If there’s anything that Steve Schmolaris loves more than listening to Winnipeg music, it’s listening to people talk about listening to Winnipeg music.
That’s why Bad Gardening Advice has teamed up with Shirley and Rick Hamelin to create the Bad Gardening Advice Podcast. Join Shirley and her husband, Rick, as they dive deep into the inner workings of both the Winnipeg music scene and Steve Schmolaris. It will be wild. It will be weird. It will be, well, Winnipeg.
Keen minds will remember Shirley Hamelin from the award-winning podcast BLOODSHOT: The Untold Story of the Rainbow Trout Music Festival. She’s returned, folks!
This inaugural episode above looks back at Steve Schmolaris’s reviews for December 2024; they talk AI, they talk anxiety, they talk revolution: they talk Winnipeg music — what it means now, and what it may mean going forward.
Open your ears, open your minds, open the Bad Gardening Advice Podcast!
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Steve Schmolaris is the founder of the Schmolaris Prize, “the most prestigious prize in all of Manitoba,” which he first awarded in 1977. Each year, he awards the prize to the best album of the year. He does not have a profession but, having come from money (his father, “the Millionaire of East Schmelkirk,” left him his fortune when he died in 1977), Steve is a patron of the arts. Inspired by the exquisite detail of a holotype, the collective intelligence of slime mold, the natural world and the suffering inherent within it — and also music (fuck, he loves music!) — Steve has long been writing reviews of Winnipeg artists’ songs and albums at his website Bad Gardening Advice, leading to the publication of a book of the same name.
