My first AirBnB guest has arrived. A Brooklyn girl from NYC. A very young (emphasis on the word “young”), freelance film producer who has one of her works showing at the Female Eye Film Festival. Jessica has never been to Toronto before although this is the second time one of her films has been selected to show. With only two full days, unfortunately she won’t have an opportunity to really experience The Big Smoke. However, she was asking me if I knew any clubs with live music…..REALLY!!!
I find myself at the front end of yet another re-invention of myself. When last I spoke of my day job I was driving automobiles for a subcontractor to one of Canada’s only two railroads. It wasn’t CN. The job nearly killed me. It was so labour intensive and the hours were so long that I actually don’t remember getting to or from work some days.
2013 has been a long and tumultuous year, filled with many challenges, some failures, many successes, tons of new discoveries and an innumerable amount of wonderful memories made with the family and friends I love so very much. For my first DBAWIS article of 2014, I thought I’d highlight a few of the musical and otherwise amazing things that have come to be my “favourites” of this past year.
We live in a brave new world. Our phones are portable and more powerful than our first computers ever could be. Print media is a dying breed, or a dying art depending on your point of view. You can go days without talking to another human being face to face and still somehow feel connected to the people around you. And musical discovery has become easier, and much more difficult at the same time.The digitization of music has led to what I think is a strange and kind of sad phenomenon – the picking and choosing of songs, and the disregarding of others. This piecemeal music selection is another reason why I’m falling more and more in love with my growing vinyl collection. There’s no picking and choosing, there’s only listening and discovering.
I’m lucky to have several super cool and like-minded people in my life, and as a result I have some fairly intellectually stimulating conversations on an equally fairly regular basis. Sometimes these conversations can devolve (entertainingly so!) into some pretty epic rants. One such instance happened quite recently. I was talking to my dear friend Emy on Gchat while we were both taking brain breaks from work (hey, it’s necessary sometimes…a lot of the time), and the topic of band tshirts came up. Both of us, being music lovers to the nth degree, have our share of band related tanks, tshirts and even dresses that claim places in our respective wardrobes. One important fact to note is that the band outfits we own are inspired by bands that we actually *gasp* LIKE!
What did drivers do before car radio was invented? There’s nothing more torturous to me than absolute silence while driving. I spend a lot of time in the car. My daily commute ranges from about thirty minutes each way (on a very very good day) to one to two hours each way (on very very VERY bad days). Accidents, the slightest hint of inclement weather, and events like sports games, Molson Amphitheatre concerts and disasters like the Hondy/Molson/whatever it’s called now Indy are catastrophic to my sanity in proportion to how much time they add to my already painful commute. Sometimes, the only thing that keeps me from screaming in frustration is singing.
This past weekend, my fellow Soundgarden fangirl Emy and I flew down to Washington D.C. to get our quarterly dose of SG music love at the DC 101 Chili Cook Off. I am definitely no stranger to a music festival; I’ve been to several, both at home and in the U.S. since delving into this music journalist world. As a result, I’ve developed an idea of what makes a good music festival, and what kind of a clusterfuck a bad one can be. And let me tell you, DC 101 (a rock radio station in Washington) needs to go back to festival planning school, because they put on a pretty shitty festival.
The idea for this column came about last night when I received an email of a peculiar nature. The email in question was angry in tone, derogatory in content and evidently written in the heat of the moment by someone who had become very incensed by something that the person thought I had done to him/her. The email, in actuality, was hate mail, in response to a review that I had written. It wasn’t the first piece of hate mail I’d ever received, and the more I choose to push myself into the public eye, the more likely it is that it won’t be the last. But it did get me thinking about publicity, the internet and how hate proliferates so easily when the two come together.
I seriously need a vacation. I feel like I’ve been running flat out for weeks now, which normally is awesome but MAN am I tired. There is so much I want to write for all you lovely DBAWISers out there but the words simply do not exist in my brain right now. So instead, I’m going to write in music. No, not actual musical notes, but with songs. When I stated a blog a couple of years ago, I had a little post series I called “Songs that make me”. Whenever I heard a song that evoked a certain feeling , whatever that may be, I would post about it. I haven’t updated my blog in a while, but that doesn’t mean that I react any less strongly to a song. Whether the song puts a smile on my face, brings a tear to my eye or make me want to jump the nearest attractive male specimen, here are some of the songs that have, well, made me…
I mentioned last week, there are some days, even weeks that simply by way of existing, make it hard to stay positive. A hard few days at work, where thanklessness and bitterness overwhelm the desire to work hard and stay motivated will bring anyone down. Lately, technical difficulties with my Examiner page have made it even hard to get excited to sit and write a music review, which really sucks. When even the job you’re passionate about starts to get tiresome, you know something has to give. Last week, when I was beyond frustrated, tired, cranky and really just “over IT” (IT being everything), the musical gods must have been looking down on me with pity and generosity in their hearts. I was given not one, not two but THREE amazing music related opportunities, all of which turned into some of the greatest moments of my fledging music journalist career. They also served as much needed reminders of why I am doing what I do in the first place.
Bullseye Records of Canada
Segarini: Don't Believe a Word I Say 