In this final episode, I give some insight into why this is the final episode and thank listeners, supporters, guests and our fearless editor Todd Donald for a great 65 episode, nearly 2 year ride.

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Mako Funasaka is passionate about interviewing musicians. He hosts the Talkin’ Blues Podcast & hosted the TV show and has been documenting music since 2001. He explains his goal of reaching 300 episodes with Talkin’ Blues and extolls the virtues of self imposed deadlines. We talk about his reticence to include himself as part of his video interviews and he describes the experience of initially hearing himself speaking on his podcast as “torturous”. He shares the “life-changing” experience of his first time interviewing a musician and explains how connecting with people through long form podcast conversations is what drives him.

“This is the thing that I love to do. There's no doubt about it. The fact that I could talk to somebody new every week and get to know them a little bit, the fact that I can do that is amazing. Everybody has a story. I just recently got the chance to talk to a zookeeper. And this was his dream since he was four years old. And you think: ‘how lucky are you to do this?’ That you become who you wanted to be when you were four years old? I just think people like that, if you can tap into that and get their stories and talk about their passion and what makes them happy, it enriches my life.”
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MAKO FUNASAKA
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Bob Barlen is the writer of PAW Patrol: The Movie, Bigfoot Family and Escape From Planet Earth among many others. We dig into his life writing movies and talk about the huge success of PAW Patrol. We also talk about his time working on the George Stroumboulopoulos show and his love of magic. He shares insights about the benefits of having a writing partner and the importance of working without ego. 

“The best idea wins. It doesn't matter who's suggesting it. It's not like only certain people on the team are allowed to have thoughts on the movie or thoughts on the process. I mean, we really are open to hearing from everybody because I think we are confident enough in our vision that if something makes it better, we're the first to admit, ‘Hey, great. Let's jump on that.’ And it doesn't need to be a radical rewrite, it can be just a small suggestion. Throughout the entire production, every artist on our team is someone who we respect their opinion as an artist. We want to make the best movie possible. When it comes to notes that we disagree with, it's a conversation. A lot of times when someone is making a note, maybe they just didn't understand. If it's like what you'd call a bad note, maybe we weren't clear enough. So it's actually just exposing something that we need to clarify, because I do think that, especially for family films, but I mean, in all storytelling, clarity Is really important. And if you are being unclear, a note that comes in that you think is strange, it might actually expose, ‘Oh, wait a minute, someone is interpreting this differently’, because you haven't done a good enough job of communicating what you wanted to say.”

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BOB BARLEN
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Christine Bird is the Community Engagement Coordinator at the University Of Waterloo School Of Pharmacy. She describes her role helping students think about better serving vulnerable populations and shares  challenges working from home over the lock-downs. She talks about how she became known as “the bully lady” when she was speaking to grade-school kids in her work for John Howard Society and we touch on her work with people who’d been convicted of DUI and strategies around alcohol. She shares the challenge of her experience of being a college professor with a 2 year old at home and how her roles have organically evolved from working to improve kid’s lives directly to more of a systems level. She reminisces about playing music with the late Matt Osborne and talks about losing her husband and how having a young son at home at that time was an incredible gift.

“How do you get through losing your husband? You have a five-year-old who needs you to get out of bed, make breakfast, and sort of keeps you going. I don't know how you do that when you don't have a little one kind of pulling you out of it. He pulls you out of your head and back into the stuff that has to get done right now. It doesn't matter how upset or depressed or sad you are, you still gotta make pancakes. It's kind of the 'fake it till you make it'. It's like he pulls you out and makes you live your life and go through the motions of just the stuff you have to do to carry on. And that act alone helps you to carry on. Kids are good that way: They bring you into the moment, whether you want to or not.”

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Timothy Abraham is a Juno winning producer, engineer, mixer and composer. We dig into his creative process and the meditation-like alpha wave brain state he gets into when working on a mix. He stresses the importance of setting up plugin chain templates and workflows that allow him to work fast and stay in this purely creative zone and how, as a mixer, one of your most valuable tools is the mute button. We talk about the confidence it takes to stay open to other people’s ideas, listening to your inner voice and the importance of communication between artist and mixer. He details how the process of having to rebuild his studio 3 times within a five year span has been resilience building and he also shares insights he’s gained through self reflection in the past few years.

“There's a mindfulness and a self-awareness that I think I'm learning in my mid forties that I wished I learned when I was in my mid twenties. Just learning how to be a better man and a better communicator and a better listener. Paying attention to your body, paying attention to your mind, and being able to kind of step back from that and understand that, and also being less judgmental of yourself. And that goes with learning how to step back in a relationship and not be judgmental and drawing boundaries. And to do that, you have to understand what you want and figure out why you feel things and how to have a good conversation with another person or how to fight clean. All of that work turns around to yourself as well. And so your conversations with yourself, you can employ a lot of those same kinds of things.”

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THE INTRO MEDLEY FEATURES:
Liar (Mike Todd)
Make It (30 Frames)
Ok Ok (Beth Moore)
What I Believe (Steve Strongman)
Charity Case (Sean Pinchin)
First Of The Last To Know (Peter Katz)
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TIMOTHY ABRAHAM
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SPOTIFY PLAYLIST OF TRACKS THAT TIM + ROB HAVE WORKED ON

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Caroline Marie Brooks is a singer songwriter and 1/3 of the Juno-winning band Good Lovelies. We dig into her life in music and her fantastic new solo album Everything At The Same Time. She describes how she’s been wanting to make a record of very personal music for a long time and that making this album was in a way an act of self-care. We talk about her life with Good Lovelies and how she sees her doing a solo album as being “lifted by”, as opposed to “stepping out from”. She also looks back on her experience touring as a new mother and describes how touring with a young baby can be extremely taxing but also gratifying. We nerd out about guitar playing and alternate tunings which she explains was her father’s influence. She reflects on insights she’s gained in her 40th year and how they've informed her new album.

"Mortality plays a big role in the songs I've been writing and thinking about a lot in relation to my own parents and my children and that continuum. My grandmother is 92. On my 40th birthday, we had this big party and it was my family and my grandmother was there and my daughter and we took this family photo with four generations. And I just thought about that line and where I am in it and my mother and thinking of my mother at my age. And then thinking about my grandmother at my age. And then what my daughter will be like at my age. And all those things feeding into each other. So, yeah, 40 feels like a milestone in that it marks a very specific time of my life. And now that I made this record, I specifically will always feel like I've captured that time."

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CAROLINE MARIE BROOKS
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Mike T. Kerr is a world-class guitar player going through a creative renaissance. We track the evolution of his creative spike from early lock-down inability to finish any project, to releasing an album per month in 2021. He shares some ups and downs as a gigging musician, the “aha moment” he had around being able to optimize creative input and output simultaneously and he schools us on some of the history of guitar playing as he plays on his newly beloved tenor guitar.  We nerd out about how we both thrive on relationships that are hyper-focused on specific areas of life but ultimately illuminate what matters most, the importance of the book “The War of Art” and the idea of overcoming artistic resistance. Mike also explains the inevitability of the path he’s currently following.

"All my life. I've taken a step in this direction and been like, ‘Ooh, should I have done that? Couldn't I have maybe gone this way instead? But okay, I guess I'm on this path now. I guess I'll take another step in this direction just to see.’ And then it’s like, ‘Oh, I took another step. The forest is getting a little thicker. Maybe I should have gone down that way instead, but I guess I'll just keep going.’  And it's been like this for a long time. And I realized that that path has been getting more and more paved as I've been going along, you know what I mean? I only get stronger as I go. It's been a long time since anyone has ever said to me: ‘Get a real job.’ Of course I've had that and I think I've realized why another path wouldn't work:  Every time in my life that I have gone down the path of, 'Okay. Here's something that offers a different kind of stability and security and a paycheck at the same time every two weeks.’ That lifestyle, which tons of people are able to just do, and compartmentalize, and then free themselves after to be the awesome person that they are,  for me, if I ever say, ‘Okay. You know what? I have to do this to make this part of my life square. So I'm going to put this thing, I don't know what to call it: my love, my art and my passion and stuff. If I say, ‘Okay. You know what? I'm going to sort of put it over here, for this number of hours a day, because I need to get serious and “get a real job”.’ This little pen that I put it in will never be large enough, no matter how much I try and compartmentalize it. For me, it will always grow and overtake whatever part-time or full-time job I got ’til the point where I have to quit that job anyways. This is what I've seen in my life over the years."

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MIKE T. KERR
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Alicia Comer is an executive assistant supporting C-suite executives, and has been for over 10 years. We dig into her work life as an EA and she emphasizes the importance of multitasking and staying flexible amidst the constant changes and interruptions. She shares tips on getting things done, dealing with difficult personalities, and explains the importance of building morale and keeping teams happy. We also dig into the evolution of her work life: from working 40 hr weeks at 2 jobs while still in high-school, to leaving her tiny hometown of Westville, NS at 19 years old to forge out on her own in Edmonton and later Toronto. She also talks about her thinking around college or university diplomas not being the be all and end all.

“At the beginning, I definitely missed my family. All of them were still in Nova Scotia. It was just really cool to have the independence. ‘Cause a lot of the people that I went to high school with, they were all in university and they were wondering why. ‘Why are you not going to university? What are you going to do with your life?’ Because you're taught all through high school that you need to go to college or get some sort of diploma. I'm like: ‘I’m going to prove everybody wrong and I'm going to make it.’”

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Christa Couture is an award-winning performing and recording artist, non-fiction writer, and broadcaster. We dig into her new book How To Lose Everything a self-described "grief bio" which she describes in point-form as "cancer, amputation, death, death, divorce and more cancer".  She shares her life’s losses from having her leg amputated as a cure for her cancer as a teen to losing 2 sons as babies to her divorce to her 2nd episode of cancer.  We discuss the need for our culture to normalize differences among people in terms of disability & neurodivergence. We also talk about coming to terms with the idea that sometimes finding meaning in suffering and loss can be elusive and she explains her thinking around shaping her life experience into a book that could be shared.

“I used to sit at my piano and just banging on the piano, saying all kinds of things. Just sobbing. And it's moving through you. And those aren't moments that anyone should witness. They're cathartic. And I think how I know when it's something that I can craft or it's something that I believe won't be too much, won't be too raw is kind of by feeling: it's beyond catharsis. It's now more expression or storytelling. I don't know who said it, but there's this idea of writing from the scar, not the wound. And so I think it's also the timing. If I'd written this book sooner, it probably would have been a bit raw, a bit too messy, maybe a bit burdensome, you know. I didn't want to tell these hard things in a way that left the reader kind of stuck with them. I always had this idea that I was sort of holding my hands up saying like, 'Look, but you don't have to touch it and I'm not going to drop it on your lap. It's mine. And I will take care of it, but you can see.' And I think that just kind of came with time.”

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 CHRISTA COUTURE
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Andrew Katz is an English and creative writing teacher at Dawson College and the author of several children's book including: How To Catch A Bear Who Loves To Read, I Just Want To Be Super! and the upcoming A Starlit Trip to the Library. He shares the joy he experiences in the process of finding just the right word and muses about humans' metaphorical minds. We discuss how his experience of remote teaching during COVID lifted a curtain for him on the inequality among his students and explains how he tweaked his teaching approach to take into account his students' needs.

“When people are in the middle of a pandemic, you cannot just launch into the subject of the day as if everything is normal. That would be like if you're in some kind of disaster situation and you just pretend it's not happening. You have to acknowledge the situation that we're all in. The way I structured my class is the first half hour was optional. It was like hanging out. So people would just come in if they felt like it, half an hour of hanging out and another 15 minutes of small groups just to get the pulse of everyone and just to kind of ease into being together in this online space. And I think once they feel like you're aware that we're in a storm, that there's water sloshing over the side of the boat, that they feel very alone and scared, once they're like, 'oh, he's aware that I'm in this situation, now I'm okay to learn about English and creative writing.'”

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 Andrew Katz
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