We often spend our time here in Polarisland focusing on what the shining jewels of our world — the artists — are up to. What’s occasionally lost in this whole process is that the foot soldiers who make Polaris happen — the writers, editors, DJs, programmers and hosts — are pretty awesome people, too. If […]
It’s around this time that we here in Polarisland are mighty glad that our award cycle for 2012 finished in September (with Feist winning for Metals). Because of this most of our jurors have already sorted out their mind grapes when it comes to which Canadian albums they’re going to put on their year-end Top […]
Now that we’ve successfully conquered New York City the sky’s the limit from here. Think of it as some Mary Tyler Moore/Jeffersons montage of Polaris staffers ushering our beloved Prize towards the big-time. Except because we’re Canadian and it’s starting to get cold we’ll all be wearing toques. To call attention to a weak transition, […]
For those not up on our new feature Polaris Picks we’ll kindly remind you that this week it was David Dacks, an Exclaim editor and music director for Toronto’s Music Gallery, who wrote about the worth of Ratchet Orchestra’s album, Hemlock. You can find out about that here. Additionally, we’re less than a week away […]
It’s been an exciting week in Polarisland. First, we kicked off the 2013 season with our new feature “Polaris Picks.” Our first advocate for this new regular feature was National Post’s Ben Kaplan who really thinks Jason Collett should win the Polaris next year for his album Reckon. Then we announced that our patented argument […]
In new ventures and housekeeping announcements, the occasionally teased Polaris Picks feature we’ve discussed in past months is finally happening. Stay tuned to this website for its big debut next week. Back here in Polaris People land the word “Drake” really snuck its way into to a lot of news items this week. We’ll let […]
First, up a hearty congratulations to author Will Ferguson, who recently won the 2012 Giller Prize for his novel, 419. Ferguson takes home $50,000 and joins the likes of past winners Mordecai Richler, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro and Michael Ondaatje. Back in the music world, the Barclaycard Mercury Prize for the best album from the […]
Weird Al Yankovic turned 53 years old this week, which seems like a pretty good excuse to sermonize a bit about how incredible novelty songs can be. As someone who loved Chuck Berry’s “My Ding-A-Ling” from about the age of 5, but who didn’t understand it until 10 years later, I can attest that a […]
We’re going to kick off this week’s column with a hearty congratulations to Future Of The Left. The band, which includes former members of Mclusky, just won the Welsh Music Prize for their album, The Plot Against Common Sense. In other nominally commonwealth news, Polaris juror and Cult Montreal writer Lorraine Carpenter recently scored an […]
Now that we’ve all settled into Feist winning the 2012 Polaris Music Prize it’s time to start looking towards next year. That’s right. Polaris is a long march and the ’13 season officially kicks off October 18 with our first-ever Polaris Salon in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It’s gonna be good to get the right side […]
