Ottawa synthpop band Church of Trees has hooked up with legendary Rough Trade vocalist, Carole Pope, on a new single WORLD’S A BITCH. The single captures the global angst over the COVID pandemic and the desperate need for vaccine distribution.

The JUNO award-winning Pope, who pushed the boundaries of sexuality and sexual politics both in Rough Trade songs and on stage, says “I think the song encapsulates how we’re all feeling about being locked down… and you can dance to it!”

WORLD’S A BITCH is the lead track off Church of Tree’s forthcoming EP PAUSE, which drops in late February.

Church of Trees founder Bernard Frazer brims with excitement describing his experience with the rock icon. “She was delightful! They say to never meet your heroes because they’ll disappoint, but Carole was extraordinary, and in such fine form!”

“The papers said Ed always played from the heart
He got an agent and a roadie named Bart
They made a record and it went in the charts
The sky was the limit”

Tom Petty’s “Into the Great Wide Open” catches the dream very well and it is one of my favorite songs. It’s about and artist rise and fall and the lines above here is the essential dream of the music industry.

Someone said that the music industry is selling a dream; we make smoke and mirrors to keep that dream still true. The question now is when will this dream change? The dream will always be there, that a lot of people will enjoy my art. But the rules have changed.

In the dark middle-ages when we didn’t have cell phones or internet, yes I’m talking the 80’s and early 90’s.  Recording a record was expensive. To get a good sound you needed to be in a professional studio with the right equipment. The record label put up money for artwork, a producer, pressing, and recording. An album was an achievement.

Brand new year, same old sins.

Spotlighting Wigwamen Waabnong Food Bank 20 Sewells Rd, Toronto, ON Scarborough North  Phone 647-607-5943

Websitetorontoeastsda.ca

Service contact Faye Moffett, Coordinator, fayemoffett@rogers.com

HoursCOVID19 -- Food bank open Thu 2 pm-4:30 pm; serving outside

Support your local foodbank. Thank you.

How does your songwriting garden grow after a decade of silence? Been just that long since Small Sins, pet project of Canadian writer/performer/producer Thomas D’Arcy, has put out music so this new release is large for him.

The curiously titled Volume II (his fourth release) is due out on February 12th (Thomas D'Arcy Music Inc) and includes the lead single “Andre” out today. The new album was recently included in Exclaim's 29 Most Anticipated Albums of 2021, with the single premiering on CBC q.

Although Alex Pangman grew up a couple of generations late to have sung with Benny Goodman, the vibrant vocalist is the say-no-more quintessential jazz and swing artist Canada knows and adores. Pangman possesses the requisite taste, talent, and the historical knowledge of an avid record collector to breathe new life into the sturdy songs of the classic jazz era. She is also the host of Swing Set, a weekly program on Jazzcast.

She has recorded four albums for Justin Time Records, toured internationally including several mainstage appearances at the prestigious Montreal International Jazz Festival, recorded with her own Alleycats group, plus Bucky Pizzarelli, Kevin Clark, Jeff Healey, Ron Sexsmith, Dick Sudhalter, and many more classic jazz luminaries.

And now Canada’s ‘Sweetheart of Swing,” JUNO Award-nominated singer Alex Pangman & Her Alleycats has released a heartfelt new video for her take on Louis Armstrong’s classic composition, “If We Never Meet Again.”

Listen and watch “If We Never Meet Again” here on YouTube:

The 60’s in Greenwich Village in New York was a magical time for the folk boom and there is no shortage of legends that were there in the mid to late 60s to talk about it and share their experiences. The likes of Eric Andersen, Tom Paxton and Tom Rush are still out singing their songs and telling their tales but how about that period of time that led to folk explosion?

Brooklyn born Art Podell was there in 1957 and was a big part of the Village scene. “ Back then there wasn’t a lot of folk clubs. The village was more of a “beat” scene. There were poets and some singers. My influences were Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. There was a place called Café Wha? where we got to play folk music. I teamed up with Paul Potash and formed a duo called Art and Paul. We performed regularly at Café Wha? with and incredible guitarist named Dick Rosmini.” The Kingston Trio’s Tom Dooley sold an impressive 3 million copies in 1958 and the search was on for the next big “folk act.”

This week we spotlight Second Harvest Central Food Bank 1450 Lodestar Road Unit 18 Toronto, Ontario
Tel: 416-408-2594
email@secondharvest.ca

Member agencies have been coping with the new realities of providing emergency food relief during COVID, whether it’s changing their community dining programs to take away meals or offering prepared hampers instead of food bank access. Many agencies have closed their doors, which has put further strain on the food resources of agencies that have remained open.

Support your local food bank. The need is dire.

The punk’s punk, Art Bergmann is now a member of the Order of Canada. Tell me it still ain’t 2020. Dude was the walking, singing, shouting face of punk, rubbing people the wrong way for the right reasons, creating a nationwide conversation among punknation and oh, influencing the Canadian punk sound, his current iteration of which can be heard on 2020’s Christo Fascists single.

The Signs are everywhere, 2021 is going to be a breakout year in music. Do you know what kinds of trends we will see in the music industry over the coming year?

If you are involved in the music industry then you’ll know that a lot changed this year. Top artists released songs that no one ever thought they would and smaller artists gained notoriety much faster than usual. Artists have been shaking up the music industry and this is setting us up for an exciting 2021.

In this article, we are going to look at some of the top music industry trends to watch in 2021.

Lack of Genres

You may have already noticed this but the way in which music genres are categorised has been changing a lot recently. With so many new artists creating music, allocating their songs into specific genres has been increasingly more difficult. You can’t simply say that a song is pop now when it could be a mixture of four or five genres. This trend is set to make playlisting and chart lists more difficult in 2021.

Shorter Songs

What did you do with your time during the pandemic lockdown? Some people got to some long put off chores. Some read books, some folks binged on NetFlix.

Paul McCartney wrote, produced and played on a new record.

When the lockdown started Paul was with his daughter Mary and her family, 20 minutes away from his studio. “I was working on a tune for an animated film and I went to the studio to finish it up. It only took a half hour but it was so much fun so I kept going. I started finishing up some bits I had and started writing some new ones. The grandkids would ask me what I did in the studio so I’d play them what I’d done. Before I knew it I had 11 songs and thought I have enough for an album. And it was fun.”

This is the turning point.

I just felt this holiday just passed with little notice. The quarantine just made me stay at home and keep on working on my projects. The only difference was that I left social media and the mailbox with an out of office reply. Even with pandemic still raging,  it has just left me with more work than ever. The major part of the workload is also for preparing when we are getting back to seeing each other, and resuming our time on the road.

No, not going back to normal. We are not getting back to normal. Like when 9/11 happened nothing went back to normal it was a new normal. To be honest 9/11 was a small impact in comparison to something that results in a lock down for the whole world. It is a new normal we will now be facing. What we are lacking is meeting people and interaction so that will come automatically when we resume our post-pandemic roles, it’s just with what restrictions and safety precautions? This is one of the turning points in history, we will talk about before and after 2020.

On January 8th, 1935, in Tupelo, Mississippi, was born to Gladys and Vernon Presley, a baby boy. He would be named Elvis Aaron Presley, and one day would be known simply as…..The King.

On August 16, 1977, 41 years ago, we lost one of the most significant artists on human beings the world has ever known.  Elvis Presley. Although the anniversary of his death is not as universally recognized as years past his impact on the world has not diminished. In 2010 we wrote the story “The Boy Who Would Be King” and thought it appropriate to rerun it for your reading enjoyment. Elvis didn’t like being called the King and at one show where they held up a sign saying Elvis Is King. He asked them to take it down saying there is only one King and pointed heavenward. Hope you enjoy the read.

This is my New Year's column. Is there anything good to talk about in 2020? This will be remembered as one of the worst years anyway. I could just fill the whole page with all the stuff that was not good. Nearly all conferences were turned from social events to pale online copies with not as much value. All the time I have been missing out on new artists and especially friends that I would have shared moments with that are lost.

No, I won’t do that. This is what you feel but if you look at the whole thing you can really see it from another angle. You really can’t move forward by doing the same things over and over again. I look at 2020 as the break we probably needed. Not that we needed people to die, but I guess that is the only way we get governments and officials to react to serious problems. I guess we can just cynically laugh that COVID-19 is not as deadly as Ebola, the Black Death or the Spanish Flu. ( a fact we will not know until this is finally over)

Yes, it’s Christmas Day when this goes on. Although in Sweden, we celebrate Christmas the day before. This day it’s the big homecoming day when you go back to your little shit city and meet all your old friends in the local shitty bar since they are also home and has nothing to do. Yes, it’s usually a pretty drunk evening. That won’t happen this year though for obvious reasons!

Still, I celebrate that from today onwards Christmas is over. Suddenly, I get back more than half of all my favorite radio stations that have been jammed with shitty Christmas music. No, I’m really not a big fan of Christmas music. All this has led to the fact I have become a collector of Christmas music that is obnoxious. Things you really can’t play in a crowd of people since there will be always someone offended. Okay, the truth is 2020 that is hard to find a topic that people are not offended by.

Christmas and New Year’s Eve, the last week of the calendar year are most often a time of constants. At Christmas we sing the same carols and songs we sang as kids, watch the same timeless movies, “A Christmas Carol”, Scrooge and his ghosts don’t get any less scary, while we have our hearts warmed by “It’s A Wonderful Life”.

We decorate the tree with some of the old decorations that have been handed down and open presents Christmas morning and eat the same turkey, stuffing, yams, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce that our mothers and their mothers before them prepared. There is something comforting and grounding in tradition. It gives us roots and steadies us.

And New Year’s Eve is the same. We gather and wish each other well and wait patiently for the stroke of midnight and sing Auld Lang Syne like our parents did and theirs before them. We talk excitedly about the coming year and discuss the good and bad of the outgoing year.

The Andy Kim Christmas Special presented by the air miles® reward program re-airing due to popular demand Television Special in support of Crew Nation, CAMH Gifts of Light and Food Banks Canada to re-air Thursday, December 24 at 9 p.m. on Citytv and Citytv.com

Featuring performances by Andy Kim, Barenaked Ladies, Broken Social Scene, Buffy Sainte-Marie, City and Colour, Glass Tiger & Roch Voisine, Jully Black, Kardinal Offishall, Ron Sexsmith, Sam Roberts, Sarah McLachlan, Serena Ryder & William Prince

With his extravagant way of expressing himself, the looks of a visual prince, a singing voice which can tackle English, Japanese, and Swedish, his naturally confident stage awareness, and his undoubtedly great fashion sense – YOHIO has captured the heart of thousands of fans all over the world.

The platinum-awarded Swedish visual pop-artist YOHIO released his third album Nov 27^th2020,
‘A Pretty Picture in a Most Disturbing Way’, and “Undo” is the current single from that album.

Check out the video on YouTube here:

I heard from a whining artist the other day that managers only took a percentage of what the artist earned. The artist was angry since he got an offer that he could pay for management services and as usual though he became screwed.

I have seen more and more managers actually turning into more of a consultant. Even more and more of them call themselves consultants. In my opinion, that is also where the management role is going to be, and here are the reasons why.

Yes, in the old days the management role was just a percentage. At the same time, this is quite long time ago and the industry has changed. This is mainly in the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s people born in those years are now middle-aged. Back then the artist made money. Touring was a substantial part of the income. Getting a percentage of that and merch sales could make you a living, not a big a living but an income. Same with record sales. The sales came hand in hand with the release that also could be sold and get some monetary value. This was more the 70’s and 80’s, in the 90’s it started to change.