In the 1990s Chris Birkett was working around the clock as the UK’s go-to-producer/engineer working on legendary projects, such as Sinead O’Connor’s album I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got, that featured the massive hit single, Nothing Compares 2 U. With artists and labels taking most of his time Birkett had little to spare for his two young children.

Feeling he was missing key moments in their life, the Toronto-based renaissance artist reflects on the importance of work-life balance with his heartwarming new single “Hear The Angels Sing.” Birkett wrote the opening lyrics late one night as his career was taking shape.

Why does it take all of my time,
To go out there and be someone?
There’s nothing left at the end of the line
Nothing left for the ones that you love.

“It’s a question and sentiment people are feeling today” says Birkett. “The music and lyrics of Hear the Angels Sing are an example of angelic gifts, especially during the holiday season.”

Every ten years some bigger things seem to rock the music industry. Around 1990 it was the passing of vinyl and cassettes to CDs. CDs then became a household item and yes the record labels just competed to make reissues of the old vinyl catalogues.

2000 came with the MP3 becoming a household thing. Napster was the new thing to spread music and the gateway into the digital world. The money that the record labels earned on the reissue catalogues were lost and it put the record labels in crisis.

2010 was around the launch of Spotify and everything that we now have with ] our music online. Here come the playlists and new consumer behavior to listen to just the tracks they like and change songs much faster.

“I've Seen The Sun,” "I'll Go Where You Lead," and "Little Warbler" added to CBC Radio this week!

From the heady feeling of being the only one awake at night, to the brooding at the end of a relationship, to the coziness of a rainy day, to the slithering sexiness of a night out on the town, Songwriter is a jazz album of deliciously dark tones and stormy sonic landscapes. It’s the third album on which vocalist Alex Bird and pianist Ewen Farncombe combine their singular talents, and it reflects deeply on the full spectrum of human mood and the act of songwriting itself.

Check out Alex Bird and The Jazz Mavericks "The Sweetest Moments" on YouTube here:

Okay, I have been writing about why certain songs are not picked for Cashbox Radio 9and beyond). What is kind of annoying is when you get a song and can’t play it, yes it happens, more often than you realize.

I was just doing my featured radio show “Yesterday and Tomorrow” for our weekly Sunday feature where we play the new singles alongside the hits. We have pre-approved five songs and told these artists that we will play the song in our Sunday show and they will be added to the database so their fans can also go to our request line on Request a Song on Cashbox Radio! – Cashbox Radio for additional airplay for the track. This was done late last week or early this week. So now on Saturday, I’m there to create and record the show and see if they had sent the song.

The Andy Kim Christmas returns to Toronto’s Massey Hall Wednesday, December 7 with a collection of iconic performers celebrating this year’s holiday season. The 18th iteration of the renowned concert series sees Andy Kim bring Canada’s most decorated musical talent together for an evening of cheer with all proceeds donated to CAMH Gifts of Light.

Tickets to The Andy Kim Christmas will be available for purchase Friday, October 28 at 10 am at MasseyHall.com and TicketMaster.ca. Tickets start at $35.50- $85.50 plus fees. The full line up of special guests will be announced in the coming weeks.

Billboard-charting world music supergroup Sultans of String are excited about the launch of their feature length film "Sultans of String: The Refuge Project - Visual Album" – their pandemic project that just won at the Cannes World Film Festival, Best Istanbul Film Festival, and selected for the Vancouver Independent, Scarab, and Folk in Film Festivals.

Come join their Cast and Crew party, and celebrate their recent wins with a film screening, as well as another birthday “year around the sun” for bandleader Chris McKhool, all while raising donations for a good cause!

TORONTO: Sunday November 20
Doors at 6 pm, Film at 7 pm sharp.
Tranzac Main Hall, 292 Brunswick Ave, Toronto, ON M5S 2M7
Tix: https://sultansofstringfilm.eventbrite.ca

All admission proceeds of Toronto show after hall rental cost are donated to the UN Refugee Agency for their life-saving programming. Sultans of String have raised more than $10,000 so far!

Following a world premiere at The Toronto International Film Festival in 2022 and in honor of Native American Heritage Month, American Masters – Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On premieres nationwide Tuesday, November 22 at 9 p.m. ET on your local PBS station, pbs.org/americanmasters and on demand after this date on the PBS Video App.

The life, music, and activism of legendary Indigenous singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie are explored in this documentary that is as captivating as its subject, who smashed through barriers to become an inspiration to fans and fellow musicians alike.

This is why your song is not picked! Part 2.

I’m writing the main and most common reasons why we reject artists' songs on the radio station. I will get back to the series about the magazine and the festivals. Now gets to the main reasons we say no to songs for radio. Just to get some inspiration I will go into my mailbox and submit an account to see what is in there right now.

Oh, the first one here is an artist that wrote: Listen at 3:20 in the song there the magic happens.

Before writing a No. 1 Billboard hit (“Black Velvet”), becoming a MuchMusic original veejay, and an author and podcaster, JUNO-winning songwriter Christopher Ward recorded a 1978 solo debut album titled Spark of Desire.

Until now, Spark of Desire has never been available on streaming services. However, on a lucky trip to his well-organized storage space during the pandemic, Ward found the master tapes, and Warner Music Canada was able to bake them back into existence and remaster this delightful debut.

Fans will finally be able to discover (or re-discover) Spark of Desire in its remastered splendor, including the joyful, groovy single “Once In A Longtime,” which, with its bright horns and easy disco roll, evokes the beauty, wonder, and euphoria of discovering new love.

The biggest problem right now for the music industry is that we have opened the doors to the big brown wave. Before we had some kind of gatekeepers in the music industry. It was definitely not good all the time, but better than today when there is nothing to stop people from giving out stuff.

The opportunity to give out something stops artists from really developing a song. When I became a scriptwriter for TV and Film the first thing, they told us was, writing is rewriting. Something I’m not good at, as you can see here in my columns. Sometimes I should just stop reading the text and rewrite it. Stop again and just rewrite. Yes, my columns would be better. Unfortunately, time wise and I need to do so many other things I really don’t have time for it, so you have to bear with me.

When it comes to a song though, it’s a different story. Here you are writing something that should be forever. There is no real deadline; the song is ready when it’s ready. You are also writing a song that should compete with millions of other songs. Not just a column that comes out once a week and then is forgotten. No here you must put your soul into it.

It’s not hard to make a show in your head and everything is there. I would even be the best performer in the world if you just let me have an unlimited budget and complete control. My show would have singing dinosaurs on a real life scale and more pyrotechnic than Kiss or Rammstein. I would just perform my own songs, but since I’m not that good of a singer we would require at least twenty-five people and guest stars that would help me perform by songs. Also, a good sound technician can handle Autotune in any circumstances. It will be a story during the whole show about my journey in the music industry and all the artists that I have met and worked with over the years.

Sounds good?

It would be a spectacle, I promise. The problem here is that, of course, if I would take this to a festival or any gig place for that sake, they probably would say no. You would need a gigantic stage and production around it. Even if I paid for all the production myself many would be skeptical to bring this show in. Of course, it will be good, even if I can’t sing or play all the things around it will be just worth seeing. The music is coming far behind the show.

Just in time for Halloween, Jackie K has released her latest single, “Nurse Jane,” a creepy alt-folk ballad inspired by a tuberculosis sanatorium in Saskatchewan and a troubled nurse who worked there.

Check out “Nurse Jane” on YouTube here:

“On the shores of Echo Lake as the Great War was done / She dressed in white and went to work in the sanatorium / Nurse Jane doled out tablets and help to those in need / She cleaned and fed, they coughed and bled / The valley of TB,” she sings.

“Saskatchewan opened three TB sanatoriums at the beginning of the twentieth century and one of them was located in the Qu’Appelle Valley at Fort San,” Jackie recounts. “It was a completely independent space, except for coal delivery, and an early model for what we now know as Medicare.” Built in 1917, it functioned as a TB clinic till 1971.

I wrote the same line around 2005. Internet was taking over, MTV was dead, and it seems like we were splitting up in our media consumption that there were no trends, just niche things. Back then my question was if Eminem and Britney Spears would be the last Superstars! It looks like it, nothing big really came out.

I was wrong but it took up to three years more, almost to 2009 before it really happened again. Then it was Lady Gaga and after that, we got several Superstars. I don’t know what made it possible. Did we actually start to look on the same channels just to make it possible? Did someone have the formula to get their things in several channels at the same time? I know for a fact that Lady Gaga put all PR in Europe for example, but at the same time was just a fluke.

I have attended many showcase festivals over the past half year. What strikes me is how organized most of them are, but how lost they are in some fields including people. I have been looking for a while now at how many of how them are accessible for handicapped and special needs and to be honest it’s sad to see the lack of support and awareness in this area.

Almost none of them have handicapped speakers, but worse is that they don’t have handicap-friendly venues or facilities. At the same, they almost compete to have small stickers to have on your badge if you are he, she, or them it’s totally ignored that there is around 26% of people that is handicapped or challenged, or if there are people that have special needs. Or that around 11% actually are in wheelchairs, something you very rarely see at festivals. In fact, in Sweden, a person in a wheelchair was thrown out from a festival because he wanted to get further ahead to see the show since people were standing in front of him.

Auction items include music trips, autographed items, original photography prints, vinyl packages, event tickets, and a 15-minute Zoom call with Cmdr. Chris Hadfield

For a complete list of auction items, please visit the website: theawesomemusicproject.com/auction

The Awesome Music Project, a Canadian charity dedicated to raising awareness and supporting research into music’s transformative impact on mental wellness and mental health, will be launching its first-ever Awesome Online Music Auction on World Mental Health Day, October 10, 2022.

“What better way to mark World Mental Health Day than with an auction to raise much-needed funds to help bring music-focused mental wellness programs to communities across Canada,” said AMP Executive Director Cori Ferguson. “We are blessed to have received an incredible line-up of donations from partners across the country, and I think we’ve got something that will appeal to casual and hardcore music fans alike.”

Featured auction items include:

Anyone who’s ever had a fake friend knows that, in contrast, loyalty in a friendship is an important quality that is worth its weight in gold!  JUNO-nominated Canadian pop group Girl Pow-R captures the unique agony of knowing a backstabber with their new single “Slam” – check it out on YouTube here:

The fifth single from Girl Pow-R’s sophomore album, “Slam” begins with funky flute and ominous beats, and then dissolves into a head-bopping groove as the group sets their boundaries with a “friend”:
You snuck around my back
And I will not take that
I thought that you were real
Yo, what’s the deal?

With 2+Billion digital streams across platforms and counting, Canada’s original, best-selling kids’ music group the MINI POP KIDS celebrate their Bright Lights Relit tour with a new video for “About That Time” – check it out on YouTube here:

A kid-friendly cover of Lizzo’s “About Damn Time,” the ’70s-inspired disco-funk earworm gets the video treatment with highlights from the tour thus far, depicting a montage of the kids’ high-energy performances and fun-filled interactions with fans.

After a temporary touring hiatus due to Covid-19 restrictions, the MINI POP KIDS finally returned stateside this summer, where they will be touring through the fall. They have also added several new dates in Canada.

Wintersong Music Festival has officially announced the headliners for their 4th edition, taking place January 20th - 21st, 2023 in Stouffville, ON. The annual festival draws thousands to the local area in the shoulder-season of Winter, giving a much-needed boost to the local economy.

Wintersong will be headlined by Montreal indie-pop band Stars; two-time JUNO award winning musician Dan Mangan; and 80’s new wave/synth-pop band Men Without Hats.

They will be joined by 2022 Polaris shortlisted OMBIIGIZI - a collaboration between Zoon’s Daniel Monkman and Status/Non Status’ Adam Sturgeon; and local indie-folk band Man Made Forest.

I have been attending a lot of meetings with industry people the past week. Since it’s a lot of people from the live industry the discussions have been about what has happened since COVID was left behind and everything opened up again.

This is mainly in Sweden so I can’t really say yet if it is an international trend. Of course, here we got an overproduction of events this summer. You had several events that were postponed during COVID that now had to take place at the same time as new events were coming around. I thought that we would see some events going really bad since it was so many and that people now with economic crisis would keep their money tighter.

In the end, though most events seem to have succeeded. The ones that got hit and didn’t go that well are located in bigger cities. Events in the countryside seem to go fine. But one big problem seems to be the same for everybody. People are buying tickets late.

Jeff Bova may not be a household name but his body of work and the list of the iconic artists he has produced and worked with is known in most households that have radios, televisions or computer, phones and all streaming services.

Bova is a Grammy Award-winning producer, arranger, and musician with hundreds of platinum and gold records to his name. He won his Grammy for Album of the Year as the producer on Celine Dion’s, “Falling Into You” and during a career spanning over 40 years, he toured as a member of Herbie Hancock’s Rockit Band and has contributed to hundreds of recordings by significant mainstream artists, including Katy Perry, Michael Jackson, Celine Dion, Luther Vandross, Tina Turner, Eric Clapton, Robert Palmer, Billy Joel, Bee Gees, Backstreet Boys, Cher, Meat Loaf, Cyndi Lauper, Iron Maiden and many more.