​A sailboat childhood, a forgotten demo, an unexpected piano and decades of hesitation led one woman to a decision: it was now or never.

Her name is Ariane.

Long before there was an album, there was the sea.

She grew up on the Magdalen Islands, surrounded by wind, water and changing seasons. Part of her childhood was spent on a sailboat, listening to cassettes as the boat moved through the water. At home, there were her parents' vinyl records.

Music was simply part of life.

​Ariane grew up in a creative household — her mother was a musician with twelve years of classical piano studies and played the accordéon — so instruments and sound were always around her.

“I was raised on a sailboat part of my life and grew up listening to cassettes and vinyls with my parents. So music, movement, landscape and memory have always been connected for me,” she says.

Ariane studied visual arts, wrote and sang, and was always creating something. In her twenties, she recorded a four‑song piano‑and‑voice demo with her vocal teacher in a home studio in Montreal.

She had written the songs herself, but didn’t know much about the music industry or what to do with the recordings.

So the demo stayed a demo.

Life got busy, and music moved into the background. She built a business, raised children and took on the responsibilities that came with both.

Then a piano came back into the picture.

And eventually, Ariane would take on a name most people don't know yet.
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ArianZ.
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This is how she got there.

​Joshua, better known to many as Breezy, has a somewhat unusual double life.

He’s a school principal in Phoenix. He works with students, families and teachers. He leads a community.
And he also runs Tracks In Wax, a Phoenix record store that has been part of the city’s music culture since 1982.

On the surface, the two worlds might seem completely unrelated.

Breezy sees it differently.

“Both are really about people, relationships, and community.”
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That idea sits at the heart of how he approaches Tracks In Wax — not as something he simply owns, but as something he has been entrusted to carry forward.

McMaster. Laurier. Guelph. Western. Brock. Queen’s. Trent. Different campuses. Different traditions. Different rhythms.

Yet this fall, they’ll all share something unexpected.

As the new academic year begins, another tradition quietly returns. It doesn’t appear on orientation schedules or campus maps, but for thousands of students across Ontario, it has become one of the first moments where campus life feels truly alive.

Before lectures begin, students gather around folding tables stacked with hundreds of vinyl records.

Coffee in one hand, backpack slipping off the other shoulder, they flip through Fleetwood Mac, Bob Dylan, The Smiths, Nirvana, The Stone Roses, Kendrick Lamar, Taylor Swift, and jazz classics.

Someone laughs after finding an album their dad won’t stop talking about. Someone else holds up a record and says, “You have to hear this.” A first‑year student buys their very first LP. A seasoned collector finds a pressing they didn’t expect to see on campus.

Suddenly, the conversation isn’t about classes or exams. It’s about music — and memories.

They Owe Us — Katzengold

I've been thinking a lot lately about how little music any of us actually hear.

There is so much of it out there, yet most of us spend our listening lives within a pretty small circle. The music we grew up with. The bands we know. The genres we feel comfortable with.

There's nothing wrong with that. I do it too.

But it made me wonder: how much music are we actually missing?

That question started with Michel Faber's Listen: On Music, Sound and Us.

Early in the book, Faber writes: “I’m not here to change your mind about Dusty Springfield or Shostakovich or Tupac Shakur or synthpop. I’m here to change your mind about your mind.”

That line stopped me.

I've started trying to do exactly that.

And Katzengold, the new album from They Owe Us, landed at exactly the right time.

I listened to it digitally first, then went back to it on vinyl. I wanted to give it some time before deciding what I thought.

That led me to Kristoffer Ragnstam.

Thunder Bay has always had a complicated relationship with distance.

It’s a long way from Toronto. A long way from most of the Canadian music industry. But for decades, people in this city have found ways to make music happen anyway.

Some of that history happened at a place called Crocks N Rolls.

The legendary Thunder Bay venue became a home for touring and local bands, with generations of people carrying memories of the shows that happened there. Sarah MacLachlan, The Tragically Hip, Rheostatics, 54-40, Cowboy Junkies, Big Sugar, Matthew Good, Sloan and Blue Rodeo all passed through its doors, alongside Canadian indie and punk acts such as D.O.A., Bourbon Tabernacle Choir, The Grapes of Wrath, Eric’s Trip and SNFU, to name a few.

The list is as vast as the highway they travelled.

For generations of Thunder Bay music fans, Crocks wasn’t simply another venue. It was the room.

Today, part of that same room is home to The Vinyl Frontier.
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Owner Chris Bernst knows exactly what the address means.

​The stage is gone. The records are still here.
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And the story of The Vinyl Frontier begins, somewhat improbably, with a storage problem.

Over the past several months, I’ve been connecting with record store owners, independent artists, and vinyl collectors as I’ve been building Vinyl Vibes​, sharing their stories and celebrating the culture that keeps vinyl alive.

Somewhere along that journey, I came across an incredible book called The Record Keepers by Josh Greenberg, a project built around digging into the stories behind Canada’s record stores and the people who keep them going.

I spent the past few weeks with Josh’s book — a bit strategically, honestly. I’d pair chapters with listening sessions, spinning albums like David Bowie’s Scary Monsters or Echo & the Bunnymen’s Songs to Learn and Sing. I started with the Ontario chapter and eventually journeyed coast to coast, discovering stories that made it feel like I was standing inside the shops myself.

That’s what made The Record Keepers such an enjoyable read for me. It isn’t simply a book about record stores. It’s about the people behind the counter, the customers walking through the door, the records they discover and the communities that form around them.

Vinyl has always had a way of bringing people together.

Sometimes it happens in a record store, standing beside someone flipping through the same bin. Sometimes it's a conversation at a record show or a recommendation from someone who knows exactly what you're looking for.

And sometimes it starts online.

That's how I came across Vinyl Threads Collective, a group of music and record lovers who found each other through Instagram and turned a group chat into something much more.

I recently had the chance to talk with two of the people behind the collective, Luis and Sophie, about how the group came together, what keeps it going and why it has become such an important part of their lives.
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What I found wasn't a story about one person building a community.

It was a story about a group of people who found each other through a shared love of music, then kept showing up for one another.

Walk into Kops Records today and you will still find what has made the store special for decades: walls of records, deep catalogue, and people who love music. But you will also notice something else — a new generation helping carry that history forward.

Founded in 1976, Kops has survived every major shift in how people discover music, from vinyl’s decline to CDs, downloads, streaming, and now the renewed excitement around physical records.

But record stores have never survived simply because of what is on the shelves. They survive because of the people who create the experience.
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Among those people is Taylar, a musician from Wellington, New Zealand, whose journey at Kops began behind the scenes and grew into a role helping connect the store with a new generation of listeners

Some albums arrive quietly, almost by accident. Silver Spoon found me through a physical copy sitting at Flashbacks in Hamilton, waiting for someone to take a chance on it.

I went out of my way to pick it up because Chad always seems to have something interesting spinning, and I've come to trust his taste more than any algorithm. I'd streamed a couple of Fighting Frogs tracks, just enough to get a feeling for the band.

Something clicked.

So I made the trip.

What I came home with was CD 50 of 50, the final copy in the band's limited run. The number wasn't printed or factory-stamped. It was a homemade label stuck right on the front of the CD case.

That small detail says a lot.

This wasn't a major-label release designed to sit neatly on a shelf. It was two Hamilton musicians making something themselves, putting together fifty physical copies and sending them out into the world.
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Holding the last one made it feel less like buying an album and more like catching a small piece of a local music story while it was happening.

Canada has a knack for producing world-class independent music across just about every genre. The problem is that in the streaming era, finding those artists can feel harder than ever.

Music is everywhere, all the time. Thousands of new releases push through algorithms every week, each one fighting for a few seconds of our attention. And somehow, the more access we have, the harder it can become to connect with anything long enough to actually feel something.

Music discovery isn’t broken because there’s a lack of music.

It’s broken because there’s a lack of attention.

So when something does land—when a song cuts through the noise and makes me stop what I’m doing—I pay attention.

For context, I don’t cover anything I don’t genuinely like.

The first record that pulled Joe Hat into vinyl wasn't even his.

It was Black Flag's Damaged, sitting in his college radio station in Toronto in 2010. Joe was studying graphic design, buying CDs and getting deeper into heavy metal and hardcore punk when a classmate brought the album into INtune Radio.
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The music grabbed him. The artwork grabbed him even more.

Long before Elevated Music became a record store, it was a way for Bill to bring together everything music had given him.

Growing up just outside Vancouver, he started playing drums at ten years old and spent his teenage years chasing records with the same enthusiasm he brought to making music. While most people his age were buying the latest releases, Bill was already building a collection that stretched into the thousands.

​That obsession never really changed. It simply evolved.

By his mid-twenties, he was doing whatever he could to make music pay the bills. He recorded local artists, produced beats, played session drums, organized live events and sold records on the side. None of those jobs alone offered much security, but together they allowed him to keep building a life around music.

In 2011, at 25, he created Elevated Music—not as a record shop, but as the name for all of his creative work.

A deep dive into Kevin Crump’s passion for overlooked records, underground scenes, and the stories hidden inside the grooves.

That's how Kevin Crump opens almost every video. It's a playful, punk-rooted catchphrase that sets the tone before he even lifts a record.

He loves the mythology behind records as much as the records themselves. The whispered Beatles tapes that slipped out of Abbey Road. The bootlegs that feel half legend until you hear him explain where they came from. That's where the Record Detective comes alive. He's not chasing condition or value. He's chasing the strange, the overlooked, the records that shouldn't exist but somehow do.

Like the Russian pirate pressing of Daydream Nation, Sonic Youth's landmark 1988 double LP. He didn't show it off like a collector. He held it like evidence.

I first came across Kevin through one of those videos. That unmistakable opening line. The guerrilla-style delivery. The punk‑rooted intensity. The quick cuts. The raw enthusiasm.
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It reminded me of Nardwuar the Human Serviette. The same passion. The same deep-cut knowledge. The same genuine curiosity you can feel through the screen.

​Growing up is supposed to be simple, but most of us learn early that it isn't.

Love doesn't always last. Confidence comes and goes. Identity can feel uncertain. Healing rarely happens when we expect it. These are the quiet realities people carry for years before they ever find the words to describe them.

Happy Thought School gives those feelings a voice.
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This isn't an album built for playlists or background listening. It asks for your attention. It's the kind of record that rewards sitting down with it, preferably on vinyl, where every pause between songs feels intentional.

​That is what makes this collaboration with Paper Bag Records feel like such a natural fit. Their artists have always leaned toward honesty over trends, creating records that reveal a little more of themselves with every listen.

For years, Justin built a shoegaze album in the quiet margins of his life. Not in studios or rehearsal spaces, but in the hours after everything else — after work, after the kids were asleep, when the house finally settled. Headphones on, lights low, he shaped a private world of swirling guitars and whispered vocals one session at a time.

He grew up loving the kind of music that feels like weather. The haze of My Bloody Valentine. The softness of Slowdive. The drive of Ride. The atmosphere of The Jesus and Mary Chain. Those influences shaped the way he hears sound, and they shaped the way he built the songs that would eventually become his band, Azure Rose.

​It wasn’t a project. It was a ritual. And in 2026, he finally lets the rest of us in.