We’ve all sat listening to music and though to ourselves “what does this song mean?...what’s the singer (or the band) trying to say?”.

Sometimes it’s nothing…it’s just a bunch of words strung together in a way that sounds fun…other times, lyrics to a song may be just some kind of stream of consciousness thing that somehow made sense to the singer or the lyricist at the time…or maybe it didn’t…lots of songs are written in altered states.

A song could be an oblique and opaque form of poetry that’s supposed to resolve itself in the brains of each individual listener…there have been many times when I’ve asked a singer “what does this song mean?”… and their answer is “well, what does it mean to you?...whatever you say is the right answer”.

Okay, i get it…it’s art…art is supposed to be open to personal interpretation…when you hear something beautiful or provocative or inspiring, who cares what the initial intent was—if there even was one…all that matters is that the song somehow hits you on some kind of emotional level that’s difficult or impossible to quantify or describe.

Then again, some songs have a very specific point…they tell a story…or they’re inspired by something that happened in real life and the composer is trying to capture what he or she felt and saw.

And then there are the stories of the creation of the songs themselves…something happened for that song to be born…what was it?...and what were the circumstances, the serendipity, the accidents, the crazy coincidences that needed to manifest for a great song to come to life?.

Let’s explore that…this is another episode of stories behind songs.

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This is an episode about murder…call this a crossover episode with my true crime podcast, “Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry”.

For as long as rock music has existed, people have been blaming it for turning impressionable people to the dark side, inspiring them (if not outright encouraging them) to do evil things.

My opinion is that an unstable mentally ill person is liable to be triggered by anything…and yes, sometimes that trigger might be a song…there are, however, not that many documented cases of this happening. I call this episode “murder ballads (and other deadly songs)”…and what you’re about to hear is not pretty.

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When Nadine Bailey was 7 years old she woke up terrified of dark figures looming at the end of her bed and an eerie presence all around her. From then on every night was the same, she was visited by phantom-like shadows and no matter where she went, the ghostly encounters followed her. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits and the unexplained have consumed her entire life and for the past 20 years she's been an award-winning guide with Edmonton Ghost Tours  Along the way she has taken people into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness and inside some of the most haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more. On Haunted Canada, Nadine journeys through terrifying and bone chilling stories of the unexplained. Join her if you dare.

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Anyone with a passing knowledge of rock is aware of its origins back in the late 40s and early 50s when blues, rhythm and blues, western, country, folk, and hillbilly traditions began to mix and match, eventually coalescing into what became known as “rock’n’roll”.

If you’re an alt-rock fan, you’ve heard the story of how all this began with the garage bands of the late 60s and the punk rock explosion of the mid-70s.

The birth of modern electronic music?... It has a rich and complicated origin story that stretches back to the 40s before the technology was cheap enough for young musicians to give it a go in the 70s.

Ska and reggae?... Understanding those sounds and their enduring appeal requires a deep dive into Jamaican culture and politics.

Once we get to the 80s, things really begin to separate, segment, and stratify…goth, industrial, punk-funk, hardcore, dream pop, all the various flavours of metal…the last time I checked into Spotify’s classification system, the platform had sorted music into more than 2500 different genres—and that number keeps growing.

This program has looked at many of these origin stories…and it’s time that we did another one.

If you have ever enjoyed a pint in a traditional pub, you’re going to love this…it’s the history of Celtic rock.

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If you’re a musical artist and you start to do well, the point will come when you need a manager.

The manager is the person who looks after all the business stuff so the musician can get on with the business of making music…managers deal with booking gigs, marketing, promotions, promoters, publicity, support staff and road crews.

They collect the money and pay the bills…and the oversee all the infrastructure of your career: lawyers, accountants, and all the other people involved in running the business that is you and your music.

But it doesn’t stop there…managers can also function as advisors, sounding boards, fixers, father and mother figures, referees, bail bondsmen, bouncers, psychologists, and even amateur physicians and pharmacists—for good or for not-so-good reasons.

They need to be on top of trends, have all the right connections, understand audiences, be able to navigate record companies, and translate contracts…it can be a 24/7 job.

Bottom line is that a manager can make or break a career…they are incentivized by their commission, which is usually somewhere around 15%...the more you make as an artist, the more they make…if they’re good at their job, your career grows and the money roles in.

These are the stories of nine managers who have had an impact—mostly good, but also, you know, not-so-great.

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For some people, history is dry and boring…it’s all dates and wars and dusty facts about things that don’t have anything to do with life today…and yes, that can be true…but history also helps us understand why things are the way they are…study the past, understand the present, and maybe predict the future—at least to some extent.

But history can also be stupid…and when it is, it can be fun to learn about these things…and in addition to all the dates and wars and famous people, i think we need to stupid history’s stupid bits…i’m calling this instalment “stupid history: the music version”.

These are some of the dumbest stories from music history that i believe should be taught alongside the serious stuff…i think it adds colour and understanding—and it shows that history’s heroes are as dumb and weird as everyone else.

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By the time this episode is over, you will learn things about your fellow music fans (and music in general) that you can use to astound your friends…and when they say “go on, that’s not true,” you can simply point them to the research.

Some are the result of serious, empyreal scientific work at universities and labs…other were conducted by professional pollsters and survey-takers…and then there’s the category of survey where a piece of research is really just a masquerade for an advertisement.

Everything you’re about to hear that is the result of a legitimate study—or at least something pretending to be.

I call this episode..."Survey Says: Useful and Odd Music Surveys and Polls".

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After years and years or rumour and speculation, we now have an Oasis reunion. 

The brother Gallagher have agreed to reunite…and possibly burry the hatchet. This for a series of shows next summer in the UK, Ireland, Canada, the USA, Mexico, and beyond.

A lot of this coincides nicely with the anniversaries of their first two albums….1994’s Definitely Maybe, and What’s the Story Morning Glory from 1995.

We really don’t know how we arrived here with a reunion, I mean…this is Noel and Liam after all…but anyway, it's here...it's happening.

So we thought why not go back into the podcast vault and re-release a two part series we call “Oasis at War”.  

It’s a look at one of the most intense sibling rivalries in music…and boy…there is a lot to go through.

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We don’t like to think about our favourite musicians as being mortal…because let’s face it, we believe that they do extraordinary things and make us feel in ways we otherwise wouldn’t.

Rock stars are special, superhuman, because they can do what we can’t and live a lifestyle that we can only dream about.

Yet they are just as human as you and, fallible to temptations, in danger of accidents, and vulnerable to all the failings that may plague the body and brain.

When one of our favourites die, it’s like a little bit of us goes with them…in most cases, we’ve never met these people…we might have never seen them in the flesh…but because what they do speaks to us in only the way music can, it hurts when they’re gone.

And in a weird way, it’s instructive to look at how they died…these deaths can be cautionary tales that we as fans can learn from—you know, “hey, i’m not gonna let that happen to me!”.

Their deaths may provide retroactive insight into the music they made—where in their hearts it came from—so we understand them better as both artists and humans…when they’re gone, we may appreciate their music even more…you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone, right.

This is another installment of “the last moments of”.

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After years and years or rumour and speculation, we now have an Oasis reunion. 

The brother Gallagher have agreed to reunite…and possibly burry the hatchet. This for a series of shows next summer in the UK, Ireland and beyond.

A lot of this coincides nicely with the anniversaries of their first two albums….1994’s Definitely Maybe, and What’s the Story Morning Glory from 1995.

We really don’t know how we arrived here with a reunion, I mean…this is Noel and Liam after all…but anyway, it's here...it's happening.

So we thought why not go back into the podcast vault and re-release a two part series we call “Oasis at War”.  

It’s a look at one of the most intense sibling rivalries in music…and boy…there is a lot to go through.

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It may not seem like it, but everything in this universe is connected in all kinds of unseen ways.

Humans have always known that chaos is a capricious and fickle thing, something that can show up when you least expect it…i find this aspect of history fascinating.

There’s the butterfly effect, the concept that a butterfly flapping its wings in China will set off a complex domino effect in the atmosphere that somehow results in a low-pressure wave blasting from Africa across the Atlantic causing a hurricane in the Caribbean.

That doesn’t really happen…it was a metaphor created by a meteorologist and mathematician named Edward Norton Lorenz in 1963 when he discovered that a miniscule change in atmospheric conditions ---he ascribed a value as tiny as 0.000127—could make an enormous difference down the road …this shows why it’s so hard to forecast the weather…a little difference can add complexity and instability to a system.

Remember that “treehouse of horror” episode from “The Simpsons” where homer accidentally turns a toaster into a time machine? ...he travels into the past where he manages to screw up the future multiple times by making the tiniest mistake.

This is based on a 1952 short story by Ray Bradbury entitled “A Sound of Thunder” …a man named Eckels goes back in time and kills a dinosaur…when it returns to the present, everything is different.

We hear about “black swan” events, a random thing that no one expects or could have predicted, yet it happens…and suddenly, everything changes.

Covid-19 was an example of that…whatever spawned the virus—bats, infected animals in a wet market, a lab leak—started as something very, very small but ended up changing the lives of virtually everyone on the planet.

We can also apply this sort of investigation to the world of music…if you pick a topic or thing, you can often trace it back to something that illustrates the wonderful and awful randomness of the universe.

This is another episode that I call “connections”.

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