Calgary’s The Lovebullies have always been fast and hot. Fast, well, maybe they just look that way — heck, check out those mini-skirts; they even had to lengthen them to be family-friendly for their appearance last month on Canada’s hallowed TV series, Heartland.
While fans of Calgary’s Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir will delight to hear aptly titled Everything Was a Long Time Ago, the band’s first album release since 2008’s Ten Thousand, they’ll also wish to purchase the album for reasons beyond the band’s forays into pre-modern blues, folk, and country.
It’s daytime on New Year’s Eve, and songwriter/guitarist Alejandro Escovedo and his wife Nancy Rankin are at Milton Riemer’s Ranch Park in the hill country of Dripping Springs, outside of Austin, Texas, ready to go for a hike after Escovedo finishes his interview.
After a series of pandemic-related false starts resulting in a cancelled 2021 festival, and a revised format, multi-weekend festival in April 2022, Calgary’s BIG Winter Classic is back in a big way for 2023, with a stacked roster and guaranteed stellar performances in the doldrum-defeating January music festival format we once knew and loved.
The end of 2022 is rapidly approaching and as I think back to the year in new music: I am puzzled how, once again, the year’s most commercially successful music was mediocre at best and gawd-awful at worst.
When Ontario author Jason Schneider contacted legendary punk rocker Art Bergmann to write Bergmann’s biography, he wasn’t sure how it would go due to the many stories about the artist’s wild ways and crusty demeanour.