In the beginning, Jonah and Avery sang only for protest marches and basements where rent parties ruled. They called themselves Black Lantern. They wrote songs that detonated. They had rules.No […]

The gallery was small, near the Black Sheep Inn. Not much more than a room with windows, above a bakery in Wakefield, Quebec. Word had spread: a retrospective of Jay […]

On the ferry to Salt Spring Island, with the gulls screaming like unpaid interns and the rain politely refusing to stop, Halid Frochill sat in the galley with a soy […]

It is (or was) Robin Kuretsky’s birthday, thirty-first of the month, a number mirrored in my own thirteenth, like two cards from a fortune deck flipped in opposite hands. Inversions, […]

In a city where musicians practiced day and night to impress the festival judges, there was a drummer named Hank who played only one beat. Every morning, he sat outside […]

Reading through my novel for its first round of edits. So far, so good – no nervous breakdowns, no setting fire to the manuscript, metaphorical or otherwise. Thirty pages to […]

They were loud and fast. Except for Stash, the drummer, who once spent six weeks in a monastery and now said things like, “The snare is the breath.” One night […]

The band was called Patient Karma. They had a van with three working tires, and a bassist named Sage, who refused to play the root note. The others begged. Pleaded. […]

Quillette magazine keeps making the most amusing music stories to me: HIS SATANIC MAJESTY RETIRES. “Ozzy Osbourne really was popular culture’s Prince of fucking Darkness. His songs have scored so many black-laced […]

They need a driver and I’m the only one available even though I have to get to Guelph from Toronto. It’s worth it. As you age you see more meaning […]