Summerfolk interview

Jan Vanderhorst from CKPC 92.1 FM Brantford was kind enough to send me a copy of the interview we did last August at Summerfolk.

Jan is a wonderful guy - one of the very few commercial DJs who really gets behind folk music - and there's some neat stuff in here... including mention of The McFlies, who at that time, didn't even exist except in my mind!

If you're interested, check it out here.

<--! Imported from The Shed Out Back, 1/1/2009 -->

Zen Canadiana Explained

Every now and again, someone asks me what the heck I mean by "Zen Canadiana"

Recently, Andy Frank asked me that very thing in an interview on CIUT.

My response made a surprising amount of sense to me when I heard it back, especially considering I had just gotten back from a ZimmerBoyZ jam weekend up north.

Anyway, perhaps this explanation will be useful or interesting for someone.

Cheers,

David.

<--! Imported from The Shed Out Back, 1/1/2009 -->

What a way to run a radio

Recently, it was announced that the hosts of the Toronto CBC morning show would take their talents to the airwaves on a local community radio station. There have been a few instances of this occurring across the country as the CBC lockout continues.

All this good energy being shared between CBC radio folks and the local c/c stations raises the question, why doesn't the CBC work this way all the time?

Between the new tools of the multimedia age, including blogging, audioblogging, podcasting, netcasting, streaming audio, personalization, etc, and the local presence and mandate of the c/c stations, theoretically, a true national broadcasting network with truly local nodes could be created with relative ease.

The CBC has largely failed of late on local programming because of funding cuts, while the c/c stations sometimes lack the credibility and consistency of production values to draw significant audiences. Together, though, they might be greater than the sum of their parts.

In my view, we have the ability not only to MAKE hyperlocal news and programming, but also to allow viewers nationwide to determine what prominence such programming gets in the scheme of things; that is, Little League scores from Labrador may not deserve national attention, but the listeners can determine that for themselves.

Maybe it's time we looked at how all this stuff works and recognized that centralization is no longer the best way to run a radio service.

When the ship went down

The storm that sank the Edmond Fitzgerald shook the Great Lakes coastal area for hundreds of miles. That was 29 years ago tomorrow. I was only 6 at the time, but I remember it clearly.

I remember getting up the next morning to walk up to my school bus stop along highway 69 north of Parry Sound. I had to turn back on our gravel driveway because trees had fallen onto the powerlines. The cables were dancing around like live snakes, spewing sparks as they fell across the road.

I ran back to the house for help. My family was in the kitchen, listening to the bulletin on the radio about the Edmund Fitzgerald being lost with all hands.

It seems like it was only a moment later that the song came out, maybe on some other sunny, frosty morning after a November Great Lakes storm. As a kid I remember feeling that the water I grew up on, the radio that I listened to, the cool of the morning air, that lost freighter, and the haunting voice of Gordon Lightfoot were all part of the same thing.

It's woven so deeply into my mind and my memory now I don't know what to call it. But perhaps the moment 'folk music' really entered my consciousness was with the realization that songs could be one of the purest forms of truth.