WHAT WERE YOU LISTENING TO IN 2024?
- ‘Listening In’ on Travel Industry Today is one of our most popular features . We took a nostalgic stroll/scroll through the weeks and came up with the top five most watched/listened to in 2024.
LISTENING IN: Raising a cup of cheer for Christmas
- In this special Christmas Eve edition of ‘Listening In’ I will offer that without a doubt my favourite Christmas song is “Christmas in Killarney,” a song written in 1950 and performed by many artists over the years, though the best IMO is unquestionably The Irish Rovers version, recorded in 2002 (a video we posted a couple of years ago).
LISTENING IN: Turning Christmas up to 11
- The Trans-Siberian Orchestra has become as much a part of Christmas as Frosty or The Grinch, ever since its landmark album “Christmas Eve and Other Stories” album debuted over 25 years ago. The collection of Christmas-themed “rock operas” included this week’s offering, the epic instrumental “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo,” which cleverly incorporates echoes of a familiar Christmas tune.
LISTENING IN: Lost in a familiar song by Boston
- Boston’s “More than a Feeling” was about how music can take you back to people or places from the past, so it’s not surprising that hearing the song today does just that for me – back to 1976 when the band exploded into public consciousness with a self-titled album that became the fastest- and best-selling debut LP in US history.
LISTENING IN: Getting it on with T-Rex
- What could be better than banging a gong and getting it on with Marc Bolan than also doing it with Elton John, who was a surprise guest with T-Rex in this performance of their 1971 classic on Britain’s Top of the Pops?
LISTENING IN: In praise of Hozier
- Andrew John Hozier-Byrne (aka Hozier), the thoughtful Irish singer-songwriter, sure gets his money’s worth out of his music – not syrupy ballads or inane love songs for him. His breakthrough smash “Take Me to Church” in 2013 was an audacious indictment of the Catholic church’s homophobic doctrine; and the song we covered previously, “Nina Cries Power,” was an homage to the legacy of protest songs and singers who were there at the beginning of the movement.
LOOKS LIKE WE’RE IN FOR NASTY WEATHER
- John Fogerty is a brilliant songwriter – composing such celebrated hits as Proud Mary, Down on the Corner, Have You Ever Seen The Rain, and many, many more, generally performed by Creedence Clearwater Revival, but covered by artists around the world. However, this song has been an earworm in my mind for the past few weeks. I can’t get rid of it, so I’m passing it along. With an apology to our editor Mike Baginski for bumping his choice, here we go...
LISTENING IN: America through the looking glass, Styx’s prescient classic
- Dennis DeYoung called it the Styx song that the record company “missed.” The Chicago band’s ultimate masterpiece, “Suite Madame Blue,” anchored the 1975 album Equinox, challenging and encouraging a “changed” America to “lift up your heart and make a new start” to be a mature and worthy world leader once again.
LISTENING IN: An Apple a day keeps Fats at play
- On almost every level It’s hard to compare Fiona Apple with Fats Domino, but that doesn’t mean the exceptional American singer doesn’t do justice to the great early rock and roller. From John & Yoko to Cheap Trick, plenty of artists have covered “Ain’t That a Shame,” but Apple and her collection of talented friends give it their own rootsy treatment, which is fun and refreshing.
LISTENING IN: Don’t fear Blue Oyster Cult
- Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” is a rock classic, but has always seemed a little creepy, nonetheless. Which is to say, the perfect song for Halloween this year! Having said that, we’ll take the edge off a little (and mostly because all the BOC videos are quite long), with a version by the rather more wholesome Choir! Choir! Choir!, a Canadian-based initiative we introduced recently doing Bowie’s “Space Oddity.”
LISTENING IN: New Hall of Famer Peter Frampton shows us the way
- If you grew up in the ‘70s, odds are that “Frampton Comes Alive” in some way penetrated your existence – if not spinning hundreds of times your turntable, then certainly on the radio and TV. The double album came out of nowhere in 1976 and went on to be the best-selling live album of all time (at the time), and ultimately setting in motion the wheels that led to the English singer-songwriter being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last weekend.
LISTENING IN: Bon’s bagpipe shows another side of AC/DC
- Recently we ran an early-days clip of U2 when the band were hardly recognizable as what they would become. Here’s another – of AC/DC – from 1976 on Australian TV, though the band isn’t so much unrecognizable as just kinda funny.
LISTENING IN: Burton Stands Tall
- Any conversation about rock’s best vocalist typically begins and ends with Freddie Mercury. But those of a Canadian persuasion sometimes tentatively proffer an alternative: Burton Cummings, the legendary Guess Who frontman, and subsequent solo star.
LISTENING IN: Remembering Kris Kristofferson
- Kris Kristofferson, a Rhodes scholar with a deft writing style and rough charisma who became a country music superstar and an A-list Hollywood actor, died earlier this week. Starting in the late 1960s, the Brownsville, Texas native wrote such country and rock ‘n’ roll standards as “Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down,” “Help Me Make it Through the Night,” "For the Good Times" and "Me and Bobby McGee."
LISTENING IN: For the love of Streetheart
- One of the great Canadian band of the classic rock era, Saskatchewan’s Streetheart scored several hits in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, including covers of Them/Van Morrison’s “Here Comes the Night” and “Under My Thumb,” which in my humble estimation improved on the Stones’ original. My favourite, however, was/still is “What Kind of Love Is This?,” arguably their most memorable hit.
LISTENING IN: New musical takes audiences on a ‘Joyride’ with Roxette
- Furthering the ‘90s musical revival, Malmö Opera in Sweden is hosting ‘Joyride the Musical,’ a new feel-good production paying tribute to the music of Swedish pop band Roxette. The musical takes audiences on a joyful, humorous journey that since its debut Sept. 6 has received rave reviews from audiences, comprised in large part by international visitors.
LISTENING IN: I want to know, have you ever seen John Fogerty?
- An appropriate song for this soggy summer, perhaps, “Have You Ever Seen the Rain” was according to its author John Fogerty, a metaphor for impending change – in particular in respect to his, at the time, troubled band, Creedence Clearwater Revival.
LISTENING IN: You’ve got to hand it to Alanis
- “Jagged Little Pill” catapulted Alanis Morisette into music superstardom in 1995, with the album going on to become one of the highest selling albums of all time (more than 33 million and No. 7 on the all-time Billboard 200 chart) and forever ensuring that the Ottawa-born singer would be one of Canada’s most famous.
LISTENING IN: A look back in anger, and forward with hope
- You might have heard this week that Oasis is getting back together – 15 years after the battling brothers Gallagher busted up, seemingly for good after years of sometimes amusing/ sometimes just-plain-nuts escapades by and between Liam and Noel that continually suggested that real life was quite the opposite of the band’s name.
LISTENING IN: Let’s get together and feel all right
- War in middle east and eastern Europe, US politics, cats and dogs living together! (to quote Bill Murray in Ghostbusters) … It seems we should all just get together and feel all right, which I tend to do when listening to Playing for Change, the amazing collective of world music practitioners who creatively re-interpret favourite songs in the name of peace, love, unity – and charity – through song.
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