A Human Being In Conversation

Way back in 1988, guitarist Rik Emmett stunned fans when he left the successful Canadian rock group Triumph to pursue a solo career. He left many questions on the table in the wake of his departure, most of which he answers in Chapter 5 of his autobiography Lay It On The Line.   Now, when I call the book an autobiography I’m using air quotes because this is also a self-help book and an instruction...

Jane Harbury has been a beloved figure in the Canadian music industry from her days washing dishes at Toronto's legendary Riverboat Folk Club to acting as publicist to some of the world's most revered musicians. A couple years ago I met Jane for coffee where she shared her origin story growing up in England. That afternoon has stuck with me all this time so recently she and I arranged to r...

Welcome to episode 50! When I started this podcast  I had no idea whether anyone would listen or how far I’d be able to take it and yet, here we are.  For this episode I reached to an old friend, Jeff Woods, to talk about his longtime love affair of writing and telling stories to turn people on to the things he loves.  Many of you who are listening will instantly recognize Jeff’s voice from his da...

We all tell stories in our daily lives.  Some are just the mundane answers to the question "How was your day?" But others are the stories we use to try to entertain or convince people of something. Whether it's a sales person presenting a product or an artist doing an interview, there's a story to convey and the best way to tell it is with authenticity. But not everyone is comf...

Gordon Valiant is a bio-mechanics engineer and 30+ year veteran at Nike where he helped develop ground breaking athletic footwear.  In this episode of The Creationists, Gordon talks about what goes into the research and development of new products and shares some of his experience as a part of the team that helped build the Nike Shox, a unique shock absorber first introduced in 2000. Please follow...

Tim Sommer has had a remarkable life in the music industry. He became a rock journalist at the age of 16 writing for Trouser Press and then as the New York correspondent for Sounds Magazine in the UK. He was the first American to interview U2 and Henry Rollins called him out in print for a negative review Tim once wrote. He hosted an influential hard core punk radio show on WNYU and then learned h...

There’s that old saying “Do what you love, love what you.” When Tim Pierce moved to LA from Arizona, he hoped to make a living as a professional musician not knowing the path that lay ahead.  It took a decade of hard work but he eventually became one of the town’s most in demand session guitarists playing on records by a wide range of superstars including Michael Jackson, Phil Collins, Joe Cocker...

I think that it's probably fair to say that Bernie Finkelstein is one of the architects of the Canadian music industry. He's well known as the founder of True North Records and for managing people like Bruce Cockburn, Murray McLauchlan, and Dan Hill, among many others, but what's the lesser known story is how he started his career managing the Paupers with a $74 loan for his father....

One of the reasons that I started The Creationists podcast was in hopes of inspiring listeners to explore their own creativity. Over the past two years, I think that we've all come across friends and acquaintances who have finally taken the plunge, to do things that they always wanted to do but always made the excuse to not pursue. One of the biggest obstacles to get over is time. If Julie Ad...

I've worked in the music business for over half my life. One of the great privileges is to hear an amazing unknown artist and then have the opportunity to introduce them to the world. So I can only imagine what Jonathan Poneman was feeling the first time he heard Nirvana. Before Nirvana literally changed the fortune of Sub Pop Records, Jonathan and his partner, Bruce Pavitt, were rolling righ...

Over the course of his 45 year career, Doug McClement has established himself and his company, LiveWire, as the go to for capturing live audio on location for broadcast or recordings. He’s had a number of dream gigs over the years but in 2010 when the Winter Olympics were awarded to Vancouver, he thought that his ultimate dream of working the games was about to come true.   In Canada, when you wan...

Toronto’s Massey Hall joins Carnegie Hall, Royal Albert Hall and Boston’s Symphony Hall as one of the world's classic concert venues. But as author David McPherson discovered while researching the history of Massey, the hall has hosted plenty of events over the years in addition to iconic concerts it has been  associated with.  In 2018, Massey Hall closed its doors for a long overdue massive...

In the early 2000's, Geoff Tait was running his fashion forward golf apparel company Quagmire.  The business was flying and Geoff was hanging out at the Masters with golf icons Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus and partying with Kanye, Jay Z and John Legend.  And then it all came crashing down. Like any good entrepreneur, Geoff picked himself up, dusted off the disappointment and found a new ve...

In the late 1980s and early 90s, Kurt Swinghammer’s artwork became synonymous with the city Toronto as well as the Canadian hip hop scene. Art critics dubbed it  neo-primitive and his abstract work could be found on radio station logos, business signs and in music videos. His bold improvised artwork eventually  became ubiquitous and a go to stile in the advertising world.  Kurt Swinghammer has had...

As a member of the Canadian rock trio Triumph, Rik Emmett has sold millions of records and toured the world performing for millions more. Since leaving Triumph in 1988, Rik has enjoyed a successful solo recording career and, until recently, spent two decades as a faculty member at Humber College in his hometown of Toronto where he taught Songwriting, Music Business, Creative Development and Direct...

How did his music get to one billion streams? Why is he not interested in signing with a record label? Why won't he show his face in photographs? People are motivated to create for many different reasons. For some, it’s merely self-satisfaction and an escape from the rest of the world. Some people use creativity as a way to find new solutions. As a teenager, Florida based rapper and producer...

Marci Segal was the first Canadian graduate of the International Center for Studies in Creativity program at the state university in Buffalo. She has the distinction of being the first creativity specialist hired on staff at an international advertising agency as well as being a creativity consultant at NASA, Bosch, Ricoh and CIBC among many others. She has been featured in Fast Company, Best Heal...

Anyone who knows Vince Ditrich probably knows him as the merry mirthmaking drummer of Canada’s wildly popular Celtic rock band Spirit of The West. With the days of long haul touring behind him, Vince has settled into a much quieter life on the West Coast. As you’ll see in our interview, Vince has always had an interest in writing and has kept up the practise with his blog Random Note Generator. Bu...

If you been listening to The Creationists for a while, you know that I like to ask my guests about the inspiration for their creations. Sometimes it's a lightning bolt of imagination that gets a creation started, but sometimes it comes out of the tedium of a slow work day.   Indie filmmaker Justin McAleece and his friends began developing the mockumentary Brick Madness while they worked as hi...

Though I’ve known Eric Samuels for several years, I never really knew the many roads he’s travelled to get to where he is today. When I first met Eric he was one of Canada’s leading radio programmers.  I thought he was a little buttoned up the way he was always quoting market research as the reason not to play a record I was promoting at the time. As a result, finding out that he had tried his han...

In the previous episode of The Creationists, I talked to celebrity chef Roger Mooking about his passion for music and cooking and how he was able to make a success of two careers. As the main cook in our household, I thought I would take advantage of having Roger on the line to ask for a few cooking tips. In this bonus episode, Roger shares some simple truths about spicing up your kitchen. If you...

Not much in life beats the combination of music and food and both have been passions at the centre of Roger Mooking’s life.  I first met Roger Mooking when he was a member of Bass is Bass and I worked at Warner Music Canada. Bass is Base was the hot independent hip hop group at the time and were being courted by all of the major labels. We didn’t sign the band but they did go on to enjoy a success...

Imagine if you worked with a team for several years on creating a thing and then that thing couldn’t even be tested properly until almost a year after it was completed.  And now, imagine that you can’t even see if your creation works in real time because it’s on another freakin planet! Well, that is exactly the experience of my guest Taryn Bailey, a mechanical engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab...

Up until now, I’ve interviewed a variety of guests about their creative process and the road they travelled to get to where they are.  As a change of pace, I thought that it would be interesting to explore our brain’s relationship to creativity. In their book The Runaway Species, neuroscientist David Eagleman and composer Anthony Brandt explore what makes human creativity unique among the animals...

This is the final episode of Season Three of The Creationists and since this season featured a series of music related interviews, I thought it only appropriate to include an interview with Christian Swain who, along with his longtime friend Richard Evans created The Rock and Roll Archeology Project, a podcast that is an in-depth look at rock and roll as well as the culture and technology that inf...