Day 6 of the road trip: Toronto, ON to Cambridge, MA!
Okay, so now it’s your turn. What songs remind you of Boston? I wrote about several when I was in town last December, but I’m sure that, if you’re reading this, you have some great suggestions to make. Please respond in the comments!
Day 5: Sault Ste Marie, ON to Toronto, ON
Okay, after the fourteen-hour Kenora-Sault Ste Marie drive, I’m a bit too braindead to say anything clever about my hometown of Toronto. The video is for “Songtario,” by Henry & Clare (thanks, @kimblem!). And Broken Social Scene is a pretty good representation of the Toronto indie music scene, since the collective contains practically everyone anyway, and I imagine my choice of BSS song is pretty self-explanatory.
Day 4 of the road trip: Kenora, ON to Sault Ste Marie, ON
Going even further afield than is usual for z=z for a brief lesson in physical geography, try this: Go to Google Maps and centre the map around the eastern half of Canada (Hudson Bay should be in the middle). Notice that Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba, the northern half of Saskatchewan and Nunavut are all liberally laced with blue? Now switch to ‘terrain’ view – see how all of this is a darker green than the south? This is the Canadian Shield, created during the Pleistocene when glaciation scraped it down to the 4.5 billion year old bedrock. Pockets in the newly-exposed granite filled up with rainwater to create hundreds of thousands of lakes; so many that when you fly over it, you can’t tell whether you are looking at lakes or islands. Today’s drive, along the north shore of Lake Superior, is in the heart of this geological region.
All of this is really by way of preamble to introduce Montreal’s Besnard Lakes, which is named after one of these glacial bodies of water.
Day 3 of the road trip: Swift Current, SK to Kenora, ON
…which means crossing the Hundredth Meridian and heading through Winnipeg, the hometown of z=z fave The Weakerthans, who played a great set at Neumos in Seattle last Saturday night. The MP3 below is their backhanded paean to that city, from 2003’s Reconstruction Site. The picture above is of The Tragically Hip; if you click through it, you’ll get to the video of their classic track “At the Hundredth Meridian.”
Day 1 of the road trip: Seattle, WA to Revelstoke, BC
Despite heading inland and therefore bypassing Vancouver, I thought I would share this track from Lotusland’s The Awkward Stage. Frontman Shane Nelken is part of the extended New Pornographers collective, having played piano on AC Newman’s The Slow Wonder and collaborated on Dan Bejar and Blaine Thurier side project. The Awkward Stage has a brand-new album out, Slimming Mirrors, Flattering Lights, but this is the title (and my favourite) track from their 2006 debut. But the video above is for a new track, “Mini Skirt of Xmas Lights.”
Michael McGowan’s film, “One Week” opened last Friday. It’s a road-trip movie about twenty-something Ben Tyler (played by Joshua Jacobs) who, upon learning that he has aggressive and probably-terminal cancer, buys a motorcycle and rides from his home in Toronto to Vancouver. Canadian independent movies have a reputation for being painfully earnest, and this one looks like it’ll fit that stereotype. But, as you can see from the trailer (above), it’s also a love song to Canada – gorgeous shots of the landscape are interspersed throughout—and to Canadian independent music. The movie features songs by bands like Stars, Great Lake Swimmers, and Wintersleep. You can read more about the music in the movie here.
It’s only been released in Canada (unsurprisingly), but you can already add it to your Netflix queue. Or, of course, you can go on a north-of-the-border road trip of your own.
MP3: Wintersleep – Weighty Ghost [buy]
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