Archive for category: Music

Angelina Jolie is the first of two stars we feature in sidetacks & detours this week, the other being Martha Wainwright, who is part of an acting and musical dynasty.

I look back to when I was one and twenty, as A E Housman would have had it, and feel sure I was in my salad days. I had fallen in love with a generation of songwriters and was enjoying the folksy, pastoral music that was a gentler sibling of rock. We had a stereophonic recording player that was like a piece of furniture and it had a sliding door over the turntable and I often tried to squeeze my head into the cabinet so that I could hear, even better, the fierce emotions wrapped in such laid back and softly sung arrangements. When I married and had a home of our own I was enjoying listening to how this generation of Canadian songwriters began to influence the writers who would forge what we now call Americana.

The hundreds of incoming e mails that drop into the sidetracks & detours each week present a pretty much accurate picture of what is happening on the arts  We can trace back to one off or isolated events and explore their growth into new likes and trends.