A dozen songs that clock in just shy of 50 minutes with hooks aplenty, I bought Road Apples in Grade 12. In the ensuing decades, it’s been played more than most of my 1,500 CDs. I also own the vinyl. Thirty years on, I still know the words to every song. And, when I sing along […]
March 2020. North America is in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Businesses close. Families are separated. Isolation and loneliness set in as imposed quarantines keep loved ones apart. The Masters, a spring tradition, had been cancelled for the first time since the Second World War. Which meant professional golfer Mike Weir, who became a […]
Scars, we all have them. Some are visible; others are hidden deep. Human nature is to bury these secrets — keeping the most harrowing stories for our ears only. The problem is these memories of past traumas circle our brains like caged animals, gnawing away and fraying the wires, hoping for release, a little bit […]
Julian Taylor: Perseverance and Patience –– A Life in Music Julian Taylor is not the first artist — nor will he be the last — to grow disenchanted with the music industry and shelve his dreams of making hit records for a living. The lifestyle of a Canadian touring musician is hard. You watch friends […]
Throughout history, tragedy, heartbreak, and unfathomable loss are experiences that have inspired artists to write songs. While they start from a personal place, when combined with the zeitgeist when they were written, these songs can resonate with generations long after the songwriter is gone – because of the shared feelings evoked by the words and the music.https://www.youtube.com/embed/il7DWoLySW8 […]
A vital cog of the alternative and indie scene on Vancouver Island, this past October Logan’s Pub closed its doors for good. Another live music venue casualty due to the pandemic. For more than three decades, Victoria’s arts community found a home here. Live music rained from its rickety rafters six nights a week. From […]
A little boogie-woogie, buckets of blues, and heaps of rock ‘n’ roll. That’s Crowbar. Frank Davies, owner of Daffodil Records, the label that released three LPs by these musical miscreants from Hamilton in the early 1970s, knows this cast of characters better than most. He introduces us to the band behind Bad Manors, Crowbar’s debut, which […]
Rough Trade were innovators. Equal parts new wave, punk, and pop, this Toronto-based band led by Carole Pope and Kevan Staples marched to their own beat. Art, music, and theatre collided in their compositions. The band was a vehicle to have fun—and poke fun—at the world’s shortcomings through lyrics laced with social, sexual, and political […]
Music and art are natural friends. Many musicians don’t just paint pictures with words and melodies; they also pour these creative thoughts onto canvases. Tom Wilson, Kurt Swinghammer, and Joni Mitchell are a few examples of multi-talented Canadian artists who express their creativity and imagination across disciplines. In the fall of 1995, The National Gallery […]
“Strikes across the frontier and strikes for higher wage/ Planet lurches to the right as ideologies engage/ Suddenly it’s repression, moratorium on rights/ What did they think the politics of panic would invite?/ Person in the street shrugs ‘Security comes first’/ But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse/ The trouble with normal […]