Video Of The Week: Lou Canon

Lou Canon (whose government name is Leanne Greyerbiehl) is a Canadian former elementary school teacher and current sister-in-law to songwriter extraordinaire Hayden; it was he who encouraged her to pursue music as more than a pastime, offering his home studio as the venue to record her self-titled 2011 debut album, which he also released on his own Hardwood Records. She also appears on his 2013 release Us Alone.

She released her sophomore effort last April, titled Suspicious, and she releases the second video for it today, called Fever, directed by Sammy Rawal and Vanessa Heins with cinematography by Vancouver-based image-shaper Carl Elster:

Oh, perhaps I should have mentioned that the video succeeds in making wallpaper, milk and skinny white women seem creepy.

Video Of The Week: Neil Gaiman & Amanda Palmer

There are troubling times, to be sure. The world is in turmoil - and not just at war. People's rights are being bought and sold everywhere, usually to the lowest bidder.

The artists we saw a buys and lighthouses, guides in the darkness, are vanishing nearly every week. One such artist, Leonard Cohen, has fortunately left behind a body of work that many will be able to draw from; this week, award-winning writer Neil Gaiman narrates the lyrics of Democracy, with his partner Amanda Palmer accompanying him on piano, and an orchestra arrangement by Jherek Bischoff that features Étienne Abelin (violin), Ola Sendecki (violin), David Schnee (viola), and Lukas Raaflaub (cello) in a video animated and directed by David Mack and Olga Nunes:

What I like most about this version is that it is straightforward, with the words up-front, ahead of all, including melody, which means they do without the cheesy keyboard, 80s electronica-pop parts.

It's the one thing I didn't like about Cohen's oeuvre: the fact that he felt he had to provide cheesy bridges for his dames-of-the-moment to sing, rather than include them in the actual body of the song.

Video Of The Week: Leonard Cohen

We lost another great today, with the passing of legendary Montréal poet Leonard Cohen, who was inducted in the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame in 2008.

Sure, Cohen was a Montrealer through-and-through, a Jew-turned-atheist-turned-Buddhist-turned-peacenik, a bohemian ladies' man, a quiet man who loved his routine (including freshly-squeezed orange juice to start his walk around the Mile End area on Sunday mornings)...

But he was also a New Yorker through-and through, having lived at the Chelsea Hotel alongside Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin (the story of their night together told through Chelsea Hotel No. 2), a friend of Lou Reed's, who partied with Saturday Night Live cast members and its producer, Lorne Michaels.

And yet he was also at home in Europe, drinking wine, eating well, and courting beautiful women at all times of night and day, muses for eternal songs to come.

And he spent his last years in the perfect California weather, perhaps extending his life by doing so, as you want to battle cancer in the most perfect setting possible.

Many of his songs are now seen as prophetic - and not just those from You Want It Darker, the record he released just weeks prior to his passing. Now, the final words from one of his best-known songs, Tower Of Song, ring as true as ever:

Now I bid you farewell, I don't know when I'll be back
They're moving us tomorrow to that tower down the track
But you'll be hearing from me baby, long after I'm gone
I'll be speaking to you sweetly from a window in the Tower of Song

I don't know. As I sit here in tears writing this piece I find myself reflecting on my own life, most of it spent not just with no regard to my own future, but not even picturing myself in one; I've lived for the moment for so long - 20 of those years in the excesses of food and alcohol - that I never thought I'd outlive someone like Cohen.

Today, I choose to feature the video for Closing Time, from his 1992 record The Future, directed by Curtis Wehrfritz, featuring back-up singers Perla Batalla and Julie Christensen:


If you like the look he has in his eye, it's because his flame at the time, actress Rebecca De Mornay - who also co-produced the record - felt he needed to show more passion than he had in previous takes and opted to perform a mock striptease off-camera to seduce him.

Ever the Old World Romantic, Cohen then bent down and put De Mornay's shoes back on for her, on his knees.

Lou Reed. Hunter S. Thompson. Leonard Cohen. Most of my influences and idols have now passed.

Someone make sure Tom Waits, Renaud Séchan, Eric Clapton, Jean Leloup and Eddie Vedder still have a pulse.

Video Of The Week: I Am Snow Angel

I Am Snow Angel released a video today, for the song Keep You Out off of her forthcoming EP, Desert. It was directed by Lauren McCune:

This is one of my favourite Julie Kathryn songs, ethereal and dreamy - darkness and hope intertwined.

Video Of The Week: I Am Snow Angel

Winter's got us in its grasp, and will have us for four more months. Might as well get used to the cold.

And so I Am Snow Angel (Julie Kathryn's musical project fusing ballads with electronica) releases a video for a song that fits perfectly with the mood I'm in: trying to find a party in the midst of a season where even trees look dead and your limbs can freeze and fall off.

Directed and filmed by Alexander Cherney with nothing but time-lapsed landscapes (none of them of a frozen tundra, I might add), they bring a sense of warmth and analog to the distant voice and digital instruments used, to produce a nice mixture that blends well together:

Video of The Week: I Am Snow Angel

I Am Snow Angel is Julie Kathryn's project-without-her-own-name,  shock-full of synths and lash production interspersed with 8-bit sounds; this would not have been out of place 10 years ago, when The Postal Service were making a huge splash within the indie-rock/soft electronica scene.

Directed by We Are Films and Patrick Ermlich, the video for Crocodile is just as the song is: lavish, polished, beautiful and soft, full of blue and white and pretty boy Hardy Winburn.

It works well in the middle of a sad night, at the top of a sad week. It's a ray of light with a dark message to contrast with the black heart of a good soul.

Video Of The Week: U2

What, you thought I'd go with the obvious New Year's Day?

No, instead I set my sights on one of U2's numerous recent movie-ballads, Ordinary Love, from the soundtrack to Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom. Apart from one cameo from Bono, the band is absent from it; instead, we have the lyrics appearing on-screen in cursive, on walls or boards.

Simple, and effective, just like this b-side-sounding little ditty (in the vein of The Sweetest Thing crossed with The Hands That Built America); it's U2 attempting to sound like U2, in a good way (as opposed to their last record, No Line On The Horizon, where they could bore a zombie back to death.

Video Of The Week: Counting Crows

To say I was never a Counting Crows fan is an understatement; at best, I dislike some of their songs, hate the rest. I'm not particularly fond of this one - A Long December - either, although having singer Adam Duritz' then-girlfriend Courteney Cox play in it (in a rare dramatic role) is a plus.

But the lyrics are a fair reflection of my month so far, as I spent the first 12 days of December (and the last two of November) in the hospital, clinging onto my very life for the first half, as a first-diagnosed/third-in-total acute pancreatitis mixed with undiagnosed and out-of-control diabetes threatened to destroy the rest of my insides while they, themselves, were keeping me dehydrated, weak, in pain even morphine couldn't calm, and unable to recover through enough food intake (the IV was insufficient for my physical mass) or sleep; however, with a tremendous team of nurses and caretakers working around-the-clock to try to bring my condition from ''critical'' to ''stable'', which came last Friday, December 7th, I pulled through with accolades (one doctor said I was ''as strong as a horse'' with that being the only reason I made it through), excitement, relief, and - at least one doctor admitted - shock and disbelief.

I don't ever want to put my mother through this again.

All in all, it marked a full calendar year of things turning to shit for me, which is where some words from this song started to make (too much) sense:

A long December and there's reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last
I can't remember the last thing that you said as you were leavin'
Now the days go by so fast (...)
The smell of hospitals in winter
And the feeling that it's all a lot of oysters, but no pearls
All at once you look across a crowded room
To see the way that light attaches to a girl (...)
I guess the winter makes you laugh a little slower,
Makes you talk a little lower about the things you could not show her
And it's been a long December and there's reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last
I can't remember all the times I tried to tell my myself
To hold on to these moments as they pass

I don't know if next year will be better than the last. I can't. No one can. But I can hope. And I can tell myself life doesn't always have to be about hitting rock bottom.

I'm not out of the woods yet; my pancreas will never heal back, my diabetes is permanent (and not yet under control), I don't have the physical strength to walk more than 50 feet without feeling lightheaded or flat-out fall to the ground as I did today, in public, in front of 20-or-so people in shock. But there are things I can do, and things I still have left to say and write about.

As long as I'm still around, I'll keep expressing myself the one way I know how - through words, be they in songs, on paper or online. I ain't dead yet.

Oh, and neither are the Counting Crows, by the way, still touring though they've seen a number of line-up changed through the years.

Video Of The Week: Northen Lights

After Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas and USA For Africa's We Are The World, Canadian artists of the 1980s also needed t voice their own worries about the situation of starving children, and Bryan Adams and a few associates (Bob Rock, David Foster, Jim Vallance, his wife Rachel Paiement of CANO fame, and Paul Hyde) penned this cheesy track and had Bruce Allen convince a veritable ''who's who'' of Canadian singers from all across the spectrum take part - from respected, political singer-songwriters such as Neil Young,  Gordon Lightfoot and Bruce Cockburn, to the universally-acclaimed likes of Burton Cummings (The Guess Who), Geddy Lee (Rush), Anne Murray, and Joni Mitchell, pop artists like Corey Hart and Loverboy's Mike Reno, as well as the obligatory Québec French-language artists (Véronique Béliveau, Robert Charlebois and Claude Dubois).

All that talent, backed by Paul Shaffer, comedian John  Candy, Tom Cochran, Ronnie Hawkins, Kim Mitchell, Aldo Nova, actress Catherine O'Hara, Jane Siberry and countless others...

And yet...





This song came to mind as I witnessed the 27th, 28th and 29th straight late-night demonstrations (the last one which was violence-free) against the provincial government, where I heard my share of overhead helicopters on top of my house, police sirens, tear gas, concussion grenades, and saw an abundance of useless pepper-spraying and clubbing...

And the words came to me:

''If we could live together...''
''Don't you know that tears are not enough?''