Nick Krewen Special to the Star She may be from Texas, but don’t be surprised if country singer and songwriter Mickey Guyton ends up hanging a flag bearing the Maple Leaf outside her house: Canadians have been a paramount factor in her ground-breaking success. “I looooovvvve Canadians – yes I do!” gushes Guyton, whose racially insightful anthem “Black Like Me” earned her pioneering stature as the first Black female to receive…
Nick Krewen Special to the Star You may know him as the artistic director of the currently paused Beaches International Jazz Festival or hear him on one of the three radio programs he either hosts or co-hosts in the city. But did you know that Toronto’s Bill King, a three-time Juno Award nominee, also served as music director for blues-rock singer Janis Joplin, the stylistically versatile Linda Ronstadt, The Pointer…
Nick Krewen Special To The Star SHAWN MENDES Wonder Island Records Wonder, the fourth studio album from Pickering pop sensation Shawn Mendes, is a game changer for the lad. In a process that began with his self-titled album from 2018, Mendes has largely left the folkish, boyish strains of acoustic guitar behind and settled more for a piano- and-electronic-keyboard sound that sonically bounces between intimate tenderness and epic explosiveness. Mendes…
Nick Krewen Special to the Star John McHugh remembers the time he accidentally became Joni Mitchell’s matchmaker. McHugh, who owned the Yorkville-era clubs The Penny Farthing and The Half Beat back in the ‘60s, recalls meeting “Joanna Anderson” when she came around to one of his venues around 1963-64. “It was at the Penny Farthing that (singer) Cathy Young brought this young lady in with her,” McHugh recalled recently…
Nick Krewen Special to the Star Sometimes to move forward, you have to take a few steps back. Or stop completely. For singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards, who releases Total Freedom her first album since 2012’s Voyageur, on Friday (August 14), the latter move was her answer to a decade of the non-stop rinse-recycle-repeat music industry treadmill that took its toll. In 2011, her marriage to local producer and Blue Rodeo guitarist…
