Jesse Kinos-Goodin

The new album from Toronto rapper DL Incognito, Someday is Less Than a Second Away, comes with a curious subtitle: A Guide to Accomplishing Little and Rhyming Great.

The rapper, born Oliver Nestor, admits it’s an ode to the book The Underachiever’s Manifesto: The Guide to Accomplishing Little and Feeling Great, but it’s also tempting to see it as a reflection from a well-respected Canadian underground rapper who’s been at it for more than 10 years, with five albums and two Juno nominations for rap recording of the year to show for it, but who also holds down a job to pay the bills. 

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The Band Perry is not just the biggest family band in country music today — it could very well be the biggest band, period, when you look at recent achievements.

Only two albums into their career, including the release of Pioneer in April, which reached number one on the country charts in both Canada and the U.S., siblings Kimberly, Neil and Reid Perry already have multiple country music awards and were nominated for best new artist at the Grammys last year.

Known for their sharp lyrics and an energetic live show, the siblings alternate between powerful ballads and country rock, or a little bit of both, as on their hit single from Pioneer, “Better Dig Two.”

As Kimberly explains it, the mix of music on Pioneer was a chance for the young band to map out to fans where they’re headed.

“In writing this record, we asked ourselves a ton of questions about what are we going to sound like next, where are we going to go next as a band, and this record is us figuring out what that path is going to look like,” she says over the phone from Nashville.

I was recently given 10 minutes with Kimberly, Neil and Reid, so it only made sense to put them through a countrified version of the “10 questions in 10 minutes” quiz.

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When listening to the new album from bass saxophone player Colin Stetson, New History Warfare Vol. 3: To See More Light, you may begin to feel an uncontrollable sense of unease and terror. That’s OK, you’re supposed to. In fact, Stetson feels the same thing.

“I don’t listen back to it very much, but when I have, sometimes it surprises me that I get new feelings or new imagery, but largely the things that I feel are the things that I intended for the pieces,” he says. “Things that are supposed to create a tension and be a terrifying energy, I feel that.”

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Paul Anka knows all about the pressure of fame on a young star.  

At 14, he wrote his first commercial single, “I Confess,” and by 16, with hits like “Diana” and “You Are My Destiny,” he was not only one of the biggest teen idols of the 1950s, but was also well on his way to cementing his status as a songwriting legend.

Soon, the fresh-faced boy from Ottawa, Ont., was side-by-side with the giants of the industry, from Buddy Holly to Tom Jones and, most notably, Frank Sinatra and the Las Vegas lifestyle that’s now become synonymous with the late singer.

So yes, Anka knows a thing or two about pressure. When the name Justin Bieber comes up in a recent interview at the CBC headquarters in Toronto, and how the teen star from Stratford, Ont., is now known just as much for his music as for his personal missteps, Anka just sighs.

“I just don’t know what’s going to end up with Justin,” he says. “It’s just teenage shit, you know? You got to see who’s around him, who’s giving him bad advice, then it’s up to him.”

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“I think it’s my fave thing in the world and has been forever,” he says before adding, rather matter-of-factly, “although I never really got caught. I set my front yard on fire with a couple buddies once, and that was pretty dangerous.”

Luckily, the drummer for the likes of Dan Mangan and Mother Mother has put the “dangerous” side of his fascination behind him and channeled it into a solo music project, the Crackling, and a beautiful, acoustic-driven sophomore album, Mary Magdalene, released April 16.

Appropriately, the image of fire spreads itself throughout the album, but none more so than on “The Crackling,” a thunderous and acidic song that pushes the depths of Loewen’s vocals to Tom Waitsian levels as he bellows, “someone set fire to the church, and all the members started spinning, the crackling of the old boys let ‘em know which God was winning.”

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If you ask Kacey Musgraves, country music is overdue for a revolution, and she’s just the type of singer to bring it.

“I knew some of the ideas I sing about would be a little different than the norm, but I wasn’t sure how people would respond to what I like to sing about, meaning I don’t like to sing about trucks,” the 24-year-old says of Same Trailer Different Park, her major label debut released last month. 

Her album has been heralded as a welcome change in focus for a genre of music that, according to The New York Times, “continues to suffer from its masculinity crisis … as male singers have left the genre’s increasingly dull assumptions unchecked.”

Musgraves agrees, adding that her intention for the album was to shake things up, as she’s “always wanted to change things about country music.”

“If anything, though, I would say there is a femininity crisis,” she adds. “Up until now there hasn’t really been that many new females, but I’m glad some new girls are starting to pop up on the scene, like Ashley Monroe and Holly Williams.”

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When Vancouver’s the Belle Game debuted in 2009 with an EP called Inventing Letters, their brand of folk-pop, captured perfectly on lead single “Tiny Fires,” was fun and breezy, just summery enough to win them the Fan Favourite Award in Shore FM’s Sounds of the Summer contest.

But it’s been a formative few years for the band, which has opened for the likes of Gotye and Polaris Music Prize winners Karkwa, and is just now releasing a debut full-length album, Ritual Tradition Habit, an affecting and introspective look at the impulses that drive us to do the things we do.    

“Back then we were still figuring out our real tastes,” explains singer Andrea Lo about the sonic chasm between Inventing Letters and their current album. “Even our second EP [2011’s Sleep to Grow] could be considered part of this unintentional experimentation phase. We started as a three-piece, so when we accumulated more members, we naturally accumulated more influences, and now our tastes have become clearer.”

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“One year slightly of losing track, I wasted much I cannot get back,” Sabrina Halde sings on “Superhero,” a song she says is about “letting go and moving on,” about simply not being afraid to take chances.

And she should know, considering the 25-year-old just recently quit her job at a restaurant in Montreal to pursue music full time as the lead singer for Groenland.

“It’s the first time I quit a job to make music, so it’s exciting,” she says over the phone from her home in Montreal. “It’s a big risk when you decide to put everything in the same basket, but it’s a big risk I can take.”

And if Groenland’s debut album, The Chase, is any indication, Halde made the right decision. “Superhero,” the lead single, has already topped the Radio 3 charts, and the full album is set to be released April 16.

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Just last month, CBC Music named Shad the second greatest Canadian rapper ever, falling right behind Maestro. It’s fitting, considering the godfather of Canadian rap recently took the younger rapper under his wing and gave him a little history lesson.  

“Maestro drove me around and told me a lot of the music history of the time that I wouldn’t know about, back when he was starting off,” Shad says over the phone. “That was super cool, on a personal level and just as a fan. Even in Canada we don’t know some of the history of hip-hop and how far it goes back.”

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Patrick Lehman is proof that three years of classical vocal training can’t erase a childhood of listening to Motown and Stax records.

After listening to “Stop Pretending,” the lead single off last year’s independently released Soul Kitchen Vol. 2, it would be easy to assume the singer is from Memphis, rather than his hometown of Montreal.

“It’s just the music I grew up listening to with my parents, so I’ve always been exposed to that,” he says over the phone, speaking in a deep voice that sounds as if it’s being filtered through the baritone sax that gives “Stop Pretending” so much of its flavour.

“Classical training focused on operas and arias, and just a lot of technical aspects of your voice, that sort of thing,” he says. “It’s about the technical side of singing, while soul music is just whatever comes out, so I guess I’ve been influenced by soul more than I realized.”

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Just over one year ago, Zeus released Busting Visions, which became a breakout album for the Toronto indie rockers. To celebrate, they are re-issuing the album with an EP that includes seven distinct and, well, extremely varied cover songs.

Called Cover Me, it includes Zeus’s take on R&B classics like Michael Jackson’s “Who Is It?” and party anthem “Ignition” from R. Kelly, as well as songs from Stone Temple Pilots (“Vaseline”), Big Star (“The Ballad of El Goodo”), Genesis (“That’s All”), the Flaming Lips (“Fight Test”) and Sam Roberts Band (“Without a Map”), whom they’ve toured with extensively.

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Josh Ritter is one of the most respected young singer-songwriters working today. A modern day Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, Ritter has developed his inimitable strength for storytelling over 15 years and seven studio albums. 

On his latest album, The Beast in its Tracks, Ritter tackles perhaps his most challenging subject yet in the dissolution of his marriage to musician Dawn Landes.

“I don’t want to write about breakups, but this was a major moment in my life,” he says over the phone. “It’s not just a breakup, it’s the crumbling of this institution that I really believe in. To not write about that would be dishonest.”

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In a very short time, British singer-songwriter Lianne La Havas has gone from being a relative unknown singing backup for Paloma Faith to becoming one of the most buzzed about solo artists on both sides of the Atlantic.

She released her first solo EP, Lost & Found, on Oct. 21, 2011, the very same day she appeared on the taste-making British music show Later… With Jools Holland. It exposed the world to La Havas’s minimalist mash-up of folk and soul, and her career has been on a direct ascent ever since. She’s toured with Bon Iver and Alicia Keys, was longlisted for the U.K. Sound of 2012 poll, and her full-length debut, 2012’s Is Your Love Big Enough?, was named the iTunes album of the year. Now the 23-year-old singer kicks off her largest North American tour, including dates in Vancouver on March 26, Toronto on April 4 and Montreal on April 5. 

I caught up with the affable singer while she was en route to Birmingham, U.K., to talk about why it took two years to record her debut, what she plans for a followup and how some big-name remixes have brought her music to a whole new audience. 

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Picture this: you’re at an uptight party where everyone is standing around with their hands in their pockets, and right there in the middle is one person dancing wildly and with utter abandon, having more fun than everyone else combined. Maylee Todd is that person.

Luckily for us, there’s plenty of that energy and undeniable charisma on the Toronto musician’s sophomore album, Escapology (out on April 2, but streaming here in advance), which spans everything from funk and disco-boogie to soul and singer-songwriter.

“We like to call it really feelin’ it music,” says Todd of her sound, over email, reached while travelling in the Philippines where she’s “exploring my roots, my history, staying in native villages in the mountains, getting to know and understand other cultures, people and their way of life, and most importantly, getting to understand my mother and myself. It’s been real heavy.”  

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In the mid to late-’70s, Toronto was a swirling mess of blood, spit, spilled beer and riotous, incendiary guitar-driven noise. It was the city’s — if not the country’s — punk rock awakening, a short-lived underground scene with a DIY aesthetic that inspired soon-to-be musicians across the country to take up guitars and speak their minds. 

Bands with names like the the Diodes, Teenage Head and the Scenics played clubs like the Roxy Theatre, the New Yorker and the Crash ‘n’ Burn; names that have been largely forgotten today by everyone except for those who were there. What was once the Colonial Tavern, home to a thriving punk scene, is now an HMV, while ascendant bands that seemed poised to take over the world stalled out mid-climb before they really had the chance.

For those who experienced those early punk days first-hand, whether as fans, journalists, concert promoters or bands, that moment in time is one of the most important moments in Canadian music history. Unfortunately, it’s never really been treated as such.

Directors Colin Brunton and Kire Paputts hope to change that with the release of The Last Pogo Jumps Again: A Biased & Incomplete History Of Toronto Punk Rock Circa September 24 1976 To December 1 1978, a documentary that begins when the Ramones played their first Canadian date at the New Yorker on Yonge Street (now the Panasonic Theatre) and ends when police kicked Teenage Head off the stage at The Last Pogo concert, leading to the city’s first (and only?) punk rock riot. For many, that marked the end of an era.

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