Since I posted a Los Straitjackets tune the other day, I couldn’t resist following up with this one, featuring the wonderful Nick Lowe. For a very long time I pretty much stopped listening to any pop music, in favour of old time music, button accordion… Read More
Here’s Los Straitjackets… And now, Wade Hemsworth…. It’s a cage match….who wins?
Sometimes, when frustrated by the development gold rush in Long Branch, I have to remind myself how fortunate we are to live so close to fantastic spots like Sam Smith Park. Yesterday we took The Partners for a long walk by the lake…. There is… Read More
This was yesterday….
It’s been drizzling all morning here in the southwest corner of Toronto. Further north, periods of freezing rain have been causing grief for motorists. It seems like the kind of day for a weird, melancholy minor key banjo tune, doesn’t it? This tune is called… Read More
Last night we watched the last of the 8 strange episodes which make up the Netflix series, The OA. It is difficult to describe the show without making it sound totally goofy (think multiple dimensions and strange but powerful dance moves), but oddball as the… Read More
Alan Jabbour was an extraordinary fiddler and ethno-musicologist. RIP
Back when I was playing a lot of button accordion, I knew this tune as Le Reel de Ste-Anne. These days I play mostly clawhammer banjo and in the banjo world, the tune is more generally known as The St. Anne’s Reel. Either way, it’s… Read More
I came across Marrow Island on somebody’s list of best books of 2016. I read a brief description of the book and was drawn to the unusual premise. Imagine an earthquake in the Pacific Northwest destroys an oil refinery on a remote island, causing really… Read More
Just how many craft brewing companies are there in the Toronto area these days? I’m overwhelmed by the choice… This one promises (on the can) to be bright, crisp and thirst quenching, and I quite enjoy it.
27th Street 