As a member of the Canadian rock trio Triumph, Rik Emmett has sold millions of records and toured the world performing for millions more. Since leaving Triumph in 1988, Rik has enjoyed a successful solo recording career and, until recently, spent two decades as a faculty member at Humber College in his hometown of Toronto where he taught Songwriting, Music Business, Creative Development and Directed Studies. Writing has always been a part of Rik’s life whether as a songwriter or as a regular contributor to Guitar Player Magazine. In 2001 he self published Bric-A-Brac, a book of short stories, poems and unreleased lyrics but now he has taken a unique approach to writing a memoir as a book of poetry called Reinvention.
Read MoreImagine if you worked with a team for several years on creating a thing and then that thing couldn’t even be tested properly until almost a year after it was completed. And now, imagine that you can’t even see if your creation works in real time because it’s on another freakin planet! Well, that is exactly the experience of my guest Taryn Bailey, a mechanical engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in California. Taryn is a part of the team that built Ingenuity, the helicopter that proved that controlled flight on another planet is possible.
Read MoreSince I’d been doing a series of music related interviews, I thought it only appropriate to include an interview with Christian Swain who, along with his longtime friend Richard Evans created The Rock and Roll Archeology Project, a podcast that is an in-depth look at rock and roll as well as the culture and technology that influenced it from 1945 to 1995.
Read MoreGood fiction is like an abstract painting. The story is born out of the imagination of the writer, and I'm always curious about the inspiration behind that story. Marc Bolan Killed In Crash is the coming of age story of teenager Laila Russell, and her discovery of rock and roll, as well as your introduction into London's glam rock scene. So to satisfy my curiosity about the story's origin. I asked Ira about the book's inspiration.
Read MoreI’ve been a music fan for most of my life but I didn’t really get into rock music until the mid seventies and the seventies were a great time to be a rock fan. You not only had your favourite bands but you also had your favourite magazine and there were so many to choose from. There was Circus and Creem and Hit Parader and Rock Scene and Rolling Stone, of course.
Read MoreWhen Steve Jordan first introduced the concept of the Polaris Music Prize to the Canadian music industry, the idea was generally welcomed, though the artistic community was still a little sceptical going into the first show in 2006
Read MoreWhen Shauna de Cartier wanted to start Six Shooter Records, she found that it was going to be difficult to secure funding from outside sources. She didn’t have the track record to secure government grants and banks weren’t interested in lending her the money. And, when she approached the major labels, she found very little interest there too. So she had to find another way to get her artists in the studio and her label off the ground.
Read MoreBy the time Susan Rogers had come to work with Prince he was already being referred to as a musical wunderkind thanks to five critically acclaimed albums including 1999, which had just become his first record to enjoy total and complete crossover from R&B to Pop, peaking at number 9 on the Billboard Top 200. The first project she worked on was his commercial blockbuster, Purple Rain. But, despite critical acclaim, chart topping albums and universal admiration from his musical peers, Prince had not yet felt that he had made a statement album. That all changed in 1987 with the release of Sign O’ The Times.
Read MoreHe has been a director and copywriter and has run his own multi award-winning agency as well as having written the books The Age of Persuasion and This I Know. Meanwhile, his Under The Influence podcast has amassed over 30 million downloads. What I’m trying to tell you is that when it comes to advertising, Terry O’Reilly knows what he’s talking about.
Read MorePart 3 - The lightbulb turns on
The next step was to try to design an eye-catching graphic. Pretty early on, I had decided that I wanted an image of a lightbulb with an exclamation point inside of it to illustrate the “a-ha” moment of a new idea. I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted it to look like so I Googled “images of lightbulbs with exclamation points inside.” Search engine results rarely fail me so I wasn’t surprised to find several dozen examples of what I was looking for.
Read MorePart 2 - Six burning questions
What equipment would I need?
How should I edit the interviews?
How long should each episode be?
Who do I interview in the first season?
How many episodes constitute a season?
HOW DO I LAUNCH A PODCAST?
Read MoreI was watching Anderson Cooper on CNN. I don’t remember exactly what he was talking about (probably Donald Trump) but at one point he used the term “creationists” and I immediately had my “a-ha” moment. Yes, I know what people are referring to when they use the term “creationists” but in that moment it meant something completely different to me.
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