These People Are Not Related To Me

Aaron Booth will be releasing a new album this month. He's a Calgary singer-songwriter I once called "one of the most promising Canadian singer-songwriters" in a nationally distributed mag. I am prepared to stand by that statement. The new alb is called Back Stories, and you get it from his website at your choice of cost. While you're there, you can snag some more free tunes from Booth's impressive back catalogue. Y'know what else is impressive about Aaron Booth? He has two sets of double vowels in his name.
Sadly, no tourdates yet outside of Calgary. But Christ, if you live in Calgary, at least you have something to look forward to now.

mp3: "We Don't Pretend" by Aaron Booth
mp3: "Couldn't Wait" by Aaron Booth


Steven Jesse Bernstein won't be coming to a town near you anytime soon either. He's been dead nearly two decades. I was first told I looked like him when I was 15-yrs-old, and trying to look like Lorne Greene. Then a couple of years later, I was told again, and so I got his amazing album Prison, produced by Steve Fisk. Dave at X-Ray (I think it was still ROW, then) had written on the wrapper, in white grease pencil, "Like Wm S. Burroughs in a knife fight with himself".

mp3: "No No Man (Part 1)" by Steven Jesse Bernstein


Okay, Lorrie Matheson might be related to me. Another Calgary-based singer-songwriter, he's originally from the Prince Albert area of Saskatchewan, where I have some family, or at least family roots. Matheson hasn't released anything since 2004's A Dime At A Time, which I quite liked. One Saturday afternoon, while I was doing a Spo-Dee O'Dee fill-in at CJTR, I played "Ribbon of Red Taillights" (see below), one of my favourite songs from the album. A listener called in and claimed it was "the worst song I've ever heard". When I went back on the air, I mused about what sort of privileged and sheltered life the listener must have been leading in order for that, a lonesome road song that references Gillian Welch, to be the worst song he'd ever heard.

mp3: "Ribbon of Red Taillights" by Lorrie Matheson
mp3: "I Think I See the Light" by Lorrie Matheson



If you've guessed that all of this establishing of who isn't related to me is just a prelude to something else, something about someone who is related to me, you have guessed correctedly. Stay tuned.