find a label, but now it's out and it looks good."
   
   


4. Castle spent the last two winters living on Toronto Island: "It's very different. It's eerie. It's really quiet and there's nobody there. I live at Gibraltar Art Centre so I just have a studio there. It's kind of awesome. You have to break through the ice every time you go home on this crazy boat and when it snows there, when there's a blizzard in Toronto it's like Winterland over there, 'cause there's no cars or anything, so it's pretty awesome."
   
   


5. A few years ago, she started playing drums in Doug Tielli's experiment Everybody Get Sick as well as guitar in Fox the Boombox, although she's getting away from playing in bands for now: "I sort of just do more - nothing that's band-oriented, just more playing with other musicians. Just sitting in on their projects."
   
   


6. Some of the bands she's collaborated with in the last few years include Constantines, Elliot Brood and Fucked Up: "It's a little bit more nerve-racking because you just drop in and they just start recording and you're like 'Oh shit, I don't really know what I'm gonna do,' but it's good. I mean, the Fucked Up collaboration was a good a good example of that. I didn't even know their music too much."
   
   


7. Live shows are challenging when you play some of the quietest music around, but the unruly crowds are getting less common these days: "Sometimes I get shocked when you could hear a pin drop. I'm like, 'Oh shit, everybody's listening.'"
   
   


8. Castle started playing music with an impulse buy: "I was with a friend in an antique shop in the town I grew up in and saw a guitar and totally bought it on a whim."
   
   


9. She took this guitar, a Fender acoustic, with her to England, where she played her first gig in London: "There was a little folk club that I started playing at. My friend put me up to it. She actually told the manager that I played, 'cause I always went and listened, and he said, 'I heard you play, you should come play one night,' and I did and then he gave me a little slot after that every week."
   
   


10. She still has that guitar, for what it's worth: "It's busted and broken. I dropped it in the ocean. I pulled it out of storage this winter to have a look at it and fanaticize about getting it fixed up and the whole bridge just popped right off."
    
    

The official release of Castlemusic's You Can't Take Anyone LP will be Friday, July 18 at 7:30 PM in the courtyard of St. George the Martyr (197 John) with Nifty and Ryan Driver ($8).

Look for regular installments of "10 things" every Thursday morning around 10-ish or so. If you'd like to have people know ten things about you, send Steve an email and he'll set you up proper.

Photo by Davida Nemeroff