Our local library branch has pop-up, electronic advertisements for various events in town, and a few months ago, there was one for Weird Al. Weird Al! I don’t really think of Kelowna as a hotspot for concerts, but here we were. Some of you might be thinking Big deal, Weird Al is not a huge get but I was a little starstruck at the thought of the creator of Like A Surgeon and Pretty Fly For A Rabbi breathing the same air as me. I zipped home with plans to purchase tickets immediately, thinking it would be a pretty fun outing for me and my husband.

Well.

My plans quickly dissipated at the discovery that it would be approximately $700 at a minimum for the two of us to attend, which felt a little steep just to hear a live performance of Amish Paradise.

What was the first concert you attended? For me, it was INXS in 1988 for their Kick tour, and I believe the tickets were about $20. This Kicked off several years of concert-going on my part, and with one exception – Billy Joel in 1990 – the shows were all under $25, which was good, as my babysitting income was about $2.50 an hour at the time.

It will be news to no one that I have a song, if not in my heart, then definitely in my head at all times. I usually have a song in my heart too, but my brain is full of song lyrics from every genre in any decade. I am, as Spotify says, genre-fluid. I enjoy all kinds of music – almost anything can make me shimmy my shoulders and swing my hips, even while seated – and I associate many songs strongly with different eras of my life. My favourite genres are from the 70s: disco, yacht rock, soul and funk, as well as rock, but I am open to anything, and I most likely will be able to sing along to it, which tends to startle my husband. How do you remember that? he’ll ask when I sing anything from My Grandfather’s Clock to Parents Just Don’t Understand to Kryptonite.

For my birthday I was thinking of writing about all the songs that have meant a lot to me over the years, but then I realized that a) I could not narrow the list down to less than 200, and b) a massive list of songs felt boring to write and to read. Then I remembered that Rachael (HI RACHAEL) had asked me an interesting question on the Ask Me Anything I did back in December, which was Who are your favourite Canadian musicians/ groups?

First of all, I would like to shout out three out of four Gords for Canadian Decorative Gord Season:

Two of these Gords I saw in concert: the Barenaked Ladies for their Gordon tour, which I consider their best work. I have such great memories of it coming out when I was in high school; my friend Tracy (HI TRACY) and I would sing Hello City while we worked together in chemistry class. I was, I am embarrassed to tell you, nearly fifty years old before I realized that Hello City was about Halifax. Well, we are never too old to learn something new. The other Gord I saw was Gord Downey of the Tragically Hip. I think they take away your citizenship if you are a certain age and didn’t see the Hip in concert. It might be written in the Constitution, now that I think about it.

I don’t think a Gordon Lightfoot concert would be exactly bumping, but I love his music very much. Also, he’s dead. From that same era, I adore Joni Mitchell and the Guess Who. All three are national treasures, in my humble opinion. I also have a soft spot for Corey Hart, particularly because I wrote to his fan club and received a photocopied letter in return. Also, he filmed his Never Surrender video a mere 20 minutes away from our Calgary home.

I saw a number of Canadian music stars in concert back in the day, notably Alanis Morrisette for her Jagged Little Pill tour, and Tom Cochrane at a Canada Day music festival. This was pre- Life is a Highway, when his huge hit was the excellent Big League, which is SUCH a Canadian classic. Not many ways out of this cold Northern town, you work in the mill and get laid in the ground. And if you got a jump, it’ll be with the game. Oh, the dreams of hockey players of yore, hoping to be the next Fourth Gord. This was before youth hockey became A Thing, and anyone who knows Crazy Hockey Parents will know what I mean. My husband worked with a man who coached his kindergartener son’s Timbits hockey team. At the beginning of the season he cheerfully said that they were all there to have fun, after all, no one was going to the NHL. Several parents withdrew their kids from that team in protest of his attitude. THAT is what I mean. And as far as I know, none of them did go to the NHL. So.

Back in the 80s, after INXS I saw a few Canadian bands that would mean nothing to anyone not around in that time and place; notably 54-40 and the Grapes of Wrath. I have a couple of six-degrees of separation for both of those bands. The lead singer for 54-40 was the son-in-law of my junior high principal, which certainly made me look upon him with greater respect than a junior high principal typically gets from its student body.

As for the Grapes of Wrath, I had a titanic crush on guitarist Tom Hooper, to the point that my fourteen-year-old self would dream that we would one day meet and get married, and I would live in the magical place called Kelowna, from where the Grapes hailed. Life is funny; I DID marry a man from Kelowna and am now living in that magical place, and that man has friends who went to school with the entire band. As is probably typical, they were all high school misfits who absolutely hated their hometown, as evidenced in the song Backward Town. To be fair, Kelowna isn’t exactly on the cutting edge of anything. But still! It is a magical place where the flowering trees bloom in April.

When I was that angsty fourteen-year-old, I really thought that the kind of music a person listened to said something about the character of that person. I thought that people who enjoyed pop music were vapid and silly, while those who liked deep cuts of obscure bands were deep as the ocean. I mean, I dated a guy in part because he was really into obscure Depeche Mode tracks. Also, he wrote me a whole pile of bad poetry, typed it out, and presented it to me in a yellow duotang, which struck me as a very romantic gesture at the time.

Ah, the pretentiousness of youth. Popular music is popular for a reason, Young Nicole, and that is because it is FUN and also generally pleasing to listen to. These days, I think that the kind of music a person enjoys merely indicates that they enjoy that music, there is no character or moral assessment to be made. After all, I really like Nickleback.

Weekly Reading

Is This A Cry For Help? CANADIAN AUTHOR ALERT! This author also wrote the wonderful Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead, which I read in 2021 and loved. I love libraries, and not just because they lend us books; they are also safe public spaces that run important programs for all different people, they allow access to the internet, and they are inclusive spaces. This book centres on a librarian who is just back from having a mental health crisis due to the sudden death of her ex-boyfriend. As she looks back on her time with him, she begins to deal with a small but vocal group of people who are calling for book bans and who believe the library has an “agenda.” Yes, its agenda is to be inclusive and to help the public. Anyway. This was a very good read and I enjoyed it so much.

The Rom-Commers. This is a rom-com about two screenwriters writing a rom-com. Cute, right? Well, Katherine Center’s brand is a cute rom-com with some serious tragic backstories, and this is no exception. One person is recovering from cancer, the other is the caretaker for her disabled father, who is FIFTY FIVE YEARS OLD. If you’re keeping track, that’s two books I’ve finished in less than four days in which the romantic lead is a caretaker for her fifty-something parent. Small digression here: this is part of the reason I wrote Inhale Exhale, because there are very few romances that feature people in the fifty-plus demographic. WE LIKE TO GET RAILED TOO, YOU KNOW. Some of us, despite our advanced ages, are not in need of caretaking and are totally DTF. Maybe even more so than before, because our children are grown and we have the house to ourselves, I hope my own sons are not reading this. Anyway. Back to the book at hand. It was pretty silly and contrived, but it was a fast and easy read, which can be a nice distraction from the whole…international situation.

The End of My Life is Killing Me. In June 2020 this author had a cough, and went for a Covid test. She found out she had stage four metastatic lung cancer. The book is a collection of essays about that time and the years after, dealing with treatment, the US health insurance system, weird public perceptions about lung cancer (hint: it’s victim-blamey), and well-meaning friends who suggest things like juicing and positive thinking as curative measures. Honestly, this was pretty dull and grinding, although there were a few interesting observations.

Thanks Rachael for the fun question; I realized there are a few questions I never answered, and I will do so post-haste. In the meantime, here are some of the many flowering trees that have been blooming these past four weeks. I wish you could smell them! You’ll have to believe me. xo