Rewinding 2024 | The Slightly Shorter List: Tinnitist’s Top Albums (Part 1: A-B)

As the old saying goes: If you want to sculpt a statue of an elephant, you just get the biggest granite block you can find — and chip away...

Rewinding 2024 | Tinnitist’s Top Albums: The Long List

Another year, another bajillion albums, EPs, box sets, compilations, anthologies, retrospectives, soundtracks, bootlegs, streams and whatnot. Here's a list of every new release that was featured on the site...

Rewinding 2024 | Tinnitist’s Top Interviews

I spent about 30 years interviewing musicians the old-fashioned way: Talking on the telephone, transcribing the tape (or, eventually, the digital recording) and turning it all into a story...

Rewinding 2024 | Tinnitist’s Top Music Videos

I have said it before. I am saying it again: If there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's that people love music videos. Here's the proof: The...

Rewinding 2024 | Tinnitist’s Top Posts

Sometimes I spend hours (OK, minutes) labouring over a thoughtful review or column that nobody reads. Other times I dash off a couple of sentences, throw together a roundup,...

Rewinding 2024 | Area Resident’s Top Albums

This year I decided not to bother including special-edition remixes or archival box sets in my year-end roundup. I'll add that there are probably dozens of albums I could...

Rewinding 2024 | Steve Schmolaris’s Fan Favourites

Lists? Ask anyone who knows me – like, really knows me – and they’ll say I love them. Which is true, I do love lists. Their simple elegance. Their...

Rewinding 2024 | In Memoriam

“The goal isn’t to live forever,” Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk once said. “The goal is to create something that will.” These people certainly did. Here's a list of...

Christmas Back Stories | My 2016 Interview With Loretta Lynn

I got an early holiday present in 2016 when I flew to Nashville in November to interview the one and only Loretta Lynn about her latest holiday album White...

Christmas Back Stories | My 2010 Interview With Annie Lennox

In 2010, Eurythmics singer Annie Lennox jumped on the holiday-music bandwagon by releasing the album A Christmas Cornucopia. I was the only Canadian newspaper reporter to interview her about...

Thunder Pie | Lou Abruzzio’s Final Christmas (Part 2)

“Human minds are more full of mysteries than any written book and more changeable than the cloud shapes in the air.” — Louisa May Alcott When Big Onion touched Lou’s hand...

Area Resident’s Stylus Counsel | So Hard To Love You

Sometimes you have a guilty pleasure that you're not even honest with yourself about. I think I love Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan, but it feels wrong. The pair were...

Thunder Pie | Lou Abruzzio’s Final Christmas (Part 1)

“Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.” — D. H. Lawrence At exactly 12:03 a.m. EST on Black Friday, 2019, a Long Island man by the name of Lou Abruzzio...

Area Resident’s Stylus Counsel: The Tom Mix Cabin

If you enter the address 2401 Laurel Canyon Blvd. into Google Maps, you're shown a boarded-up vacant wooded property, with hints of ruins. There's nothing to suggest the colourful...

Area Resident’s Stylus Counsel | Making Americans Dance

It was 50 years ago that Canada suddenly distinguished itself on the Billboard Hot 100. That year, Canadian artists were responsible for four No. 1 hits on America's predominant...

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