I'm currently conducting interviews and doing archival research on the local music scene in Toronto in the 1950s and 60s, especially as found on Yonge Street and in Yorkville Village. This project has been ongoing since 2017 as a part-time project/obsession.
At the moment, I'm writing a draft of a book about Yorkville coffee houses from 1954 to 1968.
Here are links to some of my earlier work:
When The Blues Came To Yorkville Maple Blues Newsletter, January 2020: 4-5
Some excerpts from my research into live music in 1960s Yorkville coffee houses, focusing on blues performances within the boundaries of the Village.
Listening To 'Space' Grateful Dead Studies Vol. 4, 2019/2020
A musicological analysis and interpretation of one minute of a 1976 Grateful Dead "Space" performance. First presented years before at So Many Roads: The World in the Grateful Dead, a remarkable conference in San Jose.
The Voice(s) of Frank Sinatra originally published in Frank Sinatra: 100th Birthday, I-5, January 2016
Written for a supermarket magazine, this was my first foray into writing about Frank Sinatra's singing.
John Lennon's Solo Albums: A Critical Guide originally published in John Lennon, I-5, December 2015.
Same deal, this is a series of capsule reviews of John Lennon's solo albums.
Mattie May Thomas, Mystery Blueswoman Maple Blues Newsletter, November 2016: 6-7.
Original research into the life of Mattie May Thomas, who recorded just four sides at Parchman prison in 1936 for ethnomusicologist Herbert Halpert.
Miranda Sings (Badly): A YouTube Star Mediates Adolescence Paper given at International Association for the Study of Popular Music - Canada and U.S. Chapter Meeting. Calgary, Alberta. May 28, 2016.
Going off in another direction, analyzing the brief phenomenon of Miranda Sings, an operatically trained YouTube star whose shtick was bad singing.
Lou Reed's 'Ostrich' Tuning as an Aesthetic Point of Articulation Rock Music Studies, 3:2, 148-156 (2016)
First presented at a conference on the electric guitar in culture in Bowling Green, Ohio the previous year.
Bob Dylan's 'Like A Rolling Stone': Vocal Performance and Speech Intonation Oral Tradition 22/1 (2007): 84-98.
Based on the fourth chapter of my Dylan thesis (see CV), this was my bid to try to explain some of the received meaning of the song by micro-analyzing Dylan's use of speech-song.
"Patti Smith's 'Gloria': Intertextual Play in a Rock Vocal Performance" Popular Music Vol. 16, No. 3 (Oct. 1997): 235-253
I had the beginner's luck of getting published in Popular Music, a long-running and eminent British journal, with an essay that I wrote in the first year of my master's at York in ethnomusicology.
Fate's Right-Hand Gal: Mary Martin, Music Business Catalyst unpublished manuscript.
An ongoing biographical project on Mary Martin, the Canadian music business maven who transformed the careers of Bob Dylan, the Band, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison, Emmylou Harris, Rodney Crowell and more. Based on the Mary Martin collected papers at the Rock Hall Archives in Cleveland.