music writing

Jill

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This past Thursday was the first full day off I’d had for a couple of weeks. I was sitting in a coffee shop, drinking a latte and doing a word puzzle, and decided to look at my email on my phone. Just as I opened my email account, a message came in, with a subject line so shocking I thought at first I had misread it. “Jill died in a house fire.”

“Jill” is Jill Sobule, who I took songwriting classes with during the pandemic. The email was from a friend in my online songwriting group – a group that grew out of Jill’s classes. The heartfelt tributes from Jill’s friends and colleagues describe what I saw in those classes. She was generous, kind, incredibly talented, and funny. I’m so grateful that I got to learn from her.

In the 1990s, I knew Jill from her hit singles:  “I Kissed A Girl” from her second album, and “Supermodel” from the soundtrack of the movie Clueless. (“Two-hit wonder”, she always pointed out whenever someone called her a “one-hit wonder”.)  I started following her on Twitter around 2018 or so, because her Tweets were hilarious. Then in April 2021, when we were all stuck at home during the pandemic, Jill announced on Twitter that she would be doing a series of online songwriting classes. I thought about it, and got up the courage to DM her. I asked whether absolute beginners could participate, and she replied, “Sure!”

I’ve taken music lessons and can read music, but other than singing in choirs at school I’ve never been a performing musician. And as much as I like music, I had never felt the impulse to write songs. Obviously I like to write prose, and I can make up little melodies to entertain myself, but I had no idea how anyone went about connecting those two things. I had concluded that other people had the songwriting gene, but I did not.

Jill in the video for “Supermodel”. (photo credit: YouTube)

But when I saw Jill’s offer, I thought, well, she writes great songs, and if I write about music I should probably learn something about how songwriting works. So, with some degree of apprehension, I signed up for the four class sessions.

At the start of the very first class, Continue reading →

Fountains of Wayne Book Now Available

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My new book Fountains of Wayne is now officially on sale.

The band announced two live shows this summer – their first in more than a decade – just before the book went to the printer! Thankfully, there was enough time to stop the production process, and to revise the manuscript to include this very unexpected but wonderful news.

Links to purchase Fountains of Wayne are here, for both print and eBook formats.  I hope you enjoy reading it.

Ship of Fools

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As some of this blog’s followers will know – especially those that follow my other blog – I have two careers: one in academia, and one in music writing. The two don’t often intersect, and that’s partly because I try to keep them separate. Having a Ph.D. and being a university professor doesn’t mean a lot in the music writing world, and being a music writer doesn’t mean a lot in the academic world. There might be some overlap if my degree was in a subject related to music, but although my area of study is very useful in helping me to understand how the music industry works, it’s not explicitly music-related.

This week marks the anniversary of the day I defended my doctoral dissertation – March 17, 1995. The defense comes after you’ve written your dissertation, which is an original piece of research, and your academic supervisor (supervisors, in my case) have signed off on it. You verbally present your research and your findings to a panel of professors, including an external assessor from another university. The panel members ask you questions about what you’ve done, and then you wait outside the room while the panel decides whether you’ve passed.

The defense is extremely nerve-wracking – you’re defending several years’ worth of work to a panel that has the power to say “no, not good enough, go back and try again”. However, I was exceptionally nervous about my defense. At an earlier step in my doctoral program, the progress of my dissertation was suddenly derailed because Continue reading →

Nick Lowe’s Christmas Show

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Nick Lowe and Los Straitjackets were on the CBS Saturday Morning TV show today, playing three songs from Nick’s classic holiday album Quality Street (here’s their performance of ‘Christmas at the Airport’). Quality Street is now 10 years old, and it will forever remind me of the Nick Lowe show I saw at Vancouver’s Vogue Theatre on December 19, 2015.

This was a memorable show for many reasons, not least of which was the excellent and exuberant music. It was also memorable because of the audience. This was my first time seeing Nick as a solo act – I had seen him in Vancouver in 1980, as part of Rockpile – but everyone I knew who had seen him on his own assured me that he was terrific. When my husband and I got to the venue and found our seats, it turned out Continue reading →

“Record Collector” Specials

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Over the last few months I’ve had the opportunity to contribute to two special issues published by Record Collector magazine.

For the Elton John special, I wrote an article about Elton’s 1975 album Rock Of The Westies. This was a particularly interesting assignment, since I still have the vinyl copy of the album that I bought when it came out! You can buy the issue here, and it’s also available on newsstands in the UK.

Record Collector presents… Elton John

For the Paul McCartney special, I wrote about Wings’ 1971 debut album Wild Life, and also took a look at McCartney’s books, music, and films for kids. You can buy the issue here, and it will be on UK newsstands as of December 7.

Record Collector presents… Paul McCartney

 

 

Tom Harrison

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This is a blog post that I didn’t think I’d be writing.

On December 27, my friend Tom Harrison passed away at the age of 70. We were friends for more than 40 years – a number which astounded me when I calculated it. We met in the late 1970s when he was the music writer for The Province newspaper and I was the music writer for The Vancouver Sun, but it honestly doesn’t feel like that long ago.

I knew who Tom was long before I actually met him. Any music lover in Vancouver in the 1970s knew who Tom was, from his writing in the Georgia Straight weekly paper and also from the pioneering music video show Soundproof that he co-hosted on cable TV. But a lot of people didn’t know that Continue reading →

Interviews about MIXTAPE

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Since my new book MIXTAPE was released, I’ve done several interviews about it, which I’d like to share.

Eric Senich and I talked about the book for his podcast Booked On Rock.

John Ackermann at CityNews1130 radio in Vancouver interviewed me about MIXTAPE for his weekly BookShelf segment. The video of the interview is here, and the website story is here.

Ben O’Hara-Byrne did a long interview with me on his nightly national radio show A Little More Conversation.  The audio of the interview is on the show’s website, in the playlist on the lower part of the page. The segment is titled “ALMC hits rewind” and the interview starts about 14 minutes in.

It’s a crowded market out there for music-related books. I’m very grateful to all these interviewers for giving MIXTAPE some extra attention.