LiveMusicTO chats with Canadian musician and songwriter, Burton Cummings. He was the lead singer and frequent keyboardist for the Canadian rock band The Guess Who. During his 10 years in The Guess Who, from 1965 to 1975, he sang and wrote or co-wrote many songs including "American Woman," "No Time," "Share the Land," "Hand Me Down World," and "These Eyes" among others. His solo career includes many Canadian singles including "Stand Tall", "My Own Way to Rock" and "You Saved My Soul."

As a proud Canadian, what is your opinion on the state of the Canadian music industry today?
Way back in the 60’s when I first joined The Guess Who, I had just turned 18, and there really wasn’t
very much of a Canadian industry at all. In those days we used to joke about the fact that if a single sold 10, 000 units we’d break out the champagne. I think what really helped create the industry that we have today was the Canadian content ruling, CAN-CON.

Initially I spoke out loudly against that – even though I was biting the hand that feeds me rather well – but at that point I just didn’t think it was a cool thing for the government to be helping the artists, and I was yapping about how it made the artists look weaker. But, in the long term, once CAN-CON came into being a lot more producers and engineers came up to Canada from England and came up from the States and it really did help to create an industry that wasn’t there previously.

It’s a tremendous industry now, and it just didn’t exist that way when we were plowing away in the 60’s trying to cut some records. Now you can sell a million units here in Canada, but there was a time when Canadian artists really had to head for the States and Europe to make a living.

With the manor in which the music business has been deteriorating in recent years, do you think that the Canadian industry continues to have that kind of strength today, or do artists still need to head to the States and abroad to find international success?
No not anymore. You can now have a very nice career here in Canada, and its been proven over and over again. It’s so solidified now with the CAN-CON ruling and the airplay from coast to coast, if you get a record that really takes off in Canada it’s instantly from one end of the country to the other, from Vancouver Island to Newfoundland.

Today, thanks to the Internet it doesn’t matter where you come from anymore. Just look at Justin Bieber. Granted, he’s a bit of a different situation because he was initially something of an online phenomenon, but look at the level of success he’s had. That would have been impossible before the days of the Internet.

What is your opinion on the CBC closing their CD and vinyl archives?
Well, the CBC is famous for bonehead moves like that. The Guess Who did a weekly television show for two years, and rather than save the videotapes they just used them again and recorded over them. The CBC is just so bureaucratic. It’s been around for so long that it’s so set in it’s ways.

You know, the BBC in England did the same thing. They took Dudley Moore and Peter Cook who had wonderful shows, and they were all erased. It’s really a shame but you know the world keeps spinning and that’s the way it is.

You guys became popular during the cultural transition from the 60’s to the 70’s, and so to did your music. With music today being again in a period of transition, how do you think the experiences of young band’s coming up today stack up against what you guys went through 40 years ago?
Well, I’m a bit of an exception in a way because the songs that I wrote and sang have never gone away. I’m very lucky, and believe me when I say it I’m not trying to sound corny. I have that attitude of gratitude as I’m walking around because I still hear my songs on the radio every single day. For young guys coming up today the competition is worse. The population has almost doubled since we made it 40 years ago, and there are way more groups vying for the brass ring.

With the Internet, there is no more shock factor either. When Alice Cooper first came along, now that was shocking. He had a guillotine on stage and he had a Cyclops and a boa constrictor, today that wouldn’t be shocking, people wouldn’t even look twice. It’s a different world, so today you have to really be unique. But, that being said, the people that can really play and sing live are making a resurgence. I think the fans and people in general have had enough of auto-tune, the machines, and the computers.

With social media, the Internet and technology essentially being the name of the game in today’s world, like with anything, music has benefited but it has also suffered. Do you think it’s fair to say that much of the music today lacks the guts, and the grit, and that realness that just comes from the heart?
The music has become dehumanized in a way, if you know what I mean. When you make a record now there is no more tape. Everything is computerized and it’s so easy for people who can’t really sing or play to do a sub-par track or just something really unexciting, and go in and fix it with the computer. We never had those luxuries.

I’ll tell you something though, it makes me prouder of the records that we did way back then before the computers. When I had to sing a vocal track in the late 60’s early 70’s, I had to really sing it. If I wasn’t in key you couldn’t go in and fix it. These days, everything is perfect on record. The vocal is always perfectly in tune, there’s never a bad note on the piano or guitar or anything, because it’s all been fixed and meddled with after the recording.

It’s not natural for us to hear everything perfectly in tune. The human element is what makes records wonderful to me. I don’t want to hear everything machined out!

As a fan of music I crave for that human element we’re discussing, but as someone who came up while both rock and roll and the industry were really in their prime, do you think that the current generation will see the likes of a Guess Who or Led Zeppelin or a Lennon and McCartney?
Well, it’s hard to say. Progress is a one-way door. A lot of times things change and they don’t change back. But, as I mentioned, there is certainly a huge movement back toward acts that really sing and play.

Fortunately though, for every one of all ages, from every generation, all those records by Elvis and The Beatles and all the British invasion stuff, those records will live forever. That’s the great thing about recording; you’re freezing a piece of time.

Coming up on the expiration of copyright laws in 2013, in what way do you think that artists being able regain ownership over the publishing of their songs is going to reshape the power structure of the industry?
It’s been a very sad point of contention for years and years now because a lot of musicians lost the
rights to their songs. It took me years to get mine back but I got them a long time ago so it’s not going to
affect me one way or the other, but I think for a lot of artists the movement is on now. For a really long
time there were a lot of songwriters who just weren’t getting their props, and I think we are definitely
going to see some shake ups in the next couple of years.

In commenting on your days growing up in Winnipeg and performing with The Deverons you’ve said: “the music was the buzz” and that “the strongest thing at a Deverons performance was the people playing.” Is that still the bottom line today?
Oh the music has always been the buzz, you know? Everybody knows I haven’t exactly lived the life of a Buddhist monk, but the music has always been the number one priority for me. Even through all those days with The Guess Who, when we would finish an album the other guys would always go out partying and fly off holidaying; I would always stay until the very bitter end, until the final mixes were all done. The music has always been of number one paramount importance to me, and if the music is good then everything else falls into line.

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by Juliette Jagger

LiveMusicTO chats with Canadian producer, songwriter, guitarist and vocalist Daniel Lanois. He has released a number of albums under his own name and has produced albums for a wide variety of artists, including Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Peter Gabriel, Willie Nelson, Brandon Flowers and Ron Sexsmith. Lanois is best known for his work with Brian Eno, producing a number of platinum albums for U2, including The Joshua Tree. Three albums produced or co-produced by Lanois have won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, and four others received nominations.

Coming up on your induction into the Canadian Music Industry Hall of Fame this month after nearly 40 years in the business, can you reflect on what the musical climate was like when you were a kid growing up in Hamilton?
What was happening when I was a kid was that it was radio time. It was a magic world and I spent a lot of time in my bedroom listening to the airwaves. I lived in Hamilton and we got pretty good Buffalo and Detroit radio so I got to hear all kinds of really cool rhythm and blues music that was on the rise at the time. Plus I had a recording studio when I was really young. I started when I was twelve so by the time I got to be in my late teens I was recording some pretty great people. I was recording Rick James.

The studio really started booming, so I went from being really isolated to being influenced by the people I was working with and all kinds of windows opened up. Not just windows of business opportunity but windows of music appreciation. That’s when I really got hooked.

Was it any one particular band that hooked you?
I was fascinated by all of it. Obviously the rhythm and blues explosion touched my heart and a lot of other hearts, and it was happening right in our backyard in Detroit. How amazing is that?

In what way were you influenced by the music that was making its way over the border?
You know, just a few miles away, James Jamerson, one of the world’s greatest bass players was living and making music in Detroit. Because of things like that I started to take a look around Toronto and compare, and wonder: “why don’t we have a Motown?” We were so close geographically and yet we were doing such different things.

It was then that I decided to embrace the philosophy of Motown: that philosophy being that you would have a “house sound.” That was the opposite of what was happening in Toronto at the time. Our temperament in Toronto was that every studio was like a blank canvas and you walked in with your vision and asked the studio to follow it. Where as with Motown you walked into the studio and they already had a vision, a sonic vision.

I decided to go with that, and I decided that the window of opportunity for me was to rebuild my instruments and my sounds, and to have stations: things like a bass station, an organ station, a piano station, an electronic station. Then I started collecting hard to find pieces of equipment that I felt could really benefit vocal musicians, and that’s how I did it. I just built my own sound and that allowed me stand out from the rest of the crowd.

What does the word “sonic” mean to your practice?
I believe that you have to have a sound. Today its technological to a degree, but I think having your own sound is finally admitting that you have a voice and you have a direction. That’s something that should be embraced and encouraged.

In that way it’s really the opposite of the “blank canvas,” I wanted my canvas to already have colours so that the people that I work with can be appreciative of the amount of research I’ve done.

To this day I go into my laboratory and dial up my sonics, and I’m still fighting for what I’ve always fought for, how to mix flesh and machine. Essentially that is what I do.

At what point in your life did you realize that you wanted to commit all of yourself to being the best you could possibly be at producing sound?
That happened when I was about 14. It’s happened a few times in my life, where this wave has come over me, but at about 14 I had that little voice that said to me: “you’ve already found your first love, and you never have to change it.”

It seems that many people from my generation have a particular affinity towards a record that you had a big hand in creating, and that’s U2’s Joshua Tree. At what point in time did you cross paths with Brian Eno, and how did that come to be?
Well, in 1979 I got a call from Brian Eno regarding recording in my studio. I didn’t even know who he was. I was very isolated. But, it was a lovely encounter because Brian Eno was in New York working with the Talking Heads and he already made great recordings with David Bowie and Devo, and he was pretty much at the cutting edge of inventive music at the time.

Even though I was completely oblivious to all this, I certainly quickly learned about him and what a great man he was in terms of concentration. Up until that point I had been recording whatever projects came into the studio because we didn’t have any money. I was just running this little business in Hamilton and we were just trying to pay the bills and see if we could get to the next level.

When I met Eno he was so devoted to what people might have thought of at the time as “extreme isolated music,” but as I look at it now, those 3-4 years of ambient music recording in Hamilton is a pretty big part of my foundation.

When you began work on Joshua Tree, did you know in your gut that you were creating a new sound and that is was going to be something important?
Well, it was the second record I made with them because we had already made The Unforgettable Fire. But, at the end of making The Unforgettable Fire I said to The Edge that I thought that we had something left to say, and I just left it at that. He thought about it, called me back and he said: “what do you think we have left to say?”

I told him that I was feeling something inside that we had touched on with the first record, but that we might be able to reach into an even deeper place. I know I’m putting myself in the club by saying this, but given the people involved, Eno, the others, and myself, these are some really innovative minds, and we have an appetite to find something that’s never been heard before.

What do you think about synchronicity as it pertains to your meeting Brian Eno when you did and in turn helping to shape the career of band like U2?
I think there was some kind of synchronicity at play because while I was still in Hamilton, I began getting tired of the conventional recording studio and I started experimenting with bigger rooms. When the old Hamilton library moved its books I had connections through the city and access to that building. I made some records in there with my renegade equipment, and I really built up an appetite and knowledge of how to use particular spaces.

I did that not thinking that there would be any practical application for my experiments, but when I got to Ireland to work with U2 they said: “we don’t want to be in a conventional studio, we want to be in a place where we can be inspired by rooms."

I realized then that there was that synchronicity present. So without getting all overly mystical, it’s part of taking a risk you know? Sometimes you do something just because it’s burning in your heart rather than potentially burning in your pocket book. It was never driven by money, it was more about intuition, and it prepared me for Ireland!

I think it falls under the umbrella of courage in a strange way because to have faith is to have courage.

Over time you’ve become known for your ability to create “soundscapes” and in doing that nurturing sound in order to capture real human moments. What can you tell me about the process of achieving that?
In the end that’s what a record has to have. It has to have a certain soul content, and it has to represent the artist’s vision. But, probably more importantly, it needs to be a nice snapshot of what’s happening philosophically at the time.

Do you still find yourself being newly inspired by songs you’ve known your whole life?
Oh absolutely. Sometimes just in passing you hear something coming out of a shop door and you say: “whoa, that just really touched me, and I like being touched by music.” Sometimes I’m even touched by my own, and I think: “wow that sounds so great, hey wait a minute I made that!”

These days I have such a fat catalogue that if I hear “In the name of love” I think “oh right I was there for that!” Or if I hear “most of the time, I’m clear focused all around, most of the time, I can keep both feet on the ground, I can handle whatever I stumble upon, I don’t even notice she’s gone, most of the time,” I think of my time sitting next to Bob Dylan, two guys in two chairs on a back porch, just hoping that this kid from Hamilton can help to make a masterpiece.

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by Juliette Jagger

As I stand on my balcony cooking on my BBQ in the sun, I am teleported back to my country of birth. The smell of onions and steak fill the air and so do the tunes from an Australian Hip-Hop artist named 360.

360’s groundbreaking album, Falling & Flying, sounds like no hip-hop release to come before it.  A mix of rap’s traditional down-to-earth grit, and indie electro’s atmospheric heights.

Subverting the worlds of both indie and hip hop into something bigger and better, 360 manages to make his music both stunningly accessible and strikingly original by merging deeply personal stories with effortless wit and charisma.

This album is world-class, but the base of it is all local. 360’s diverse, textured sound bed is the work of Melbourne producer Styalz Fuego - who of late has broken into the US hip-hop scene, collaborating with Chamillionaire, Busta Rhymes and Snoop Dogg among others.

The songs on Falling & Flying show off both 360 and Styalz’s breadth of musical influences and talents.

The trippy soaring chorus vocals emphasise the album’s moniker. The track propels the listener airborne. It’s not typical hip-hop. This album is not just for rap fans. This is for anyone who likes good music.

The album takes a few turns. It goes from poppy electro, to grunge electro, to jams with a live band, to dancehall and back again.” Falling & Flying breaks new ground; makes a new sound. And 360 delivers, ready to start flying into the hip-hop stratosphere.

Well worth the listen for any Hip-Hop fan. Makes me proud to be Australian with quality Hip-Hop like this.

Look forward to 360 breaking in the US and Canadian music scene.

- by Craig Winterburn

As an aspiring journalist and music junkie, I usually spend my days finding new music to update my iTunes library. Everywhere I look, I happen to come across the same band on almost every music website known to man. So, I thought to myself, “what could possibly be the big deal about these guys? I bet they’re just being over-exaggerated and/or paying to advertise themselves!”



Well, after taking a good 3 hours listening to them, I’ve realized what the big deal is. Talent.

MORRE is a 3-piece band based out of Toronto, Canada, and they are classified to be in the Rock genre. They have released two albums, “Out There” in 2009, and their latest, “Contrast EP”, in 2011.

The Toronto-based group has a very bold and unique, yet catchy sound, with the roots of legendary Rock’n’Roll icons such as Bon Jovi, Led Zeppelin, and Pearl Jam; as far as the modern-rock base of Creed, the Tea Party, and Disturbed. This can be heard in tracks such as “Lady of Lust” and “Winding Roads”. With their scorching riffs and finger picking solos, they will make you want to rock out for hours, giving you an endless head-banging party.

After listening to Contrast EP front to back, I would HIGHLY recommend giving these guys a tryout for your iTunes roster. You can find them at the links below!

Official website: www.morremusic.com
Facebook: MORRE
MySpace: www.myspace.com/morremusic
Reverbnation: www.reverbnation.com/morre
Twitter: www.twitter.com/morreband

- by Mike Yorke