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 […]
We’ve been so focused on our 2012 Short List nominees for so much the last few months that we’ve hardly had any time to check in on the lives of the many, many other charter Polaris People members. Let’s see what some of them have been up to: Bad google alert result fodder and 2007 […]
Wow. What a week. You’re all aware that Feist is the 2012 Polaris Music Prize champion for her album Metals, right? Congratulations, Leslie. But let’s talk about the whole Polaris Gala that took place on Monday, September 24. There was Cadence Weapon‘s crazy preacherman outro to “Conditioning,” Kathleen Edwards‘ rallying cry speech, Grimes and her […]
Feist has won the 2012 Polaris Music Prize for her Metals album, besting the nine other albums on the Polaris Short List. 2011 Polaris Prize winners Jeremy Gara and Tim Kingsbury of Arcade Fire made the announcement at the conclusion of this evening’s Gala. The Prize, which goes to the best Canadian album of the […]
These are the last days of uncertainty. By this time next week we’ll know who the next Polaris Music Prize champion will be. We shall shower them with champagne. We will bequeath to them the giant novelty cheque (which will then get broken by CBC’s Vish Khanna, and he’ll then blame Arcade Fire). We will […]
The Pop Montreal festival, not coincidentally happening in Montreal, Quebec, kicks off today and there are no shortage of Polaris-approved acts performing through the five days of shows and parties. We tracked down all the participating Polaris people and made a handy list of them for your consideration. Think of anyone listed here as freshness […]
The winner of the 2012 Polaris Music Prize will earn more than just a giant $30,000 cheque and the eternal jealousy of their peers. They’ll also score a key piece of equipment in ensuring their next U.K. or European tour doesn’t devolve into Griswold family-style National Lampoonery — an exclusive splitter tour bus courtesy of […]
