Ongoing History of New Music

One of the byproducts of doing a show like this for as long as I’ve been doing it is that it’s really hard to shut off your brain… I’m always thinking about topic ideas, ways to link facts and trivia together, reading lots of books, talking to lots of people, and otherwise trying to come up with a constant stream of things we can talk about… The result of all this researching and thinking and writ...

Every once in a while we come across someone who is famous and iconic for being...well let's be honest...nothing more than a monumental eff-up. There is nothing about them we should admire...but for some reason we find them intriguing...fascinating...compelling. This is the story of one monumental eff-up. Books have be written about him...movies done....his image has graces more T-shirts than you...

Over the last decade, there has been some very, very long overdue attempts at reconciliation with the First Nations and Indigenous Peoples of North America…there’s still a long, long way to go, but at least the process as begun… The treatment of Indigenous people makes for ugly history…but it has also been enlightening in positive ways… For example, we’ve been learning more about First Nations mus...

This the 23rd annual ongoing Christmas show…and yeah, I know that 2020 has been a challenging year, but let’s look at some of the good things that happened… Many of us learned to bake bread…drive-in theatres made a comeback for both movies and concerts…sweatpants are now accepted work attire… “Tiger King” was fun, wasn’t it?...and—uh…well, i’m sure there were many other nice things about 2020… Oh!...

Okay…let’s start the annual office cleanup…this is the time of year when I go through all the scraps of paper, all the scribbles on various notepads and all the post-it notes hanging everywhere…then there are the computer and phone notes that contain even more information… The goal is to determine if anything I’ve written down or squirreled away somewhere is of any use for this program… See, when...

We are always pouring sound into our heads, whether we’re using some kinds of speakers or wearing headphones… I’m going to make a guess here, but I’m going to assume that most people demand a certain level of audio quality to what they’re listening to…you don’t want distortion and you’re hoping for a certain level of sonic realism… You want to be able to close your eyes and feel the music around y...

You’ve heard the stories. You’ve felt for the people involved. But what happens after the cameras shut off and the reporters walk away? Just because a story disappears from the news doesn’t mean it’s gone. So whatever happened to the nuclear disaster at Fukushima? or the trapped Chilean Miners? And did anything actually come out of the Ice Bucket Challenge? Join Global News reporter, Erica Vella o...

 Our ears are amazing things…evolution has created an ability that allows us to tell the direction of a sound…left and right, up and down, front and back…we can tell how close something might be, whether it’s stationary or moving, and if it’s coming towards us or going away…in other words, we hear sound in 3-d…very helpful for humans on the plains of Africa who had to be worried about being eaten...

The universe is a weird, random place that has little regard for what us puny humans think…this is something we find very, very hard to accept…we’re always looking for explanations for the weird, random, and sometimes evil things that befall us… Occam’s razor—the idea that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one—doesn’t cut it for some people…they believe that there are nefarious thing...

I’ve always been something of a nut when it comes to the space program…but even though I’ve read all the books, seen all the documentaries, and watched all the movies, I was still surprised to learn something new with the movie “Hidden Figures”… This was a 2016 film based on a book of the same name…it told the true story about black female mathematicians who worked at nasa during the hottest perio...

2020 has been a miserable year…the pandemic…economic ruin…the crazy U.S. election, which featured an impeached President…Kobe Bryant’s helicopter crash…the death of George Floyd…murder hornets arrived in North America…swarms of locusts descended on Africa… There were so many hurricanes that they ran out of names…the Olympics were postponed...out-of-control wildfires in both North America and Austr...

Creating art is hard…if it wasn’t, everyone would do it—and everyone would be successful at doing it…even those who can create art—the people with the right stuff—have a finite supply of good stuff within them… Take Margaret Mitchell, for example…she wrote exactly one novel…but that novel was “Gone With The Wind”…Pulitzer Prize, a classic movie with multiple Academy Awards, 30 million copies sold,...

The deadliest shooting spree in Canada’s modern history left us with far more questions than answers. Join Sarah Ritchie, a reporter for Global News in Halifax, as she tries to unravel how something like this could happen there. Sarah will take you through every hour, as it unfolded and together you’ll try and piece together what happened, what could or should’ve been done to prevent it and what w...

 Artists who manage to have only one hit are often the butt of jokes…getting tagged as a one-hit-wonder can kill your career…but let’s turn this around: how many hits do you have?... There is so much music out there, so much competition for our attention, that if you managed to break through all the noise just once, that should be considered a giant victory… And remember, too, that thanks to strea...

I do not dance…I’m too awkward and too self-aware of my awkwardness…I know we’re all supposed to dance like no one is looking, but when it comes to me, people will look, point, and judge… My wife realizes this…since we were married decades okay, she’s had to be content with the fact that she got that dance at the wedding and that’s pretty much it…and that’s because she’s not into dancing, either…...

You may be aware of a podcast that came out in the spring of 2020 that sought to get to the bottom of a certain musical mystery…it’s called “wind of change” and it explores the possibility that a metal power ballad was a contributing factor to the fall of the soviet union in the very early 90s… Stay with me… “Wind of Change” was a global hit for The Scorpions; a metal band out of Hanover in what w...

Ride along with 25 year veteran Crime Reporter Nancy Hixt, from Global News, on her award winning podcast Crime Beat as she takes you through some of Canada’s most high-profile criminal cases. Real People, Real Crimes, Real Journalism. Each episode takes you deep inside cases she has worked to give you detail you didn't hear on the news. Season 3 is available NOW - LISTEN​ Crime Beat is the 2020 w...

Here’s a list of words that shouldn’t go together but do…alone together…how many times did you uses that during the coronavirus pandemic?...deafening silence…I know what that means, but when you think about it, the juxtaposition is strange… Definitely maybe…good name for a Britpop album, but an odd combination of words…random order…walking dead…original copy… Here’s another one: pop-punk…you know...

Before we get to the topic at hand, I’d like to revisit the movie “Forrest Gump,” specifically Forrest’s shrimp boat buddy, Benjamin Buford Blue—but you can just call him Bubba…he knew all the ways one could serve up shrimp… What Bubba could do for shrimp, other people can do for punk…punk rock comes in as many different varieties of shrimp…there’s hardcore punk, ska-punk, cyberpunk, synthpunk, an...

At some point, you may end up being invited to your high school reunion—and you’re probably going to go because you wanna see what happened to all those people… Where’s the jock that made your life miserable?...the girl or the guy who snubbed you for that date and broke your heart…the shy, nerdy guy who was really smart…who did well?...who got what was coming to them… But—oh, wait: people at the r...

Sometimes, life becomes too much…things get too weird, there’s too much pressure, too many decisions, too many wrong choices….the uncertainty builds—and then you just kinda lose it… We lose the plot, go off the rails, hit the ditch, blow a gasket, and generally freak out…sometimes, these incidents are fueled by drugs, alcohol and mental illness…other times, it’s the body and brain’s way of saying...

There’s something about creative types that make them different than the rest of us…if you’ve ever spent any kind of time with any kind of artist, you’ll what I mean…they’re just different, you know?... That’s not any kind of judgment…it’s just an honest observation…they look at the universe differently, feel things in ways we don’t, and interpret life in interesting ways…that’s what makes them ar...

This show is going to blow the lid off some secrets and mysteries in new rock. Admittedly some you may have already have heard rumours about,  but others....well this may be the first time you are ever hearing about them.      Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the 1990s there was a massive flood of stand-up comedians making the leap to television to star in their own stand-up sitcoms thanks in part to the success of the Cosby Show and Roseanne. Those shows were followed by other massive hits like Seinfeld, Home Improvement, Martin, Ellen and The Drew Carey Show.   All of them featured a previously established stand-up comic who had been scouted from...

Everyone talks about being first at something because it’s cool to be the first to do something…but what about being last?... There’s something called “Telesphobia,” which is the fear of being last at something…but sometimes, you just don’t have a choice… The last person killed in World War 1 was George Edwin Ellison, who was shot by a sniper 90 minutes before the Armistice went into effect at 11...