Some mind-blowing facts about music from 2024
[This was my weekly column for GlobalNews.ca. – AC]
My home office sometimes looks as if a Category 5 hurricane swept through. There are piles of magazines, teetering towers of books, records and CDs that have so far evaded being filed, and dozens of sticky notes and scraps of paper featuring near-illegible scribbles signifying… something. There are also special folders on three different computers filled with bits cut and pasted from websites, newsletters and social media.
This organization catastrophe is the result of 11 months of reading, researching, surfing, scrolling and otherwise sourcing out material for all my music writing, radio shows, podcasts and whatever other assignments fall in my lap. Whenever I run across something that I think might be useful, I squirrel it away somehow, eventually finding a home for the factoid somewhere in my content factory.
Well, most of these bits of trivia find a home. By the end of November, there’s plenty of material that’s orphaned and unused for any number of reasons. I could simply sweep everything into a big recycling bin, file the books, records, and CDs, and continue to ignore those files on my computers. That seems wrong, though, so each December, I cobble together a special Ongoing History of New Music show called 60 Mind Blowing Facts About Music in 60 Minutes. It is aired on the radio before being converted to a podcast so that the whole world may have their minds blown.
However, even with this inventory clearance, I still haven’t used all my cool factoids for 2024. Fortunately, I have this space every week. Here then are an additional 10 mind-blowing items about music. What you do with this information is up to you.
