Our Favourite Singers is a new six-episode video series featuring Dr. Mike Daley (The 1970s in Seventy Songs, The Beatles and Their World, The Classic Albums Vol. 1) and musician Jill Daley. Mike and Jill presented How Music Works last fall and now with Our Favourite Singers, you'll learn about great vocalists from the worlds of rock, opera, soul music and more, and what makes them special. Each lecture is prerecorded and will be released on six successive Monday mornings, after which point you can watch them at any time.

How it works:

Each Monday beginning on March 29 and continuing for six weeks, you will receive an email with a link to a prerecorded video lecture being released that week. The videos are hosted on Vimeo.com and all you need do is click the link - there is no need to join Vimeo. You can view the video at any time as many times as you like, pausing and restarting as needed. The videos are viewable on a computer, tablet or phone, just like a YouTube video.

When you purchase the series through Eventbrite, please give the email address that you use regularly - Mike will be sending the links to the email address that you provide. If you have any questions or problems, please email Mike at mikedaley@gmail.com.

Prerecorded video lecture release dates:

March 29: When you purchase the series, you will receive an email containing a link to the first lecture. Afterwards, you will receive emails on the following Monday mornings with the new links as they come out.

Lecture 1: 1 hour 34 minutes

Featured: Fritz Wunderlich, Sam Cooke

Also: Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding

April 5: You will receive an email from Mike with a link to Lecture 2. You can watch this video at any time from this point.

Lecture 2: 1 hour 13 minutes

Featured: Andy Williams, Amy Winehouse

Also: Edith Piaf, George Michael, Connie Francis, Sam Smith

April 12: You will receive an email from Mike with a link to Lecture 3. You can watch this video at any time from this point.

Lecture 3: 1 hour 7 minutes

Featured: Elly Ameling, John Lennon

Also: Marian Anderson, Barrett Strong

April 19: You will receive an email from Mike with a link to Lecture 4. You can watch this video at any time from this point.

Lecture 4: 1 hour 41 minutes

Featured: Whitney Houston, Freddie Mercury

Also: Dolly Parton, Jennifer Hudson, Anthony Callea

April 26: You will receive an email from Mike with a link to Lecture 5. You can watch this video at any time from this point.

Lecture 5: 1 hour 41 minutes

Featured: Angela Gheorghiu, Howlin' Wolf, Mattie May Thomas, A.W. Nix

May 3: You will receive an email from Mike with a link to Lecture 6. You can watch this video at any time from this point.

Lecture 6: 1 hour 52 minutes

Featured: Luciano Pavarotti, Father Seraphim, Frank Sinatra

Also: Anna Moffo, Ella Fitzgerald

Remember - if you fall behind in watching the lectures, the links will not expire. You can catch up when you have time.

Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young has had a long and legendary career. His classic songs include "Heart of Gold", "Helpless", and "Rockin' in the Free World." In this series, Dr. Mike Daley covers Young's life and music in detail from his beginnings in Winnipeg with the Squires, his Yorkville sojourn with the Mynah Birds, his breakthrough with Buffalo Springfield, superstardom with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and his long-standing collaboration with Crazy Horse.  Neil continues to release new albums and become more active in a variety of causes, from antiwar protest to environmentalism to a broadside against digital music streaming. This wide-ranging video lecture series incorporates numerous music and video examples of the work of a Canadian icon.

Lecture 1: Early years. In this first lecture, we cover Neil Young's beginnings in Ontario and Manitoba. Shortly after moving back to Toronto, Neil joins the Mynah Birds, a Yorkville-based band, and then heads to California.

Lecture 2: Buffalo Springfield and early solo years. In Los Angeles, Neil helped to form Buffalo Springfield, a short-lived but influential band. After recording a first solo album, he recruited the band that would accompany him on and off to the present, Crazy Horse.

Lecture 3: CSNY and After The Gold Rush. Neil joined the supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and achieved wide acclaim. This helped to make his solo album After The Goldrush a hit and established Neil as a major talent.

Lecture 4: Harvest and "the ditch". Making a move into country-rock, Neil recorded Harvest in 1972. "Heart Of Gold" became a massive hit single. In reaction, Neil headed for "the ditch" as he termed it, releasing three shambolic and uncommercial albums known by fans as "the ditch trilogy."

Lecture 5: Reunions and Rust Never Sleeps. In the mid-1970s, Neil reformed Crazy Horse and reunited with CSNY for a major tour. He concluded the decade with two popular albums, Rust Never Sleeps and Comes A Time.

Lecture 6: Experimentation. Neil flitted between a number of disparate styles of music in the 1980s, bewildering his fans. Trans was an electronic pop album, Everybody's Rockin' was rockabilly, and This Note's For You was rhythm and blues.

Lecture 7: Godfather of Grunge. With his 1989 hit "Rockin' In The Free World," Neil had a comeback of sorts, and would come to be seen in the 1990s as a senior figure of "grunge," a style of rock music reminiscent of Young's work with Crazy Horse. He would also reprise his Harvest sound with the hit album Harvest Moon in this decade.

Lecture 8: Recent Years. In the new millennium, Neil Young has continued to release new albums and has become more active in a variety of causes, from antiwar protest to environmentalism to a battle against low-quality digital music streaming.

When you purchase the series, you will be able to download a pdf document containing a link to the eight lectures. You can watch them at any time, as much as you want, and they are downloadable for offline viewing.

In this NEW video lecture series, Dr. Mike Daley (The Classic Albums Vol. 1, The Beatles and their World, the 1960s in Sixty Songs, How Music Works) tells the story of the 1970s through seventy great songs of the era, one year at a time from 1970 through 1979. The lectures will be available to stream indefinitely or you can download them to watch offline. We’ll cover singer-songwriters, country-rock, progressive rock, disco, new wave, soft rock and much more. Each song is discussed with Mike’s usual deep research and perceptive analysis along with carefully chosen audio and video clips.

How it works:

Each Monday beginning on January 18 and continuing for ten weeks, you will receive an email with a link to a prerecorded video lecture being released that week. The videos are hosted on Vimeo.com and all you need do is click the link - there is no need to join Vimeo. You can view the video at any time as many times as you like, pausing and restarting as needed. The videos are viewable on a computer, tablet or phone, just like a YouTube video. In addition to the video lectures, Mike will create an optional Spotify playlist with all of the songs and accept questions via email for a bonus prerecorded Q&A video after the last lecture.

Please give the email address that you use regularly - Mike will be sending the links to the email address that you provide. If you have any questions or problems, please email Mike at mikedaley@gmail.com.

Prerecorded video lecture release dates:

January 18: You will receive an email from Mike with a link to a lecture covering 1970. You can watch this video at any time from this point.

January 25: You will receive an email from Mike with a link to a lecture covering 1971. You can watch this video at any time from this point.

February 1: You will receive an email from Mike with a link to a lecture covering 1972. You can watch this video at any time from this point.

February 8: You will receive an email from Mike with a link to a lecture covering 1973. You can watch this video at any time from this point.

February 15: You will receive an email from Mike with a link to a lecture covering 1974. You can watch this video at any time from this point.

February 22: You will receive an email from Mike with a link to a lecture covering 1975. You can watch this video at any time from this point.

March 1: You will receive an email from Mike with a link to a lecture covering 1976. You can watch this video at any time from this point.

March 8: You will receive an email from Mike with a link to a lecture covering 1977. You can watch this video at any time from this point.

March 15: You will receive an email from Mike with a link to a lecture covering 1978. You can watch this video at any time from this point.

March 22: You will receive an email from Mike with a link to a lecture covering 1979. You can watch this video at any time from this point.

March 29: You will receive an email from Mike with a link to a video where he answers questions emailed by midnight on March 28. You can watch this video at any time from this point.

Remember - if you fall behind in watching the lectures, the links will not expire. You can catch up when you have time.

Email Mike at mikedaley@gmail.com with any questions or problems.

It is now 58 years since Bob Dylan recorded his first Columbia album. In that time, many imitators have come and gone, but Dylan remains one of our most fascinating and unpredictable cultural figures. His influence on the art and craft of songwriting is immeasurable, and it is arguably true that the summer 1965 release of "Like A Rolling Stone" transformed postwar popular music. Although he is one of the most famous people on earth, the notoriously private and evasive Dylan remains something of an enigma. Over six lectures, musicologist, musician and lifelong Dylan fan Dr. Mike Daley, (whose research on Bob Dylan's singing style won the 1998 York University Thesis Prize), will break down Dylan's career through the decades. Known as a great lyricist, Dylan will also be shown to also be a brilliant performer and interpreter. We'll survey the ways that Dylan's work has been interpreted over the years and suggest some new approaches to his art. We'll also situate Dylan firmly within his times, from his role in the generational schisms of the 1960s right up to his recent Nobel Prize for Literature. With fresh insights and a critical ear, this course will be an authorative account of Bob Dylan's life and music. Lecture 1: We begin by looking at Bob Dylan as cultural figure, taking stock of the ways that his work has resonated. We'll sketch out the world of American vernacular music and radical politics that Dylan inherited. From the leftist folksong movement of the 1930s through the field recordings of Alan Lomax and the commercial folk boom of the 1950s, the time was right for Bob Dylan. We will trace his early life in northern Minnesota, the child of Abraham and Beatrice Zimmerman. After moving to Minneapolis for university, Dylan finds a small but vibrant folk music scene, continuing the musical education begun in high school rock and roll combos. After reading Woody Guthrie's autobiography, the nineteen-year-old Dylan drops out of university and plans a pilgrimage.

Lecture 2:  When Dylan arrives in New York, he finds acceptance among the folk music old guard and Woody Guthrie himself, now institutionalized and dying of Huntington's Disease. After a swift rise in the fertile Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene, Dylan is improbably signed to a major record label. With the release of his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, he begins a career ascent that will take him to the top reaches of the (commercial) folk revival of the 1960s. Anthems like "Blowin' In The Wind" and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" soon become legendary and spawn a generation of imitators with harmonica racks and scratchy voices. By late 1964, Dylan is ready to jettison the orthodoxies of the folk scene as he watches the rise of the Beatles.

Lecture 3:  Dylan serves notice to the folkies with "Subterranean Homesick Blues" in early 1965. After a disastrous appearance at the Newport Folk Festival brandishing an electric guitar and backed by a loud rock band, Dylan finds himself getting booed and heckled on tour. His response is to make his music even louder, with the #1 pop hit "Like A Rolling Stone" achieving major commercial success. In the process, Dylan carves a new place for himself on the pop charts, and gives rock music a brain (which it sometimes uses). After a mysterious 1966 motorcycle accident, Dylan abruptly withdraws to a quiet family life through late 1967, punctuated by the marathon home demo recordings known as the Basement Tapes. Dylan closes out the 1960s with a mainstream country album, Nashville Skyline. Dylan's mysterious nature and increasingly legendary countercultural status spawn a shadowy world of obsessive fans. We will acquaint ourselves with the likes of A.J. Weberman who stole Dylan's garbage and published the contents in underground magazines. The notoriously private and increasingly reclusive Dylan leaves New York and moves his growing family to a walled compound in Malibu.

Lecture 4:  As the 1970s begin, Dylan releases the substandard Self Portrait, a move that at least helped to deflate his outsize legend. From this point, Dylan could continue his career unhampered by mainstream expectations. By 1974, he is back on tour with the Band and then the Rolling Thunder Revue, barnstorming arenas across North America. His marriage in tatters, Dylan pens the cathartic Blood On The Tracks album, which recharges his fan base and places Dylan at the top of the singer-songwriter scene that he helped spawn. Following a drawn out divorce, Dylan abruptly converts to born-again Christianity, releasing two albums of all-religious material that alienate many of his fans again.

Lecture 5:  The 1980s begin with Dylan performing only his religious material in concert, but the evangelical lyrics begin to subside by 1981's Shot Of Love. Dylan tries to update his sound and image with contemporary record production and glossy music videos, with mixed results. His second marriage in 1986 is kept secret, while large-scale tours with Tom Petty and the Grateful Dead keep Dylan's profile high through the 80s. Beginning in 1988, Dylan tours more or less constantly. "The Never Ending Tour" continues to this day. Dylan's son Jakob enjoys a period of success with his own band, the Wallflowers. After some disappointing album releases, Dylan clears the decks with two albums of solo acoustic folk songs, then returns after a recording hiatus with the well-regarded Time Out Of Mind.

Lecture 6:  His artistic and cultural status assured, Dylan spends much of the 2000s collecting awards for his work, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom as well as Academy Award. His 2001 album Love and Theft is considered one of Dylan's best efforts, even as he is accused of borrowing text without attribution. In 2004 Dylan releases the first volume of his autobiography, Chronicles. This idiosyncratic account only deepens Dylan's legend. In 2006 Dylan begins to host a satellite radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour. Though he is now a highly respected figure, Dylan continues to confound expectations by releasing several albums of Frank Sinatra hits and reinterpreting his songs, sometimes unrecognizably, in live performance. Even as his 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature ratifies his legendary reputation, Dylan's absence from the acceptance ceremony underscores his unpredictable nature.

Revolver - The Beatles; Pet Sounds - The Beach Boys; Tapestry - Carole King; The Band - The Band; Bridge Over Troubled Water - Simon and Garfunkel

In this new video lecture series, Dr. Mike Daley (The Beatles And Their World, The 1960s In Sixty Songs, How Music Works) undertakes a deep dive into five classic LPs with his usual careful research and engaging style. Mike tells the story of each album's creation, fits it into the currents of the times, and discusses each song in detail. Packed with information and insight, The Classic Albums Vol. 1 casts new light on some of the most beloved albums of all time. Each lecture is pre-recorded, from 90 minutes to over 2 hours in length. The links don't expire, and you can download the video or simply watch it online, Netflix-style, at any time.

Why does the music of the Beatles sound different from the Rolling Stones? How do musicians improvise? What makes Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony so memorable?

In this new six video lecture series, musician, musicologist and lecturer Dr. Mike Daley (The Beatles and Their World, The 1960s in Sixty Songs) will be joined by Jill Daley, full-time pianist at Canada's National Ballet School and musician-in-residence at Church of the Redeemer for a series of dialogues and demonstrations to answer these questions and more. Mike and Jill will explain the inner workings of rhythm, melody, harmony, texture and timbre, composition and improvisation with the aid of live musical examples on guitar, piano, violin and voice from the world of rock, jazz, classical, folk and more.

Dr. Mike Daley Presents: The 1960s in Sixty Songs, a ten lecture series

About this Event In this NEW ten lecture series, Dr. Mike Daley tells the story of 1960s popular music through a selection of sixty songs that cover Motown, girl groups, the Brill Building, the British Invasion, soul music, the Canadian scene, country music, psychedelic rock, folk-rock, and more. In each video, Mike covers a year from 1960 to 1969 through six songs that tell the story of musical trends, world events and popular culture in that year. As always, Mike’s well-researched commentary is illustrated with video clips, recorded music and live musical demonstrations. The 1960s In Sixty Songs has never been offered before and is exclusively available through mikedaleymusic.com.

Dr. Mike Daley presents The Folk Revival as an online six lecture series. When you purchase the series, you will be able to download a document containing a link leading to a Vimeo folder containing all six lectures. You may watch the lectures at any time, in any order, as many times as you like.

The Folk Music Revival is a short history of the urban folk revival, especially during the 1950s and 1960s. The folk revival was rooted in 19th and early 20th century folk song collecting, field recordings by Alan Lomax and others, and songs of solidarity and protest during the 1930s labour movement. Beginning with the commercial breakthrough of the Weavers in 1950, we will examine the postwar urban folk revival in the US and Canada. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Ian and Sylvia, Peter, Paul and Mary and other icons of the revival will be given special attention. After examining the fusions of folk and rock in the 1960s, we'll conclude with a discussion of the folk legacy in the singer-songwriter milieu and contemporary folk music traditions. Each lecture is enriched with video clips, rare images and music clips.

Dr. Mike Daley presents The Beatles And Their World as an online eight lecture series. When you purchase the series, you will be able to download a document containing a link leading to a Vimeo folder containing all eight lectures. You may watch the lectures at any time, in any order, as many times as you like.

This lecture series tracks the musical development of the Beatles, starting from the earliest days in Liverpool, moving through the excitement of Beatlemania, the rush of psychedelia, and the maturity of their studio years. While the focus will be on the music, we will also consider how recording techniques, the music business, the music of other artists, and the larger culture of the 1960s affected John, Paul, George, and Ringo as they created their classic works. Each lecture is enriched with video clips, rare images and music clips.