Tim
What I loved listening to in 2014
I’ve been doing an annual “middle-aged teenager picks his best music of the year” post for a while now. It’s always been a list, though I haven’t ranked my choices and the number of albums I picked varied. It wasn’t that I like lists so much — I don’t — but because lists are easy. Not just […]
Definitely Not the Opera, Indeed
DNTO, or Definitely Not the Opera, the excellent CBC Radio show did an episode called “Raise your voice: why is singing so powerful?” on Thanksgiving weekend. I was part of it, talking about bad singing. The producer who did the pre-interview didn’t say anything about wanting me to sing, but once I was in the studio, […]
“The Ballad of Tin Ears”
As part of my Bad Singer book project, I helped make a radio doc called “The Ballad of Tin Ears” for CBC Radio Ideas. It airs Tuesday, May 6 at 9 pm on CBC 1. If that’s not a convenient time for you, the show is available for streaming anytime (also available as a podcast […]
Bad Singer Speaking Engagement
I’m writing a book called Bad Singer. It won’t be out until 2015, but I guess it’s never too early to start the publicity. So I’m speaking at the Farmhouse Pottery Gallery and Cafe near Orangeville, Ontario, on May 1. Despite what this promotional material says, I won’t be singing. But if for some perverse […]
Drop the Worry Ball released again
Because the publishing industry is weird, Drop the Worry Ball, the parenting book I helped psychologist Alex Russell write, is out again. With a new cover. From a new publisher. At a new lower price. Here’s what happened: Wiley, our original publisher, decided to get out of trade books and sold its list — including […]
Spring 2014 issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism
I said I wouldn’t do it again. In fact, in December, 2011, I wrote “A Fond Farewell,” a post saying goodbye to the Ryerson Review of Journalism after being the instructor on the award-winning magazine five times. But last September, I took the job again. And I’m glad I did: it was lots of fun and my […]
Klondike Creative Class
What’s the Klondike really like today, more than a century after the Gold Rush? Well, according to one filmmaker who lives in Dawson City, it’s like Leonard Cohen’s Greece. Here’s “Klondike Creative Class,” my story about the coolest town in Canada and how it created a thriving arts community. And here’s an interview Maisonneuve editor […]
The music that meant the most to me in 2012
I couldn’t do it. There was so much fabulous music this year that I just couldn’t narrow it down to a Top 10. So here—alphabetically because there was no way I could rank them—are the twenty-five albums I listened to, and enjoyed, the most this year. Yeah, twenty-five (and it was hard enough getting it […]
Wild ending
This photo is from the canoe trip I did on the Snake River in the Peel Watershed with friends this past summer. A few days later, though, the sky wasn’t so peaceful. In fact, the end of our trip was pretty wild, but as I wrote in “In the Yukon’s Stormy Embrace” for Up Here magazine, my love […]
