Sadly, neither Drake nor Director X was there to accept the award. They robbed me of probably my best moment to run on stage and "Pull a Kanye." I think that's what sent me into the downward spiral. I ordered another drink. Then a double. Then a triple. And a Regina triple is pretty stiff, let me tell you

In the 24 hours since I touched down in Regina for the Juno awards, I've been overcome by the stark landscape, the kindness of the locals and the strength of the alcohol in my body. I'm hungover. I found myself at the Juno reception which was held at a Mountie training facility. There were Mounties everywhere.

The Luv-A-Fair was a giant warehouse at the intersection where the red light and gay districts met. The bouncers were tough and mean. There was one incident where a bouncer had not only barred a yahoo from entering the club, but also chased him around the block wielding a bicycle chain.

I got the job with MuchMusic. It's a 24 hour music station that plays videos, sort of like radio on your TV. Do you have such a channel over there in the U.K.? My role is rock and roll newsman for "the nation's music station." It's exciting, intense, aggravating, and glitzy all at once.

There is a trend or idea or general genre of the female singer-songwriter who somehow has to shrivel to remain sincere. This floppy prospector hat wearing type who whispers her feelings to you while maintaining a little pout. If all you have to say is you are mad at your boyfriend and your Etsy store is tanking then cool. Just get away from me and make a new Tumblr about it.

Directors both upstart and established are able to create whatever worlds their imagination (and technical know-how) can conjure. And quite frankly, when it comes to music videos it's the animated ones that are often more story-rich - not to mention pretty or hallucinatory or just in glorious defiance of the laws of physics.

Hearing "Hey Jude" live? How can that not be on your bucket list? Is there another song anywhere in the universe that begs the same effect, or comes with the same aura, when its played to people who've paid to see and hear it? On Sunday night, Paul McCartney had his way with 60,000 Canadians.

Youth love music and consider it one of the most important things in their lives yet the education system rarely exploits this passion as the remarkable teaching tool it can be. (Consider that when we were in kindergarten we memorized 26 abstract concepts, in order, by singing our ABCs.)

I got into Nick Drake's music the way most people did. A friend gave me a tape and said "you've got to check this guy out." The friend was the other guitarist in my band at school and it was the late 80s in North-West London. Nick's music grabbed me instantly. It was timeless, beautiful and melancholy.

Ohio-reared rock group The National issued a statement on their site this week after an Ohio ad posted on Youtube supporting U.S. presidential candida...

Canadian electro-pop star Grimes (real name Claire Boucher) was recently forced off the road. "Hey guys, so sorry 4 the cancelled shows. im having tro...

I am now in the twilight of my second pregnancy. This being our second child, I feel more confident than I did the first time around. Parenting is an odd, amorphous journey you take with your children. We have to avoid cramming our own nostalgia down their throats and let them discover who they are and the culture that will inevitably inform their identity. So as I shepherd a seven-year-old carefully around the edges of the music industry, I will also welcome a new person, who will grow up hearing me talk crap about music marketing and false-representation in the arts.

Thank God for Vancouver's Music on Main. Not only was its vaguely 18th century feeling -- a return to an intimate musical salon vibe -- sweet relief from our oversaturated and increasingly digitized culture, the opening night's program actually gave me some hope for humanity in the midst of so much global tragedy. For a few transcendent moments, the festival drowned out the drum beats of war with the sweet sound of strings, and I dreamed of a return to a truly human culture.

As a record collector, music has always been about quantity over quality, about how much music I can consume before I die. When iPods were new, we as music fans were at the precipice of something big. We were finally being catered to! Of course, just when we were gonna get that 500 GB iPod, Apple pulled the plug on music storage capacity in favour of Angry Birds, FaceTime and texting. So I'd like to gently propose a terabyte iPod. That's right -- a thousand gigabytes of free space meant only to keep 10,000+ records.