Award Winners

Shania: From Pain to Fame

    NEED TO KNOW: Shania Twain at the Canadian Country Music Awards, at Hamilton Place, 9 p.m. Tonight. Sold out. Tune into CTV at 9 p.m.   BY NICK KREWEN Special To The Spectator September 18, 1995   Don’t let her dazzling beauty fool you. Beneath the glamorous exterior of Shania Twain beats the heart of a survivor. The 29-year-old Windsor-born singing and songwriting sensation, who leads the pack…


White Lace and KISS for luck

PUBLISHED IN THE GLOBE & MAIL IN 1995 FANS / Some want to being a lifetime commitment at a rock convention   BY NICK KREWEN   Toronto   Like most impressionable music-starved teenagers growing up in the mid-seventies, Harold Gagnon spent his evenings after school in his suburban Montreal home huddled in his room. Cranking up his stereo as loud as his parents would permit, he’d spend countless hours daydreaming…


Roadside Hip

PUBLISHED IN THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR Thursday, July 13, 1995   NICK KREWEN   Gord Downie really likes Hamilton. In fact, when the 31-year-old singer of The Tragically Hip and his wife were looking for a new locale to live a few years back, they almost moved here. “I know a lot of good people there,” said Downie Monday during a rare phone interview from outside The Hip’s Kingston rehearsal space….


Jewel bakes Alaska for Pieces Of You

NEED TO KNOW: Jewel at The Hideaway, Linwell Plaza, (Linwell Road at Grantham Avenue) St. Catharines, tonight. 8 p.m. Free.   NICK KREWEN Hamilton Spectator June 8, 1995   Jewel Kilcher is folk music’s newest diamond in the rough. Just 21, Kilcher — billed as Jewel — has been living the life of a traveling minstrel, enduring an endless series of one-nighters to promote her new Atlantic album Pieces Of…


Weird Al Yankovic – The Loneliest Guy in the Room

   NICK KREWEN The Hamilton Spectator March 30, 1995 Al Yankovic is a lonely guy. No wonder he’s turned Weird. Who’d expect an individual with an enviable collection of loud Hawaiian shirts and a pathetically sick sense of humor to be the musical equivalent of the Maytag repairman? Who’d figure that a guy who uses the accordion to provide such parodies of public pleasure as Jurassic Park — a claymation…