My musical side hustle — Pat Dryburgh

I’ve been playing a lot of music lately. It started a couple weeks after my father died when a friend from high school invited me to an open mic. Following six years of not performing music in public, what started as a monthly night out quietly grew into a side hustle performing at local bars and restaurants several times a month.

When I started booking paid gigs, I decided to promote my music using just my first and middle name. As proud as I am of my family name, Dryburgh is difficult to pronounce and impossible to know how to spell based solely on hearing it spoken over a microphone or in a conversation at a noisy venue. So, I’ve been performing as Patrick Douglas.

It also gave me an opportunity to make myself another website! PatrickDouglas.ca is a simple one-page site powered by Jekyll and hosted on Github pages. Right now, it includes links to my email and Instagram and lists my upcoming and past shows. Eventually, my hope is it will become a repository of the music I’ve recorded and will record in the future.

I’ve reused the basic template for a couple of other projects now, including my nascent cover band, The Pop Rockets and for my friend and fellow musician Jamie Shrier. My hope is to encourage local musicians in London, Ontario to start owning their own domain names in addition to their social channels in the hopes it will prepare them for another inevitable upheaval across the social media landscape.

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