MAKE // BREAK, a Survival Guide for Creatives, Hosted by Lance Marwood

Episode 031 – Nobody Is Coming to Save You | MAKE // BREAK​ Labels sign the finished package. Nobody's buying potential anymore. Labels want sure things. They're a profit-making exercise, the majors, and what they do is capitalize off of something that already exists. A major wants to cash in. They don't want to invest in. You have artists that do it all and there's no label coming...

Ezra Vancil is a Texas Americana songwriter who signed his first record deal at nineteen and spent the next twenty years learning what it cost. Sober since 40, he now runs Near Home Records and is finishing Morning & Midnight: a double album, a book of poetry and a body of artwork made during the sessions. On MAKE // BREAK, Ezra and Lance Marwood get into the label manipulation that followed h...

Joel Gale is a Toronto commercial photographer and the owner of Joel Gale Imaging, shooting corporate headshots, events, product work and video since 2016, alongside the musician portraits, album covers and live shows he started with. In this episode of MAKE // BREAK with host Lance Marwood, Joel traces the distance between the studio career his photography program promised and the $200-a-day prod...

John Penman, drummer for Detroit hard rock band Armada Lodge, took a pay cut on purpose — leaving restaurant management to stock shelves so every spare thought could go to the band. On MAKE // BREAK, he tells Lance Marwood how the trade works: affirmations on the bathroom mirror, a rolling whiteboard planning Armada Lodge six months out, section-testing songs with ads until the data humbles you, a...

Jonny Hetherington is keeping Art of Dying's new album off streaming entirely — vinyl, CD, and digital download only. Two decades, eight albums, a Warner deal through Disturbed, and 200 million streams later, the frontman tells Lance Marwood on MAKE // BREAK exactly why: the maths that never recoups, the 1,000-stream rule that pays new artists nothing, the AI clog, and the analog revival pulli...

Zandrew Sonnemaker and Jacob Riddle made a silent film in 48 hours — La Salope, The Funk's entry in the Montana 48 Hour Film Project. Filmmaker Zandrew directed, co-wrote, edited, and ran every piece of equipment; Detective Frog frontman Jacob co-wrote, took the lead role, and scored it with his grindcore side project Piss Fist (featuring a rubber chicken on lead vocals). They join Lance Marwood o...

Chris Krawczyk founded Little Ghosts Books (Canada's first horror bookstore) and grew it into a press, a festival, and a travelling book fair. On MAKE // BREAK, Lance Marwood asks how a COVID-era reading catalogue became a Dundas West shop, why Little Ghosts reads every single submission (including 600-plus stories for a monster erotica anthology), and what it took to publish for three years w...

Greg Amici is a singer-songwriter with one of music's stranger comeback arcs — fronting NYC's Big Honey until a vocal polyp ended it, then sixteen years of screenwriting and acting before his debut solo album Tragicomic arrived on Magic Door in 2025. He joins Lance Marwood on MAKE // BREAK to talk about the 1983 rejection letter that told him he'd make it, the surgery that turned out t...

Chip McCabe is back on MAKE // BREAK — the horror author behind Kindred (as Creed Woodhouse), founder of The Metal Dad, and host of The Fiendish Five podcast. Part 2 with Lance Marwood picks up where Part 1's hard stop cut things off: whether Kindred is really extreme horror, the books and films that actually stick, writing novels while raising four kids, and pitching fiction in an era of AI-g...

John W. Sharpe is the co-author of BASSically Speaking, the forthcoming memoir of Nashville bassist Dave Fowler, coming from V13 Press. A retired magazine publisher with a self-described helter-skelter résumé — water purification patents, early-internet SEO, a Tennessee neighbourhood magazine — Sharpe met Fowler on the Rock Legends Cruise in 2018, wrote a half-page article about him, and the conve...

Episode 021 – Chip McCabe | MAKE // BREAK Chip McCabe (aka Creed Woodhouse, his fiction pen name) has spent decades covering extreme music and horror for outlets like Metal Insider and the Chicago Tribune, while running The Metal Dad and hosting The Fiendish Five podcast. After the gloriously unhinged 666 Days of Metal, he's just released his debut horror novel, Kindred. In this episode of MAK...

Episode 020 – Sean Martin | MAKE // BREAK Sean Martin is the vocalist, guitarist, and executive producer behind The Quarantined, a grunge/punk/metal project rooted in socially critical songwriting and real lived experience. A U.S. Army Airborne Infantry veteran who deployed to Iraq with the 3/509th, Sean channeled his post-service recovery into music, graduating from Musicians Institute in Hollywo...

Episode 019 – Mark Winters | MAKE // BREAK Mark Winters is a Texas-based singer-songwriter, poet, and former aerospace engineer who traded rocket science for rock with a positive vibe. Since his 2019 debut Slipstream , he's released four albums, built a loyal fanbase of over 36K monthly Spotify listeners, and launched his own label, Bernoulli Records . Now midway through a 107-date Good Vibes High...

Episode 018 – Samantha Willman | MAKE // BREAK Samantha Willman is a Canadian writer, designer, and editor based in Montréal. She co-founded and co-edits Romanticon , a Substack literary magazine dedicated to neo-romanticism and new sincerity, alongside Anthony Galluzzo , Paul Franz , and Matthew Gasda . She also publishes Marbl , a personal newsletter exploring intimacy, symbolism, and the interi...

Episode 017 – Peter Mahoney | MAKE // BREAK Peter Mahoney is a Toronto-based guitarist, recording engineer, and DJ rooted in the city's punk and hardcore underground. As guitarist for Workers Comp (who deliberately pulled their music from streaming in favour of Bandcamp) and a collaborator in UNWELL alongside Cursed/Burning Love/SECT vocalist Chris Colohan, Peter has spent two decades navigating p...

Episode 016 – Paul Thomas Van Valkenburgh | MAKE // BREAK Paul Van Valkenburgh is the vocalist and frontman of hard rock and groove-metal outfit TubeFreeks . On MAKE // BREAK with host Lance Marwood , he breaks down the music business realities of keeping a long-running band alive: the early “make” spark, the “break” moments of lineup shifts and stalled momentum, and the habits that rebuild trust....

Episode 015 – Eric Peterson | MAKE // BREAK Eric Peterson is the founding guitarist and primary songwriter of Bay Area thrash legends Testament , a band that’s spent more than four decades pushing heavy music forward while peers have fallen away. With Testament’s fourteenth album Para Bellum , he’s still co-producing, evolving the band’s sound, and keeping the riffs sharper than players half his a...

Episode 014 – Kelsey Dower | MAKE // BREAK Kelsey Maree Dower is a symphonic metal vocalist, composer, and multi-instrumentalist whose cinematic writing style turns orchestration into front-line storytelling. Best known for her single “ Rage ” and the concept-driven album project Rebirth , she builds massive arrangements with a DIY, self-composed precision that still hits emotionally. She’s also a...

Episode 013 – Scot Little Bihlman | MAKE // BREAK Scot “Little” Bihlman is an Emmy Award-winning multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter, and SAG-AFTRA actor, best known as the drummer/vocalist in Grinder Blues alongside dUg Pinnick ( King’s X ). In Episode 013 of MAKE // BREAK with host Lance Marwood , he unpacks what it takes to last: choosing quality of life over noise, staying present through...

Episode 012 – Aaron Farrell | MAKE // BREAK Welsh-born writer Aaron Farrell returns to MAKE // BREAK for a candid, high-signal conversation about discipline, identity, and creative survival. Author of The Lost and Found and the poetry collection Artbeat, The Ekphrastic Spastic , Aaron traces the path from lockdown essays and his “Violent Expression” column to an unflinching Barcelona manuscript, w...

Episode 011 – Dave Fowler | MAKE // BREAK Dave Fowler is a Nashville-based bassist, producer, and songwriter whose career spans work with icons like Dolly Parton , Dr. John , Cinderella , and Billy Ray Cyrus . A sought-after live and studio player, he’s also the co-founder of GET JOE Records , a producer at Fowler–Wells Productions , and the force behind Running With Giants , his mentorship and cl...

Garrett Barbuto is the frontman of Garrett Barbuto & The Hot Pursuit , a Calgary-based rock outfit blending classic energy with modern grit. Known for his soulful voice and grounded songwriting, Barbuto has carved out a space between old-school musicianship and new-era independence. With the band’s 2024 EP One More Glimpse and recent collaborations like “Why Be Lonely?” with Accidental Martyr,...

Episode 009 – Aaron Farrell | MAKE // BREAK Aaron Farrell is a Welsh-born writer and editor whose work spans travel-lit grit and sharp cultural criticism. He’s the author of The Lost and Found: A Contemporary Travelling Thriller of Good, Bad and Bohemian All Pursuing Their Passions – However Pure or Perverse and the poetry collection ArtBeat: The Ekphrastic Spastic , alongside essays that thread m...

Episode 008 – Ger Carriere | MAKE // BREAK Geraldine “Ger” Carriere is a Cree singer-songwriter , bestselling author , speaker , and the founder of Wild Woman Personal & Professional Development . Based in Saskatchewan, Ger’s work spans music , literature , and empowerment, each rooted in her mission to help women, especially Indigenous creatives, reclaim their voice and lead with purpose. Her...

Episode 007 – Robert Stahl | MAKE // BREAK Robert E. Stahl is the Dallas-based horror author behind Show Me Where It Hurts (JournalStone, 2025), a debut collection of 30 short stories and poems exploring grief, transformation, and the monstrous within. A former bartender turned writer and filmmaker, Stahl built his voice at the intersection of prose and comics, drawing on influences like Swamp Thi...