2009 was the year that I moved from Montreal to Toronto, and I started listening to a lot more Canadian music than ever before. Overall, a really solid year for music.
Best albums of the year

Attack In Black – Years (By One Thousand Fingertips)
Bruce Peninsula – A Mountain is A Mouth
Camera Obscura – My Maudlin Career
Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca
Ohbijou – Beacons
Portugal. The Man – The Satanic Satanist
The Rural Alberta Advantage – Hometowns
Timber Timbre – Timber Timbre
Wilco – Wilco (The Album)
The Wooden Sky – If I Don’t Come Home You’ll Know …

After one of the first rainfalls of the three-day Hillside music festival on Guelph Lake Island, two mud-covered babies splashed in a puddle while their amused parents looked on. By the end of the weekend, everyone – indie hipster kids, older lesbian couples, young queermos with sweet haircuts, families, white tribe-y hippies with djembes and synthetic dreads, old for-real hippies, and all the music-lovin’ people at Hillside – were those mud-covered babies.
A broad variety of musical performances spanned the three days, from Native American activist Buffy Sainte-Marie to ethereal Celtic …

This year was Whartscape’s fourth birthday and unlike many festivals, its guest list was mostly friends and family. Instead of big names hob-knobbing about, this event was more of a show and tell among the community that has teamed up with Wham City over the years. The celebration took place at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Maryland Institute College of Arts (MICA) parking lot and at Load of Fun.
Whartscape – whose name plays off Baltimore’s free art festival, Artscape – started early and ended late with few lulls in …

North by Northeast allows thousands of young and courageous music fans to cross the city five nights in a row and see a bunch of really good bands play in a bunch of really cool venues. For foreigners like me, it’s a crash-course in survival and coming to terms with the fact that I really have no sense of direction.

What do you do to help out your community? The fact is, most young people these days hardly think of doing much community service or charitable work. Understandably, they are wrapped up in rigorous school work, demanding social and family schedules, and what’s left of their time is often spent doing something fun- such as, going to shows maybe?