We’ve all sat listening to music and though to ourselves “what does this song mean?...what’s the singer (or the band) trying to say?”. Sometimes it’s nothing…it’s just a bunch of words strung together in a way that sounds fun…other times, lyrics to a song may be just some kind of stream of consciousness thing that somehow made sense to the singer or the lyricist at the time…or maybe it didn’t…lots of songs are written in altered states. A song could be an oblique and opaque form of poetry...

This is an episode about murder…call this a crossover episode with my true crime podcast, “Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry”. For as long as rock music has existed, people have been blaming it for turning impressionable people to the dark side, inspiring them (if not outright encouraging them) to do evil things. My opinion is that an unstable mentally ill person is liable to be triggered by anything…and yes, sometimes that trigger might be a song…there are, however, not that...

When Nadine Bailey was 7 years old she woke up terrified of dark figures looming at the end of her bed and an eerie presence all around her. From then on every night was the same, she was visited by phantom-like shadows and no matter where she went, the ghostly encounters followed her. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits and the unexplained have consumed her entire life and for the past 20 years she's been an award-winning guide with Edmonton Ghost Tours  Along the way she has taken...

Anyone with a passing knowledge of rock is aware of its origins back in the late 40s and early 50s when blues, rhythm and blues, western, country, folk, and hillbilly traditions began to mix and match, eventually coalescing into what became known as “rock’n’roll”. If you’re an alt-rock fan, you’ve heard the story of how all this began with the garage bands of the late 60s and the punk rock explosion of the mid-70s. The birth of modern electronic music?... It has a rich and complicated origin...

If you’re a musical artist and you start to do well, the point will come when you need a manager. The manager is the person who looks after all the business stuff so the musician can get on with the business of making music…managers deal with booking gigs, marketing, promotions, promoters, publicity, support staff and road crews. They collect the money and pay the bills…and the oversee all the infrastructure of your career: lawyers, accountants, and all the other people involved in running...

For some people, history is dry and boring…it’s all dates and wars and dusty facts about things that don’t have anything to do with life today…and yes, that can be true…but history also helps us understand why things are the way they are…study the past, understand the present, and maybe predict the future—at least to some extent. But history can also be stupid…and when it is, it can be fun to learn about these things…and in addition to all the dates and wars and famous people, i think we need...

By the time this episode is over, you will learn things about your fellow music fans (and music in general) that you can use to astound your friends…and when they say “go on, that’s not true,” you can simply point them to the research. Some are the result of serious, empyreal scientific work at universities and labs…other were conducted by professional pollsters and survey-takers…and then there’s the category of survey where a piece of research is really just a masquerade for an...

After years and years or rumour and speculation, we now have an Oasis reunion.  The brother Gallagher have agreed to reunite…and possibly burry the hatchet. This for a series of shows next summer in the UK, Ireland, Canada, the USA, Mexico, and beyond. A lot of this coincides nicely with the anniversaries of their first two albums….1994’s Definitely Maybe, and What’s the Story Morning Glory from 1995. We really don’t know how we arrived here with a reunion, I mean…this is Noel and Liam after...

We don’t like to think about our favourite musicians as being mortal…because let’s face it, we believe that they do extraordinary things and make us feel in ways we otherwise wouldn’t. Rock stars are special, superhuman, because they can do what we can’t and live a lifestyle that we can only dream about. Yet they are just as human as you and, fallible to temptations, in danger of accidents, and vulnerable to all the failings that may plague the body and brain. When one of our favourites die,...

After years and years or rumour and speculation, we now have an Oasis reunion.  The brother Gallagher have agreed to reunite…and possibly burry the hatchet. This for a series of shows next summer in the UK, Ireland and beyond. A lot of this coincides nicely with the anniversaries of their first two albums….1994’s Definitely Maybe, and What’s the Story Morning Glory from 1995. We really don’t know how we arrived here with a reunion, I mean…this is Noel and Liam after all…but anyway, it's...

It may not seem like it, but everything in this universe is connected in all kinds of unseen ways. Humans have always known that chaos is a capricious and fickle thing, something that can show up when you least expect it…i find this aspect of history fascinating. There’s the butterfly effect, the concept that a butterfly flapping its wings in China will set off a complex domino effect in the atmosphere that somehow results in a low-pressure wave blasting from Africa across the Atlantic...

Tell me if this sounds familiar…you’re sitting around with a bunch of friends talking about music when someone says “what’s that song with the thing at the beginning and the boom-boom sound effects?....it’s got that guitar—or maybe it it’s not… you know the one!”…and then the friend gets frustrated when he gets a bunch of blank stares. If you’ve ever worked in a record store, you know the stare because you’ve done it with the customer who wants you to identify the artist, song, and album from...

There’s a scene in the 2000 movie “High Fidelity” that introduced a lot of people to the name Belle and Sebastian. Rob, the owner of a record store, and his employee, Dick, are enjoying a new arrival. Then Barry, another employee played by Jack Black, bursts through the door. This goes on for a while before Rob has enough and rips the cassette out of the machine. I have a couple of issues with that scene…first, I have a hard time believing that an obnoxious snobby indie record store clerk...

I do not dance…I’m too awkward and too self-aware of my awkwardness…I know we’re all supposed to dance like no one is looking, but when it comes to me, people will look, point, and judge… My wife realizes this…since we were married decades okay, she’s had to be content with the fact that she got that dance at the wedding and that’s pretty much it…and that’s because she’s not into dancing, either… I can feel the judgment stop it… This doesn’t mean that music doesn’t move me…I’ve got that...

I’ve always been something of a nut when it comes to the space program…but even though I’ve read all the books, seen all the documentaries, and watched all the movies, I was still surprised to learn something new with the movie “Hidden Figures”… This was a 2016 film based on a book of the same name…it told the true story about black female mathematicians who worked at nasa during the hottest period of the space race… They were “computers” in the original sense of the word: people who computer...

Here’s one of the most misunderstood and misused words in the English language: “psychedelic” … The word first came into use in 1956 when a psychiatrist named Humphrey Osmond was studying a new class of pharmaceuticals that had potential when it came to treating certain mental disorders… A chemical known as lysergic acid diethylamide—LSD, for short—had been extracted by a Swiss scientist named Albert Hoffman from a fungus called “ergot”…from 1943 on, medical professionals tried to figure out...

Before we begin, I am very aware that there are people listening to this program who have never, ever set foot in a record store…they came of age musical after the Internet changed everything about how we hear about, acquire, and consume music… But remember this: for over a hundred years, the only way you could hear music on-demand was to own it…you had to purchase a piece of plastic for x dollars and for that price, you could listen to that music an infinite number of times for no additional...

Hey, it's Alan Cross. For the next few weeks of the Podcast, we’re diving deep into the Ongoing History of New Music Archives with a series called “The Top 100 Moments in New Rock”. In this ten-part series, we’re going to look at the 100 most significant events in new rock history...some are obvious–you know, the big stuff that made the news...you can’t ignore those. But we’re also going to look at the small things that are at the root of some of the big things...it’s a fascinating way to...

Hey, it's Alan Cross. For the next few weeks of the Podcast, we’re diving deep into the Ongoing History of New Music Archives with a series called “The Top 100 Moments in New Rock”. In this ten-part series, we’re going to look at the 100 most significant events in new rock history...some are obvious–you know, the big stuff that made the news...you can’t ignore those. But we’re also going to look at the small things that are at the root of some of the big things...it’s a fascinating way to...

Hey, it's Alan Cross. For the next few weeks of the Podcast, we’re diving deep into the Ongoing History of New Music Archives with a series called “The Top 100 Moments in New Rock”. In this ten-part series, we’re going to look at the 100 most significant events in new rock history...some are obvious–you know, the big stuff that made the news...you can’t ignore those. But we’re also going to look at the small things that are at the root of some of the big things...it’s a fascinating way to...

Hey, it's Alan Cross. For the next few weeks of the Podcast, we’re diving deep into the Ongoing History of New Music Archives with a series called “The Top 100 Moments in New Rock”. In this ten-part series, we’re going to look at the 100 most significant events in new rock history...some are obvious–you know, the big stuff that made the news...you can’t ignore those. But we’re also going to look at the small things that are at the root of some of the big things...it’s a fascinating way to...

Hey, it's Alan Cross. For the next few weeks of the Podcast, we’re diving deep into the Ongoing History of New Music Archives with a series called “The Top 100 Moments in New Rock”. In this ten-part series, we’re going to look at the 100 most significant events in new rock history...some are obvious–you know, the big stuff that made the news...you can’t ignore those. But we’re also going to look at the small things that are at the root of some of the big things...it’s a fascinating way to...

Hey, it's Alan Cross. For the next few weeks of the Podcast, we’re diving deep into the Ongoing History of New Music Archives with a series called “The Top 100 Moments in New Rock”. In this ten-part series, we’re going to look at the 100 most significant events in new rock history...some are obvious–you know, the big stuff that made the news...you can’t ignore those. But we’re also going to look at the small things that are at the root of some of the big things...it’s a fascinating way to...

Hey, it's Alan Cross. For the next few weeks of the Podcast, we’re diving deep into the Ongoing History of New Music Archives with a series called “The Top 100 Moments in New Rock”. In this ten-part series, we’re going to look at the 100 most significant events in new rock history...some are obvious–you know, the big stuff that made the news...you can’t ignore those. But we’re also going to look at the small things that are at the root of some of the big things...it’s a fascinating way to...