Ongoing History Of New Music

There are some bands that are very consistent with their sound—and fans love them for it…no two records are never exactlythe same, but whenever a new album is announced, we have a pretty good idea of what to expect… And when we get into the album, there’s a sonic linearity to the songs…nothing wrong with that… Then there are bands who like to take chances, take risks, from record to record…the last thing josh homme and whatever his crew is in queen of the stone age want to do is repeat themselves…that requires not only imagination and creativity but guts… But while they acknowledge that this approach can confuse people and maybe alienate fans from release to release, they also know that a certain percentage—a solid one at that—love that the band likes to use the curve ball Heck, it goes beyond that…we never know who’s gonna appear on a queens album…people in, people out, contributions here, contributions there…no wonder things change up all the time… And then there are all the side projects that are diff

How old is rock’n’roll now?...if we use 1955 has some kind of abritary ground zero, rock is now eligible for all kinds of senior’s discounts…. That’s a long time…and the older rock gets, the more difficult it becomes to stick out, to find distinctive approaches and to be unique in an ocean of other acts… How many bands of the last, say, 20 years, can you name that has a sound so distinctive that you know exactly who they are within just the first couple of seconds? I have one: Queens of the Stone Age…there’s something about what they do that sonically sets them apart from everyone else… But it’s more than just guitar sounds, arrangements and lyrics…the elements required to create this uniqueness are complex and varied—and, I think, worthy of study…in fact. You can’t separate the sounds of Queens from their history—which is also very, very complex…let’s see if we can untangle everything… These are some secrets of Queens of the Stone Age, part 1…. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoi

Like a lot of music fans, I’m fascinated by what goes on in the kitchen…how is music made and recorded?...who is responsible for doing what?... You may have wondered what a producer does or what’s the difference between a producer and an engineer?...how have things changed over the decades when it comes to recording technology?...and what’s the difference between the attitude towards recording music back in the day vs. What’s happening now?... The only way to get proper answers to these questions is to call in an expert…I found Chris Birkett, a producer, engineer, musician, and songwriter who has seen things evolve over a number of decades… Let’s get into some studio stories… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our memories are shaky constructs…we remember things wrong or forget things altogether…I’ve found—and other people agree with this—that if you want to dig through your brain to recover things that have gone missing is to just start talking…   The more you talk, the more will come back…and if you have a group of people with a shared history and they all start talking, it’s amazing what comes flooding back…it can be cathartic, therapeutic, nostalgic and just plain fun…hold that thought…   The longer a band exists, the more hazy the memories become…maybe it’s just age…maybe it’s because drugs and alcohol were involved…maybe some members die, taking their stories with them…   In far too many instances, we’re forced to piece together a group’s stories from second- and third-hand accounts: friends and associates, press coverage from back in the day, and various other imperfect recollections told either in person or documented online…but hey, it’s better than nothing, right?...   But what if you could get a

At one time, The Headstones were the scariest band in Canadian music…they scared audiences, scared record companies—hell, they scared themselves… There were other words to describe them…intense…self-destructive…but I think the word the group liked the most was “furious” But  that doesn’t been to tell the story of The Headstones…strap in…this is a good one… The Headstones In Their Own Words…Part 1… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the decades, drummers haven’t received a lot of respect…all the jokes…the running gag in “Spinal Tap”…the issues so many groups seem to have finding the right drummer… But there are also those who stand out and are not only admired but worshipped…and not just by music fans, not just by other drummers, not by just other musicians, but by everyone has a chance to hear them play…they’re that good, that special… I’ve been a drummer since I was in high school…I later played in bands and worked as a drum teacher to get my way through university…and I still play today…and you know why?...Neil Peart of Rush… My first exposure to him was a stereo salesman who was demonstrating a pair of speakers by playing “By-Tor and the Snow Dog” from Rush’s “Fly By Night” album…I was immediately sucked into it by Neil’s playing…and when the song gets to those three drum breaks, I was hooked for life… Later, someone played the “Overture” from “2112” for…and that’s when I decided I needed to learn how to play the drums…same

I love trying to figure out why things are the way they are…it’s a need to understand, you know?... Take a guy like Jack White, for example…if you go deep into his background, you have a much better understanding of why he is the way he is and why his music sounds the way it does… Another example is the Beastie Boys…how did they grow to what they became…if you look at Green Day’s upbringing, you get them even more… Same goes for Kurt Cobain, Dave Grohl, Eddie Vedder—they all have life experiences unique to them and crucial to the music they end up making… Lemme give you another name: The Arctic Monkeys…you may, like me, have always found something different about these guys…they rock pretty good, but their songs are constructed in a distinctive fashion….and lyrically, they’re above and beyond so many bands… And they started so young…they got it while they were still teenagers…and the way they became famous was completely antithetical to the way you’re supposed to do things in the music business… To put

It is so hard to have a hit record these days…hell, with all the music out there it’s nearly impossible to attract any kind of attention…all the noise and distractions and competition… If you’re a new band with a debut record, you’ve got anywhere from six to thirteen weeks to make an impression once that first single comes out….if you fail to achieve significant traction with radio and retail and with fans during that short window, you’re in trouble…and if your record label doesn’t make it happen for you with the second single—well, I hope you didn’t quit your day job… It wasn’t always like this…back in the day when music was harder to come by, a record label could afford to wait for a band to develop and mature through two, three, four, five albums… Look at U2…they stumbled through their first two records before settling down with “War”… Look at the Red Hot Chili Peppers…warner brothers let them discover themselves through three albums before they could deliver the a little breakthrough with “Mother’s Mi

I have a long list of music-related facts that came to my attention this year…many of them were incorporated in various “ongoing history” programs over the last 12 months…but there’s also a lot of orphaned stuff—material that is interesting and fascinating but didn’t make it into any program for whatever reason… Maybe they didn’t fit into any of this year’s topics…maybe it was too off-brand…maybe they were just too “out there”… But this research will not go to waste…i have distilled this information to a tight list of 60 so i may present them to you…this is the fifth annual edition of “60 mind-blowing facts in 60 minutes”…. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here are a couple of musical terms you may have heard of… Earworm: that’s when a clip of a song keeps running through your head on a loop over and over and over again. Mondegreen: a misheard lyric…a great example is in Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”…he sings “’scuse me while i kiss the sky”…some people hear that as “’scuse me while i kiss this guy”…there are lots of mondegreens in popular music… I propose we need a third term…it’s that opinion that overcomes us when we believe one song sounds almost exactly like another… I know you know what i mean…you hear a new song and a brief sense of déjà vu fills your head as your brain tries to correlate its musical database with what you’re hearing…and when all the processing is completely, you might think (a) “hey! Someone ripped off [artist x]!”…or (b) “someone’s gonna get sued!”… But you know something?...it’s not that simple…far, far from it…welcome to the murky world of unfortunate sonic coincidences… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/ad

The human body can be both very strong and very fragile…given its complexity, it generally works pretty well…but there are those among us who face challenges because of various disabilities… Some of these are genetic…others come as the result of accidents, trauma or some other kind of misfortune…then there’s the effect of disease… It can be very rough…there can be discrimination…and there can be a lot of misunderstanding… At the same time, though, there are opportunities for learning, compassion, and dialogue about what some of our fellow humans need in this life—and, just importantly, what special things they can offer back… Musicians are just like the rest of us, subject to the whims and frailties of this bag of water and chemicals we inhabit…these are some of their stories…   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are a lot of things wrong with Facebook—don’t get me started—but there’s no denying that it can be addictive… The best thing for me is finding out where people from my life have ended up…high school, university, my home town, other places I’ve worked…and with over 2 billion active monthly users, there’s an excellent chance that almost everyone you’ve ever known as a Facebook account… But the “where are they now” thing doesn’t have to be restricted to people you know…you can lurk on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn to track down the current whereabouts of just about anyone…that includes musicians and bands that seem to have dropped off the radar… For example, where are some of these Canadian alt-rock artists of the past?...what are they doing now?...I’ve been doing some lurking—and here’s what I’ve found out… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There have been many times over the last one hundred years where technology has changed the way we make music… Take the microphone, for example…before it came along, singers had to be naturally louder than the orchestra…they needed to have a voice that could reach the back rows of the theatre…but when the microphone came along, certain singers like Bing Crosby, realized that you could use it to create a whole new mood for singing by getting up close and personal… Amplification was another game-changer…at one point, you needed a dozen or more people in a band to fill the room with music…with amps, you needed fewer people to make as much noise… Magnetic tape and multitrack recording made it possible to create entirely new soundscapes, the kind you could never get in the real world…the studio became an instrument for new sonic frontiers… And then we had developments like the electric guitar—and I don’t need to tell you how much that changed everything… This is how things were for the late 50s, all through t

Here’s a warning right from the outset: this is going to be a weird program…the performs and the music we’re going to talk about are famous because of their weird, shocking behaviour…they set out to get our attention—and they did… Some of us appreciated what they were doing…but the vast majority didn’t get them at all…they were branded as sick, deviant, sociopathic, psychopathic, and even criminal… Yet all found some measure of fame within certain corners of the rock universe…their antics may seem tame now, even quaint…but if we put these images and behaviors in the context of the times, it seemed like that antichrist’s musicians were on earth, ready to lead the young dancing and singing towards the apocalypse… So, if you’re listening to this program, please look around and asked yourself this question: “won’t someone please think about the children?”… This is a look at some of the weirdest and most shocking rockers of all time… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You don’t need me to tell you that being a rock star isn’t a normal kind of job…you live in a bubble that’s as far removed from the regular 9-5, Monday-to-Friday thing… You spend a lot of time living in hotel rooms…there’s a lot of downtime between gigs which can get really, really boring…and your working hours are almost completely opposite to your natural circadian rhythms… A lot of people will end up coping with bad food, drugs, alcohol and self-destructive behavior—anything to alleviate the boredom…or the pain…or the loneliness…or the insecurities… And because you’re a rock star, there aren’t many people who are going to tell you to smarten up and sort out your life…in fact, your bad behavior is more likely to be encouraged than police… And it can be even worse when you get off the road…suddenly, any day-to-day structure you had on tour is gone…and all that’s left you in your house with your bad habits… I bring all this up because this is where we’re going to pick up the story of Deryck Whibley and S

If you’ve ever seen Sum 41 perform live, they seem larger than life…big…loud…brash…in your face…very punk rock…and out front is Deryck Whibley…he’s like a man possessed….it all makes for a great show… But in person, Deryck is life-sized…he moves carefully and takes care to sit up straight because of a chronically bad back…the tea he likes to drink can make him almost appear delicate… But when it comes to conversation about Sum 41 their career, he’s super-engaged…as the only permanent member in the history of Sum 41, he is the band…so when I wanted to talk about where this group came from and how things have evolved over a quarter century, he’s really the only guy I needed to talk to…and man, we talked… This is the Sum 41 story according to front man Deryck Whibley, part 1… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It all came to an end on august 28, 2009, with a plum thrown against the wall…after eighteen years, the most volatile band in the world came to an end… Noel Gallagher and Liam Gallagher had always fought, but never like this time backstage five minutes before a show in Paris…words were exchange, the plum was thrown, violence was threatened, and a guitar was destroyed.... Two hours later, Noel issued a statement: "it's with some sadness and great relief to tell you that I quit Oasis tonight. People will write and say what they like, but I simply could not go on working with Liam a day longer." Noel had left Oasis before…but this time he meant it…and since then, he’s kept his word…no amount of money or demands from fans or passive-aggressive pleading from Liam will changed his mind… Instead, Noel has gone his own way, both professionally and personally…and the impression I get is that he’s never been happier, more relaxed, or more confident with the way his life is going… Let’s get caught up with solo Noel

There is no question that the vast majority of rock history involves dudes…it’s been a very male thing…not always, but most of the time… There was a time when it was “common knowledge” that girls just couldn’t rock…they didn’t have the feel…they were built wrong…it just wasn’t in their DNA like it was with guys… That’s crap, of course…but it took a long, long time for those prejudices to be defeated—dead and buried… The original punk rock of the mid-70s was a great help, thanks to the movement’s dogma that anyone with anything to say should be able to say it, regardless of musical ability, social class, race, or sex…lots of women were able to get on board with that… But there was some backsliding in the 80s…for example, hardcore punk was among the most testosterone-drive bro-rock ever…women were pushed to the back…and when grunge came along in the early 90s, it was again very dude-heavy… Even though parts of the grunge world were down with feminist causes and ideals—Kurt Cobain and the guys in Pearl Jam

I’m trying to imagine what it might be like to design an Amazon warehouse…a typical fulfillment centre is at least a million square feet filled with a zillion kilometres of shelving… And given that amazon is all about speed—the company is always trying to cut down the time between the time you click “checkout” and when the package shows up at your door—they’re always looking for the most efficient ways to find whatever you ordered on those shelves and stuff it into a box… The logistics of this is mind-boggling…not only do you have to categorize millions of items but you have to group them in such a way that things that are in the demand the most don’t create choke points for the robots that grab the stuff off the shelves… Music is a lot like an Amazon warehouse, except in some cases, it’s worse…not only do we have to categorize everything to a very granular detail, but we also have to make it possible for us to fortuitously stumble over something you might like… This is when we get into the whole idea of

Humans have always tried to make sense the world by putting things into neat little piles and filing them away somehow for further reference…it just makes things easier…   If you study biology, you’ll know about kingdoms, phylum’s, classes, orders, families, geneses, and species…libraries organize books with things like the Dewey decimal system and the universal decimal classification….and when you go grocery shopping, there are signs directing you to the right aisle or department…   This applies to music, too…we like to organize music into categories called “genres”… This used to be fairly easy…at the turn of the 20th century, we basically had popular songs of the day (vaudeville, show tunes and the like), folk and traditional music, religious music, and material from classical composers… Music has always separated and stratified and evolved, leading to sub-categories…within classical music, for example, we had baroque, chamber music, choral, and so on…. But as the population changed and as the record