Tag: Music

The joyful sound of Dwayne Gretzky

That’s Dwayne, with a D, and not Wayne, the former hockey great we’re no longer so fond of these days. On February 22, we went to see Dwayne Gretzky in concert at Centre in the Square.

It was not based on much in-depth knowledge about this band. I knew they did covers. I had heard a couple of these covers, probably on CBC Radio, and I’d thought they were good. They were supposed to perform with the KW Symphony as part of their (the symphony’s) ultimately doomed 2023–24 season. I’d been left a bit curious about them ever since.

The show was a party.

It was really well attended, and many of the attendees were pretty well lubricated. Jean and I were sober as judges, but were still infected with the mood. Stand or sit? was the question, as it often is at these “soft seat” venues. Sitting was initially winning out… But not for that long! Soon there was a lot of standing… And dancing… And singing along.

The show was a party.

The Dwayne Gretzky band is… large. I think I counted 16 people? Because they cover lots of instruments—horns and strings and stuff, along with the expected guitars, bass, drums, keyboards—and lots of vocal styles. And these vocal stylings are great, some fantastic voices on display. And great instrumentation as well.

This video gives a pretty decent overview of what the band is like

The covers were largely from my era—1980s, with a side of 1970s and 1990s. So, though I’d never seen this band in concert before, I still knew all the songs. This is the key to the fun, if you’re in the right demographic (as most of the audience appeared to be).

This was the playlist (thank you, Setlist.fm):

  1. Owner of a Lonely Heart (Yes cover)
  2. Dreams (The Cranberries cover)
  3. Don’t Stop Me Now (Queen cover)
  4. You Can Call Me Al (Paul Simon cover): The crowd was definitely starting to rise here
  5. We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome) (Tina Turner cover): Though we sat back down for this
  6. Rosanna (Toto cover)
  7. Baba O’Riley (The Who cover)
  8. Walking on Broken Glass (Annie Lennox cover): During intermission, had to Google who did this originally. Still recognized it, though.
  9. Maybe I’m Amazed (Paul McCartney cover)
  10. How Will I Know (Whitney Houston cover): They brought out yet another singer, a guest, to handle these Whitney / Abba / Celine tunes
  11. Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight) (ABBA cover)
  12. Drive (The Cars cover): A new one in their large repertoire, they said
  13. Dancing in the Dark (Bruce Springsteen cover): We were, we were dancing in the dark.

Intermission!

  1. 1999 (Prince cover)
  2. Let’s Go Crazy (Prince cover): At some point, they mentioned how much livelier this crowd was then their previous night’s (so suck it, Peterborough, I guess)
  3. 9 to 5 (Dolly Parton cover)
  4. Crazy (Patsy Cline cover): A vocal virtuosity
  5. I Will Survive (Gloria Gaynor cover)
  6. Higher Love (Steve Winwood cover)
  7. It’s All Coming Back to Me Now (Céline Dion cover)
  8. I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) (The Proclaimers cover): So much dancing and clapping!
  9. Bang the Drum All Day (Todd Rundgren cover): A youngster joined for this on-stage, very cute
  10. Piece of My Heart (Janis Joplin cover): This singer, man! The rasp! Fantastic.
  11. Bobcaygeon (The Tragically Hip cover): Ah, my heart! So good.
  12. Radio Ga Ga ((Queen cover)): Yes, we did the arms.
  13. Under Pressure (Queen & David Bowie cover)

Encore!

  1. Come and Get Your Love (Redbone cover)
  2. With a Little Help From My Friends (Joe Cocker cover)

So basically, if you need a lift, if you want a high, quick as the speed of light, a Dwayne Gretzky concert might be the ticket. Especially if you’re GenX-y.

Getting out of the house

“I’d almost forgotten what that was like”, Jean commented, as we exited the Registry Theatre after a Larry Larson’s Jazz Guys concert. And by that, he met a live musical performance of any kind.

We’d intended to attend many a live musical performance over these past and coming months, but then the Kitchener Waterloo Symphony suddenly and apparently irrevocably went bankrupt—a mere week before what would have been their first concert of the season. Our season’s tickets for various performances, from Bolero to Magic! to Back to the Future to Shostakovitch, suddenly longer worth nothing more than a tax receipt.

There are efforts underway to try to revive the local arts scene, but who knows. Government funding is tight all around. The Globe and Mail has been covering the problems that theatre companies have been experiencing right across the country (🎁 article link). Mirvish is doing fine, but others are not. I suppose the lack of audience return is due to combination of people having become increasingly accustomed to home entertainment; inflation lowering budgetary for spending on discretionary events; and some remaining concern about the health risks of crowded spaces.

But for us, at least this year, it was just mainly that the Symphony disappeared. And we’ve had trouble finding appealing alternatives. It’s been some time since we’ve been out anywhere.

February has seemed virtually packed with arts activities, comparatively speaking.

Continue reading “Getting out of the house” →

The music of 2023 wasn’t

Of 2023. Meaning, this year I spent most of my time listening to music I already own, rather than discovering new sounds on streaming services or radio. So not that much of it was music released in 2023.

Not sure how much this was cause vs. effect, but I also had trouble settling with any particular music streaming service this year.

  • Spotify: A service I’ve tried off and on over the years (whenever they offer me a discount, as I don’t like the ad version), but it was mostly off in 2023.
  • YouTube Music: I did subscribe to this earlier in the year. As a previous Google Play Music user, I’d built up a pretty good music data set in there. But YouTube Music has never been as good as Google Play Music was. On the July long weekend, I tried to find some sort of Canada Day playlist there, and pretty much came up empty. (Maybe because Google was at this point fighting with the federal government over streaming service regulations?) This led me to try out…
Apple, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, Deezer logos.
Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Deezer, and ?
  • Amazon Music Unlimited which offered me a three-month free trial. I found that they had quite a few fun Canada Day playlists! Of course, in general they had only a fuzzy idea of my music tastes, but it still a decent enough service for when I wanted to listen to something other than “my” music. Still, when this offer ran out, we decided to switch to…
  • Amazon Prime Music: Because it was included with Prime, which we already had. But I had not realized that with Prime, in most cases, you can only listen to albums or playlists in shuffle mode. And it won’t even show you in what order it’s shuffled songs into.
    While this was perfectly fine for Jean, it was overly limited for me. Sometimes I want to shuffle; sometimes I do not. Either way, I like to see what’s up next. Hence, I decided to take up another three-month offer to try…
  • Apple Music: It’s pretty nice. No ads, no limitations, clean interface, good queue, embedded lyrics. Will I pay for it when the free period is done? Tbd.

No Spotify Wrapped for me

I did not use that service enough. I did find it pretty amusing that most every other digital service of any kind that I used tried to offer something similar. My Kobo erReader: What a bookish year it’s been! My Washington Post Newsprint: What’s your reader type? My Starbucks year in review? I’m not even kidding! Look back at your Starbucks routine!

I mean…

YouTube Music had enough data to cobble something together for me. Apparently the song I listened to those most on that service last year was…

Continue reading “The music of 2023 wasn’t” →

Stuff I learned from podcasts this week

Actually, by now it’s stuff I learned last week, or the week before that… But I still find it worth knowing!

You’re going to bullshit yourself regardless, so you might as well put it to good use!

Hidden Brain: Outsmarting Yourself

Person weighing a decision.

This was the second of a two-part series on cognitive dissonance: how you try to convince yourself that a decision you made was the right one, even in light of evidence to the contrary. Pretty much all humans do this, so even if you’re well aware of that tendency, you might still do it. But the awareness can at least help you harness it for good.

Some really interesting examples here of how to harness cognitive dissonance for good, including in the realm of public health. Hmm…

The federal government is killing local news by trying to help local news

The Paul Wells podcast: How Bill C-18 is threatening a local news empire

Jeff Elgie of Village Media.

Thanks to Michael Geist, I’ve been aware of Bill C-18, the law that (essentially) says that Facebook and Google must pay news organizations for linking to their content, for years. And that it has resulted in Facebook (Meta now, I guess) doing exactly what they clearly said they would do if this bill passed, which is to stop linking to news. With Google now likely to do similarly.

What I learned from this Paul Wells podcast is how this has specifically hurt an organization that I had never heard of before. Village Media has been very successful at going into markets that have lost their traditional local news outlets. Village Media has filled that void, supplying communities with local news, all online. They have staff journalists, with benefits—not just a bunch of freelancers! They are profitable, and growing, and had been planning to expand into several new markets this year.

Until, until…

Continue reading “Stuff I learned from podcasts this week” →

Bosch, Poker Face, Fleishman, and more: Tips and recommendations

I’ve gathered up some bits of wisdom of late that I’d like to share.

First up, how to…

…Figure out what streaming service a particular show is on

Netflix, Apple TV, Disney+, Prime, Crave, Tubi, CBC Gem… It’s nuts. So many services! I don’t subscribe to them all, but enough to make it hard to remember what’s where.

JustWatch Watchlist page

It’s even more confusing for Canadians, since US media will tell us a show is on a service we don’t have in this country (Hulu, Peacock, HBO+)—but that doesn’t always mean we can’t get it on a service we do have. Even more confusing, just because it’s on an American version of a service we have (like Netflix or Prime) doesn’t mean it’s also on the Canadian one. Could be on some other service entirely here.

This is why I love the JustWatch app. You select the streaming services you have access to and it serves up what’s on each. You can set up a Watchlist of every TV show or movie you’re currently watching, or plan to watch, and have one-page look of everything you’re currently caring about. You can mark off episodes or movies as you watch them. It will notify you when new episodes or a new season become available. And it has a pretty good recommendation engine if you need more to watch.

Of course, you can also use it to look up some show you’ve heard about, to find out if it is available to you at all, and if so, where.

…Watch Poker Face

Solid as I generally find the JustWatch app to be, one thing it doesn’t quite get is conventional cable. Particularly when it behaves unconventionally.

Continue reading “Bosch, Poker Face, Fleishman, and more: Tips and recommendations” →

The Blue Rodeo risk assessment

My Twitter feed is a terrifying place these days.

My timeline is stuffed full of doctors, epidemiologists, public health officials, and health journalists, and they are not an optimistic bunch of late. While Ontario / Canada seemed to have had a reasonable handle on Delta, the two-week’s worth of data on Omicron is not looking promising. Seemingly quite contagious, seemingly fairly evasive of both vaccination and prior infection, it looks poised to spread at exponential rates in the coming weeks and months, once again threatening to swamp Ontario hospitals whose already limited capacity is actually worse now when this happened last year.

Potential impact of Omicron could be substantial
One of the slides from the Ontario Science Advisory Table’s latest update

Meanwhile, I had tickets to my first crowded indoor event of the pandemic: a sold-out Blue Rodeo concert at Centre in the Square.

Continue reading “The Blue Rodeo risk assessment” →

Things I learned at the Carly Rae Jepsen concert

  1. Per tweet, people stand through the whole thing, from opening chord to closing greeting.
    Glad I wore comfy shoes.
  2. There are far more people in the world than you’d think who know the words to every Carly Rae Jepsen song.
    The whole thing was a grand singalong. I myself found that I knew the lyrics better than I realized. [I mean, I do have a few of her albums. I didn’t just randomly show up at this performance.]
  3. She does not end the show with “Call Me Maybe”.
    She just throws it in there as song five.
  4. Nor does she end with “I Really Like You” (song 13).
    The honour goes to: “Cut to the Feeling”.
  5. Per Jean, this was the greatest crowd to watch. He especially enjoyed as they evolved from the tentative, awkward standing to totally in-the-groove dancing along.
    The overwhelming feeling was warmth. The Carly Rae Jepsen fan base might be small, but it’s passionate.
  6. We were among the oldest people there.
    Although… Guess that wasn’t really a surprise.

So this was a September 18 concert at Centre in the Square, and it was a hoot. The opening act was Ralph, whom I hadn’t heard of before, but she was also rather fun. Cameras were allowed, but we didn’t bring one, so I’ll feature a photo from Centre in the Square:

Setlist:

  1. No Drug Like Me
  2. E*MO*TION
  3. Run Away With Me
  4. Julien
  5. Call Me Maybe
  6. Now That I Found You
  7. Gimmie Love
  8. Feels Right
  9. Fever
  10. Want You in My Room
  11. Store
  12. Too Much
  13. I Really Like You
  14. Everything He Needs
  15. Boy Problems
  16. Party for One
  17. Let’s Get Lost
  18. Cut to the Feeling

The Who: Moving on! Live in Toronto

It was hard not to compare The Who show at the Scotiabank Arena in Toronto with the Queen + Adam Lambert one, since that was only a few weeks ago. I wasn’t a Very Important Person at The Who show, which made it cheaper. So I didn’t get any merchandise. I considered a T-shirt, but they didn’t seem to carry any women’s styles. (I need a waist in my clothes, damn it!) I was in the 35th row on the floor, not the 13th, and there was no catwalk. The Who were playing each show with a symphony orchestra, and likely in part due to the expense of that, the staging and lights were really pretty simple for a big arena rock show. Not in the Queen style at all.

On their last tour, celebrating 50 years of the band, The Who presented a crowd-pleasing set list of greatest hits. In this one, they really challenged themselves. And the audience. That, too, was unlike Queen.

Continue reading “The Who: Moving on! Live in Toronto” →

Ignite TV

MobileSyrup ran an article recently called Are you experiencing platform subscription fatigue?. It focused on the mounting cost of the different services: Netflix, Crave, YouTube Premium, Amazon Prime, and so on. “I just wish there was one subscription service for everything”, the writer noted. Which I found a bit funny. Doesn’t that sound like a plea for the big, fat single cable TV bundle that streaming was supposed to save us from?

Nevertheless, I do sympathize. There are so many services now, with more on the way, and they keep raising their prices. The glory days of cutting the cord and getting by with $8 a month for Netflix are long gone.

Apart from the cost of all this, there is just the challenge of remembering what you’re watching (or want to watch) where, then maybe switching from the cable PVR to grabbing the phone to cast from Netflix, the logging in to your Amazon account to see something on Prime. It’s all rather inconvenient!

What I want, I’ve lamented for some time, is a Sonos for TV shows. Sonos is a wireless speaker system that, apart from allowing you control speakers in various rooms in the house, consolidates most anything you want to listen to in one place. Your own digital music library. Spotify. Google Music. YouTube Music. Podcast apps. Audible audiobooks. Apple music. Radio stations. Where applicable, the subscriptions are up to you to set up, but once have, you can search through it all, you create playlists that mix and match among them—you can have all your “sound” stuff organized in one place. (At least when you’re home.)

Sonos menu of sound options

Rogers Ignite is kind of like that for TV. By “Rogers”, I do mean, yes, the big cable company. Ignite TV is their IPTV (TV over the Internet) offering. Initially available only with expensive, premium packages, they now have cheaper tiers on offer, and we switched to it this summer.

Of course you get the cable channels you subscribe to, which in our case isn’t a lot (just the $25 “starter package”). But we were also offered Crave + HBO free for six months, which we of course accepted. At regular price, Crave + HBO from Rogers cost the same as if you subscribed to them directly, but then you can access them from TV same as any other channel, including on-demand. (You should also have access to them through the Crave app with your Rogers login, but there is some bug there preventing that from working—Crave can’t seem to recognize that you really do have a Rogers cable subscription.)

If you have a Netflix subscription, you can access that through your Ignite box as well. Also, YouTube. And apparently coming soon: Amazon Prime.

The Ignite box itself is this tiny little thing, compared with the large, power-hungry PVRs of the past. You get a ton of cloud storage with it, so you can record shows to your heart’s content. And it’s much smarter about recording those: if the same show plays three times in a week, it’s only going to record it once for you.

The Ignite TV box is smaller than a Blu-ray case

The basic Ignite package comes with only one box; you can add others for $5/month each. We have two. All the same information (recordings, viewing history) is available on both. If wanting to move one to a different TV in the house, temporarily or permanently, that’s quite easy to do.

There’s also a lovely, seamless integration with anything available on demand. Previously I almost never looked at Rogers On Demand stuff; it was off in its own universe, on those special, hard-to-navigate channels. I often forgot it was even there. Now you can find and watch that on-demand content as easily as anything you’ve recorded.

To find things, as their ads point out, you can just talk to the remote. Wherever it is—on demand, available to record, online—it will show you and give you watch options. It remembers what you’ve already watched and makes logical assumptions based on that. It’s all pretty slick.

Oh, and you can also watch on your phone, tablet, or PC, through the Ignite TV app—live TV, recordings, and on demand content. In many cases, you can download your recordings for off-line viewing. One thing not available? Chromecast, as I guess that would kind be competition. But since your Chromecast is typically on your TV, and you can already watch all the stuff on your TV, I don’t see that as a huge issue. (Just if wanting to watch on someone else’s Chromecast while away, I guess.)

Ignite TV app

So that does bring much TV content together, saving mental energy, though not money. I have no idea what we do about the ballooning cost. For now, I’ll just try to resist the pending Disney service and YouTube Premium.

Movie review: Yesterday

The movie Yesterday has a great premise. And a great trailer about that premise.

Yesterday movie trailer (YouTube)

In case you missed it (and don’t want to watch it now), said premise is that after a mysterious, world-wide blackout, the entire world has forgotten that The Beatles ever existed. Save one guy. This guy–Jack Malik, a failed singer-songwriter–capitalizes on this anomaly to ignite his career by singing Beatles songs, claiming they are his own.

Even though I know–I know–that great trailers can be made for really poor films, I liked this one so much I made a point to go see this movie on opening weekend.

And… Maybe it’s not quite as great as the trailer? But it was still a very enjoyable, funny, fun, romantic movie.

Romantic? Yes, at heart it’s a romantic comedy about Jack and his manager, Ellie. Ellie has been carrying a torch for Jack for years; Jack has somehow failed to notice. Now she’s letting him know. But his increasing fame is, as one can imagine, nothing but a complication.

It actually fits in well with the story of him trying to build a singing career on singing Beatles tunes, given that they wrote so many love songs. And that part of the movie–Jack introducing the world to The Beatles canon–is as fun as you’d hope. (“Interesting you called it the USSR [re “Back in the USSR”]. Russia hasn’t been called that since before you were born.”) I especially liked the detail that Jack keeps munging up the lyrics. He knows the songs–of course he knows the songs, we all do–but he doesn’t necessarily deeply know the songs. He’s no Beatles guru, and he can’t look up the lyrics on Google. So he has to wrack his brain trying to remember them, and doesn’t always succeed. We get changed words here, reordered verses there, and a truly epic struggle to put “Eleanor Rigby” together.

Also good? While there is plenty of appreciation for The Beatles work (look, those are some catchy songs), it’s not instantaneous nor universal. Many of Jack’s early attempts to revive his career by singing their songs is met with a shrug.

I enjoyed the film’s twists, including the controversial one that I don’t want to spoil (but you, unlike Jack, can Google what that is). You can’t ponder the premise too deeply, of what the world would really be like had The Beatles never existed (no Oasis, sure, but who else…?), or what the nature of this “blackout” really is. You really just have to go with it. And thereby be rewarded with a film full of people that are great to spend time with.

And some pretty nice interpretations of the songs…