When We Wake with Andrew Shaver

My guest today is singer-songwriter Lucy Clearwater , whose debut full-length album is called People Not Possessions. It's a title that tells you quite a bit about who she is before you even hear a note. Lucy started playing violin at the age of 4 and by the time she was 12 she was teaching the instrument. Then she started writing songs on guitar, and she hasn't looked back. Lucy grew up i...

Tyson Ray Borsboom is one of those songwriters who seems decidedly less interested in polishing the edges than he is in just telling the truth. Born in Winnipeg, shaped by Alberta - Lethbridge then Calgary - he’s now living out on the West Coast in Vancouver (at last, for the time being). His thoughtful blend of country, folk, and Americana feels built for long drives, which he’s done his fair sha...

You could say that Kelly McMichael took the long way round to using her own name. Born in Peterborough, Ontario and now based in St. John’s, Newfoundland, she spent years making music under different monikers and inside other people’s bands, touring with artists like Sarah Harmer, Gentleman Reg , The Hidden Cameras and The Burning Hell . Along the way she made her own music as Rouge and then Rende...

My guest today is one of those musicians other musicians talk about. Christine Bougie is widely considered one of Canada’s finest guitarists. She's a sought-after collaborator who’s spent years helping shape the sound of other artists’ songs on stages and records across the country. We’re talking Bahamas , Sarah Harmer , Jenn Grant , Amy Millan , Matt Anderson …and, trust me, the list goes on....

My guest today is one of Nova Scotia’s finest songwriters, and one-time touring bass player for Stompin Tom Connors , Pictou County’s Dave Gunning . His new album Field Notes wasn’t recorded in a traditional studio at all. It was captured outdoors in Australia, under a gumtree, with one microphone on Dave and two more pointed at the birds (kookaburras?). No isolation booths. No endless second-gues...

I met Rebekah Hawker this past January at Folk Alliance in New Orleans and within minutes we were laughing like we’d known each other for years. What starts as a conversation about surviving conference adrenaline, and then inevitable crash that follows, turns into something much deeper. We talk about growing up in a church community, about the grief she felt after her mom passed away, moving back...

My guests today are Tim Chaisson and Jake Charron from the genre-bending, Juno Award-winning, musical trailblazers from Prince Edward Island, The East Pointers . Their new album, Schoonertown , is rooted friendships that stretch decades, small-town life, and the long road of making music together. It’s also shaped by loss. The record carries the presence of their late bandmate and friend Koady Cha...

On today’s episode of When We Wake , I’m talking with Eric Duquette and Jena GoGo AKA Duke and Goldie - a duo whose entire story basically starts with a Craigslist ad in Toronto. Jena put out a call for a guitar player and, perhaps unsurprisingly, a whole host of guys answered, but it was Eric who fit the bill. So the two bonded over a shared love of Motown and Radiohead, played in a band together...

Boy Golden is the oh-so-cool Rock’n'Roll alter ego of the Winnipeg-based multi-instrumentalist/producer/songwriter extraordinaire, Liam Duncan. In today’s chat, we get into the origin story of that alter ego, but before we do that, we chat about the music. We kick it off talking about Suffer , the lead single from his forthcoming album Best of Our Possible Lives (due in February 2026). The son...

Jill Barber is back with a brand-new holiday album, A Holly Jolly Jill Barber Christmas . An album that includes a handful of the classics you’d expect, some lesser known treasures and a couple of originals, all of it shaped alongside her Grammy-nominated producer and pal Drew Jurecka . Jill’s been living in a Christmas mindset, replete with its bittersweet mix of nostalgia and hope, since Februar...

Three time Music Nova Scotia Award winner, Daniel James McFadyen grew up outside of Toronto chasing a ball, not a melody. But somewhere between the rec centre squash courts and the dark and dreary corners of the pubs filled with folk covers, music found him. His new album, Back to the Country ,  was written in a cabin on the east coast and recorded in a cabin cum recording studio on the west coast...

Charlotte Cornfield is one of those songwriters who can make a small moment feel like a revelation.  And speaking of revelations, while I’ve been a fan of Charlotte’s for almost a decade now, going all the way back to her 2106 debut Future Snowbird , in our chat, I learned that Charlotte knew of me years before that even.  You can imagine my surprise. I guess, I used to be somebody, you know? Nah....

Yukon Blonde has been part of Canada’s indie rock landscape for more than a decade. They're JUNO-nominated, they've picked up a SOCAN award , they've had tunes placed in shows like Grey’s Anatomy and The Summer I Turned Pretty, they’ve hit the Top 10 at commercial alt radio, and had #1s on the CBC Music Top 20. Not too shabby. And they don’t just write great songs. As anyone who has se...

He grew up wanting to be an inventor. Turns out he is. Jake Nicoll builds the places and the tools he records with right down to the microphones, compressors, and the bits in between.  He moved to Newfoundland with his twin brother and one of his sisters for university and to make music, and he never stopped tinkering.  When the pandemic hit, he went to his family farm in Guelph ON for what he tho...

A sense of home is at the heart of Ewan Currie’s songwriting, and after a lifetime of moving around, he’s landed on the East Coast, kinda like me. But, I’ll put my cards on the table and admit that, ok, sure, folks might be a little more excited by his move than mine. I get it. Ewan Currie is the frontman of one of Canada’s favourite Rock'n'Roll bands, The Sheepdogs , who, of course, were...

My guest on this episode is singer-songwriter Breagh Isabel . From her Halifax home and basement studio, Breagh divvies up her work week co-writing with songwriters all over the world, writing music for kids' TV shows, producing for other artists, and, somehow, still finding the time to write for herself. Though, as you’ll hear in our chat today, sometimes the songs she writes for herself, are the...

Leanne Hoffman's latest album, The Text Collector , started as a personal experiment: write a poem every day for a year. From that mountain of words came a record that’s pop-forward, poetry-laced, and emotionally razor-sharp. We talk about how seeing St. Vincent live in 2018 completely changed how she thought about performance — and how wild it is that she’s now opening for her at the Halifax...

It’s always a gift to sit down with a great artist — and even more so when that artist is an old friend. Sarah Harmer is one of Canada’s most beloved songwriters, known for crafting songs that are intimate and expansive all at once. From her early days fronting one of my favourite 90’s bands  Weeping Tile , to solo albums like her debut You Were Here and  her most recent Are You Gone , her music h...

Suzie Ungerleider has long been one of Canada’s most evocative songwriters — though for years, we’ve known her as Oh Susanna . These days, she’s releasing music under her own name, and she says it feels right — she says it feels like she’s stripped herself of a costume she’d been wearing. Her new album, Among the Evergreens , written mostly while walking forest trails near her home in Vancouver, i...

Alexander Gallant is one of the sharpest, most honest songwriters I know. His new album Rubber Monster Suit is funny, it’s sad, it’s weird, it’s beautiful - kinda like Alex - and it picks up where his 2023 debut, Waiting Table Blues , left off.  Waiting Table Blues was a stripped down and deeply honest record written in the early days of his sobriety. Rubber Monster Suit is still intimate and pers...

In this episode I chat with Dartmouth, Nova Scotia’s Mo Kenney . Now, I say Dartmouth because that’s where Mo lives and that’s where I met them, but as you’ll hear in our chat, Mo is actually from, as they put it, somewhere just outside of Nowhere, Nova Scotia. Something they made abundantly clear by the title of their most recent album, their 5th, From Nowhere . Before moving to the big bad city...

Dan Mangan is one of Canada’s most beloved singer-songwriters - a moniker he’s newly embracing. So much so, in fact, that he considered calling his new album Schminger Schmongwriter - a nod to Harry Nilsson ’s classic 1971 LP Nilsson Schmilsson . In the end, Dan went with Natural Light as an album title, and as you’ll hear in our chat, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours as an album reference, in that, he cal...

Braden Lam released his debut full length The Cloudmaker’s Cry on April 11, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is terrific.  Prior to the album, Braden released a couple EPs and a handful of singles to much acclaim - he’s been nominated for a bundle of awards, including several East Coast Music Awards , not the least of which was Songwriter of the Year .  Now, look, I don’t have a crystal ball in fro...

Joel Plaskett just turned 50. In celebration of this momentous occasion, his long time manager and friend, Sheri Jones, quietly asked dozens of his musical pals to contribute a cover of one of Joel’s songs to an album she was compiling as a surprise birthday gift.  And, boy oh boy, did these friends heed the call.  The album, Songs From the Gang: A Celebration of Joel Plaskett , released April 11,...

Julian Taylo r is a Toronto based singer-songwriter and radio host extraordinaire. He has been making music for over 30 years now. Speaking of 30, he's also managed to syndicate his radio show, the Julian Taylor Jukebox , on over 30 stations across North America.  Julian had a brush with major label stardom in the early oughts with his band Staggered Crossing , after which he went independent,...