And Sometimes ... Why? with Rob Szabo

David McPherson is an author & freelance writer. His writing has appeared in countless publications including: the Globe & Mail, No Depression & Paste. His 2017 book is The Legendary Horseshoe Tavern: A Complete History and the follow-up, scheduled for 2021 release, is Massey Hall: An Enduring Legacy. We talk about high points in his life as a music fan and writer, the magic of the legendary dive bar The 'Shoe, and why he quit drinking 5 years ago.  He also explains why he's grateful to have writing as a creative outlet.

“For me writing is something I need for my own mental health. It’s very therapeutic for me. But it is precarious in terms of a career. It’s not something that’s stable, especially these days as a journalist. More and more publications are going under. There’s not as many opportunities or places where you can get your writing out there. But it is a labour of love, that’s why I’m writing another book. I’m very lucky that I have a supportive wife who has always been there and supported my career as a writer. It’s what I know, what I’m good at and … at this point you just have to have faith and keep writing. Things will kinda fall into place. At least that’s what I’ve found. And that’s something this pandemic had shown us. The cliche I live by is “One Day At A Time” ‘cause, especially now, we don’t know what tomorrow’s gonna bring. So I might as well spend my time writing and doing something I’m passionate about. I spent enough years in corporate jobs where I was unhappy and it took its toll on my mental health so, I’m in a good place right now. I don’t know what else I’d do if I wasn’t a writer.”

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 DAVID MCPHERSON
 WEB https://davidmcpherson.ca
 IG https://www.instagram.com/mcphersoncomm

 MORE LINKS
 STOMPIN' TOM LIVE AT THE HORSESHOE 1974: https://bit.ly/2Nc7K4G

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 AND SOMETIMES ... WHY?:
 WEB https://www.andsometimeswhy.com
 EMAIL mailto:[email protected]
 INSTA https://www.instagram.com/andsometimeswhypod
 FB https://www.facebook.com/andsometimeswhypod
 TWEET https://twitter.com/sometimeswhypod

Cara Luft is a folk warrior who’s been living and breathing music for over 25 years. She’s a solo artist, founding member of the Wailin’ Jennys and one-half of The Small Glories. We reminisce about meeting 20+ years ago, nerd out about guitar playing and discuss why Winnipeg is such an arts hub. I gush about how much I love The Small Glories and badger Cara about their version of her song “No Friend Of Mine”. We talk about her various musical incarnations, how she was burning out as a solo touring artist - essentially living on the road for the last 8 years, and how she has found a renewed sense of artistic purpose, presence and connection with The Small Glories. (Oh yeah … and we also talk about her mystical purple tiny home on wheels.)

“We have a job that really isn’t about us. It’s about the moment in time that we have with people. How do you create something that’s gonna last and that’s also going to offer some solace, some respite, some hope, all the things that we as humans need, but particularly now. This moment with them is really what it’s all about. It’s about something that goes deeper than ourselves, whether you are a spiritual person or not. But there’s something that’s divine about it, something that’s sacred, something that hits the deepest core of our beings when we forget about ourselves on stage and we’re just in this with these other people.”

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 CARA LUFT
 WEB: https://caraluft.com
 THE SMALL GLORIES: https://thesmallglories.com
 IG: https://www.instagram.com/caraluft
 MORE LINKS
 THE SMALL GLORIES “NO FRIEND OF MINE”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DypwYfymyuM
 TINY HOUSE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaVr5_e5QaE

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 AND SOMETIMES ... WHY?:
 WEB https://www.andsometimeswhy.com
 EMAIL mailto:[email protected]
 INSTA https://www.instagram.com/andsometimeswhypod
 FB https://www.facebook.com/andsometimeswhypod
 TWEET https://twitter.com/sometimeswhypod

Mike Miller is the songwriter and leader of Endless Mike & The Beagle Club. He’s a social worker, husband & father of 2 boys. We discuss his outlook on American politics at this pivotal time in history. Mike explains how he doesn’t see his music as activism(even though Rob kinda does) and he laments the increased political polarization in America. Mike & Rob also deconstruct Rob’s song “The Johnstown Kids” 15 years after the fact and Mike fondly remember the heyday of the Johnstown, PA D.I.Y. music scene of the early 2000s.

“The Johnstown scene was just kids man. There were no grown ups … at all. We didn’t play at bars. We just rented out fire-halls and community buildings. And we’d rent one until, y’know, a couple times in a row somebody kicking holes in the wall or breaking the sink in the bathroom or whatever. We’d get kicked out or they would up the price. ‘Cause like 300-400 kids would come to these shows. It was so awesome. So it was like “Ok, alright, it’s just money.” The promoters never kept money. They never pocketed the money, ever … a penny of it. And if you found out that they were, you’d never go to one of their shows again. They’d get dragged for it man. ‘Cause it was just like militantly ethics when it came to that D.I.Y. punk rock thing. There weren’t that many straight down the middle punk rock bands. All the bands sounded a little different. But there was like a feel and a sound that everybody kinda sounded like, or at least the same kinda feeling and all the bands were like best friends and knew the words to all of each other’s songs.”

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 MIKE MILLER A.K.A. ENDLESS MIKE
 WEB: https://endlessmikeandthebeagleclub.bandcamp.com/music
 FLOW: https://www.flowcode.com/page/endlessmike

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 AND SOMETIMES ... WHY?:
 WEB https://www.andsometimeswhy.com
 EMAIL mailto:[email protected]
 INSTA https://www.instagram.com/andsometimeswhypod
 FB https://www.facebook.com/andsometimeswhypod
 TWEET https://twitter.com/sometimeswhypod

Deanna Knight is a singer, songwriter and fronts The Hot Club Of Mars. We chat about her evolution from her roots in choir and musical theatre through Grateful Dead influenced jam band the Fat Cats into Django styled hot jazz. We talk about her experience doing singing telegrams & the serendipitous events that moved her life from her native Ontario to running a B & B on BC’s Sunshine Coast.

“If you have gifts as a young person, it’s important to listen to that. And as hard as it is to be in an industry where you’re a product. It’s not like a painter right? Oh I’m gonna paint something and it’s gonna go away to somebody’s house. I’m gonna be something for people. And I’m gonna get onstage and I’m gonna be that over and over for them. And I’ve really struggled with that. Now I’ve come to a place where I feel safe. I feel safe and I feel settled.”

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DEANNA KNIGHT
 WEB: http://deannaknight.ca
 FB: https://www.facebook.com/deannajknight
 B&B: https://www.secretbeachbandb.com
 Blessed To Witness: https://youtu.be/NFJF7vHMowg

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 AND SOMETIMES ... WHY?:
 WEB https://www.andsometimeswhy.com
 EMAIL mailto:[email protected]
 INSTA https://www.instagram.com/andsometimeswhypod
 FB https://www.facebook.com/andsometimeswhypod
 TWEET https://twitter.com/sometimeswhypod

This 2020 Holiday Show features 2 guests(!): 

Steve Strongman is a Juno-winning blues guitar wizard and  my 30-year musical brother. We chat about his life over the past year now that touring is off the table. We also give the low down on our upcoming Virtual Acoustic Holiday Show.

Emma  Julien is the #1 most-listened to guest thus far on ASW. We talk about how that is a recognition of Emma and her magnetism and charisma as a person and conversationalist and also for the original concept of ASW which was having meaningful conversations with "regular" people. Emma & Rob also pay tribute to their mutual friend and inspiration Donna Delorme.

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 SZABO/STRONGMAN HOLIDAY SHOW TIX: 
 https://bit.ly/SzaboStrongmanTIX2020

 SUPPORT THIS PODCAST: https://bit.ly/aswKO-FI

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 STEVE STRONGMAN
 WEB: https://stevestrongman.com
 INSTA: https://www.instagram.com/stevestrongmanmusic

 EMMA JULIEN
 IG: https://www.instagram.com/emmerlouj

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 AND SOMETIMES ... WHY?:
 WEB https://www.andsometimeswhy.com
 EMAIL mailto:[email protected]
 INSTA https://www.instagram.com/andsometimeswhypod
 FB https://www.facebook.com/andsometimeswhypod
 TWEET https://twitter.com/sometimeswhypod

Sabina Singwell is a writer, social scientist and creatrix of the School Of Bitchcraft. She helps her clients “who are trapped in weight loss hell” achieve a healthy relationship with their bodies & food. We talk about the word “bitch”, Feminism & The Patriarchy. She describes her disillusionment with academia after getting her PHD in Political Science and shares insights on disordered eating, meaning-making & choosing new narratives for one’s body.  She also relates how she took her husband’s surname 14 years after getting married despite what her twenty-something self may have thought.

“I could not conceive of any logic for why a woman would change her name when she got married. Fourteen years later … (I took my husband’s last name).  For me, what it was about ultimately: I had an extremely chaotic childhood. When I quit trying to manipulate my body and I was able to learn how to deeply trust my body, I found this deep well of self-trust. And when I connected so deeply with that self trust, I realized all the shit that I went through in my childhood didn’t leave me a broken person. I am a deeply whole (and deeply flawed) person, but there is nothing wrong with me. And when I realized that, and I absolutely never would have gotten there if I hadn’t also given up chronic dieting, I wanted a symbol of how much I had divested myself from beliefs I had about myself as a result of my childhood. And because of the loving family that I had made with my husband and my daughter, the love that we have really also contributed to my transformation, that’s when I decided that I was also gonna take the same last name as my husband and my daughter because I got so much more love from the family unit that we created than I had ever experienced in my birth family.”

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 SZABO/STRONGMAN HOLIDAY SHOW TIX: 
https://bit.ly/SzaboStrongmanTIX2020
 SUPPORT THIS PODCAST: https://bit.ly/aswKO-FI

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SABINA SINGWELL
 WEB: https://schoolofbitchcraft.com

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 AND SOMETIMES ... WHY?:
 WEB https://www.andsometimeswhy.com
 EMAIL mailto:[email protected]
 INSTA https://www.instagram.com/andsometimeswhypod
 FB https://www.facebook.com/andsometimeswhypod
 TWEET https://twitter.com/sometimeswhypod

Dave Bidini is a founding member of The Rheostatics, an author of 12 books, and Editor in Chief of Toronto’s community newspaper The West End Phoenix. He is the only person to have been nominated for a Gemini, Genie and Juno as well CBC's Canada Reads. We talk about his brainchild The West End Phoenix and he highlights the importance of having an analogue hard copy paper that has a local focus in the 21st-century. We discuss documenting Toronto as a changing city and how people are leaving the city as priorities change & prices rise. We also dig into his music and songwriting with The Rheostatics and touch on how the notion of “selling out” has all but evaporated in the modern artistic landscape.

“Anytime you give anybody a voice, whether you’re making records, or whether you’re publishing books, or whether you’re staging a play, if your voice is being amplified, that’s a political act. ‘Cause I think we live in a time now where, if people had their druthers, they’d want those voices suppressed. And as Canadians too, we’re not always that comfortable raising our voices to be heard, but it’s getting a lot better and The (West End) Phoenix is an expression of that I think.” 

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DAVE BIDINI
 WEB: https://www.westendphoenix.com
 WEB: https://www.rheostatics.ca
 TWEET: https://twitter.com/hockeyesque

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 AND SOMETIMES ... WHY?:
 WEB https://www.andsometimeswhy.com
 EMAIL mailto:[email protected]
 INSTA https://www.instagram.com/andsometimeswhypod
 FB https://www.facebook.com/andsometimeswhypod
 TWEET https://twitter.com/sometimeswhypod

Roger Travassos is a real estate agent who started his career after over 20 years as a session drummer. We talk about his experience as a drummer for hire with international touring acts and how he overcame adversity and imposter syndrome on the “Chitlin’ Circuit” with Motown artist Remy Shand. He describes how his life changed when he adopted his daughter, his early days in real estate and how he learned that “you get what you bring to the door” while knocking on over 100 doors/day. He also shares personal growth work that allowed him to see the suffering of the person who killed his mother when he was 18 and gave him the willingness to forgive.

“One of the things in my past most listeners wouldn’t know is: when I was 18 years old I lost my mother to some really unfortunate circumstances. Someone walked into her workplace and took 3 lives, one of them being my mother’s. My experience of life after that was always that I was irritated. I had a chip on my shoulder. Really in a lot of ways I was kind of playing a victim. One thing that really changed my life is I did the Landmark Forum and I learned how to make my mother present in my life again. And I also started to understand that it’s possible for me to have a willingness to forgive someone for something that they did. And I found that people don’t do things in life just because they want to be mean. That’s how life occurs to them in the moment. I had a feeling like someone was out to really intentionally hurt me or my mother. But I actually started to see that someone was actually suffering. That’s why they did what they did. And that in itself has like a tragedy that allowed me to have a willingness to forgive.”

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ROGER TRAVASSOS
 WEB: https://www.rogertravassos.com
 IG: https://www.instagram.com/rogertravassos

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 AND SOMETIMES ... WHY?:
 WEB https://www.andsometimeswhy.com
 EMAIL mailto:[email protected]
 INSTA https://www.instagram.com/andsometimeswhypod
 FB https://www.facebook.com/andsometimeswhypod
 TWEET https://twitter.com/sometimeswhypod

Alysha Brilla is a 3X Juno Award nominated artist & music producer who’s been singing since she was 3 years old. She describes how music has been therapy & comfort for her throughout her life, her experience as a young teen with the sometimes predatory & exploitative nature of the music business, and how she cares less whether people “get her” as she gets older. She also shares her profound conviction that music does have the capacity to change the world and explains how she encourages students at her workshops to notice the interconnectedness of seemingly disparate things in our world.

“Even though we give courses certain titles and we segment fields of study … everything truly is connected. If they’re studying audio engineering, it’s gonna relate back to childhood. Things DO connect. You can find highways between them. The way my brain works and when I was a kid and when I’m learning something … let’s say I’m learning something about audio engineering, I’ll think, ‘Oh, that’s just like an ocean wave.’ And as a kid, y’know, kids always say that all the time: ‘Is that like this?’ I love when people acknowledge and affirm the connections that their brains are making between things. So it’s not just me teaching the software or the techniques that I am able to share information on, it’s [that] I want to encourage them to just keep learning, be curious, and enjoy the process of learning.” 

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ALYSHA BRILLA
 WEB: https://www.alyshabrilla.com
 IG: https://www.instagram.com/alyshabrilla
 “LOVE": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmHexuN1-S4
 “CENTRE”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=694nz3Ogkuw
 MUSIC - SPOTIFY PLAYLIST: https://spoti.fi/34fecxE

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 AND SOMETIMES ... WHY?:
 WEB https://www.andsometimeswhy.com
 EMAIL mailto:[email protected]
 INSTA https://www.instagram.com/andsometimeswhypod
 FB https://www.facebook.com/andsometimeswhypod
 TWEET https://twitter.com/sometimeswhypod

Shea Stewart is a partner at Toronto-based tech consulting firm Arctiq. He describes his delight at watching team members flourish and champion the company culture he and his partners fostered through distributed authority and accountability. We talk about what makes a good mentor, Arctiq’s new Dive Bar DevOps Podcast & how improv classes helped him overcome a moment of crisis when presenting at Google Next. He also shares his life-changing experiences at both a Buddhist silent meditation retreat in Thailand and an EvryMan retreat in Montana.

“I can describe one of the experiences I had on the Montana trip: somebody else in my group after spending 5 days with me, describing me to me. This is what they see and this is what they want for you after meeting you for the 5 days you’ve spent together and, I’m not gonna say the first time in my life but for the first time in a long time, I felt SEEN. This is like the depth of seen that you get with your best friend that takes years of development and this person met you for 5 days and you know that they know you and they respect the things that you respect about yourself. And that was quite an emotional and interesting experience.

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SHEA STEWART
 WEB: https://www.arctiq.ca
 IG: https://www.instagram.com/stewartshea

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 AND SOMETIMES ... WHY?:
 WEB https://www.andsometimeswhy.com
 EMAIL mailto:[email protected]
 INSTA https://www.instagram.com/andsometimeswhypod
 FB https://www.facebook.com/andsometimeswhypod
 TWEET https://twitter.com/sometimeswhypod