Show date: Jul. 06, 2025
Canadian children’s artist, Heather Feather, is pleased to announce her second studio album, Together, out on June 27, 2025. The 2025 ECMA “Children’s Artist of the Year,” award recipient holds a PhD in Music Theory from McGill, a Bachelor of Music from Memorial University, and is a fearless disability advocate, recently partnering with international advocacy group, RAMPD (Recording Artists and Music Professionals with Disabilities).
Focused on social and emotional development, the album explores concepts in development in a direct and creative manner that is clear and accessible for young listeners. With straightforward lyrics and thoughtfully crafted melodies, the album emphasizes empathy, inclusion, and real-life experiences such as being left out, celebrating others, and learning how to belong. Drawing on her academic training and musical fluency in Folk, Jazz, and Indie music, Heather designed the songs to align with both a child’s cognitive development and emotional world. Her music has been described by CBC as “appealing to kids’ intelligence”.
Heather shared her song A Fishy Tale. Download the lyrics to follow along.
We talked about:
- Our songwriting challenge for 2025 to write a song in an odd time signature
- Including a moral message in children’s songs
- How Heather explores surprises and complexity in her songs
- Reusing melodies from traditional children’s song
- Do kids appreciate complicated things like rhythmic syncopation? (Spoiler: yes they do, as long as you repeat them enough)
- The niche market for children’s songs
Show date: Jul. 01, 2025
Joining us today is rising Canadian country artist Cam Brown, hailing from Barrie, Ontario. Fresh off opening for Dean Brody at this year’s Troubadour Festival in his hometown, Cam is making waves with his original music. His debut single Pretty Lime Margarita recently climbed to #1 on the Canadian Indie Country Countdown and is now spinning on radio stations coast-to-coast. With a modern country sound that blends catchy hooks and heartfelt lyrics, Cam’s also been playing songwriters rounds in Toronto and Newmarket. With two songs out on Spotify—Pretty Lime Margarita and Nothing Like When We Met—he’s spending the summer writing new music and heads back into the studio to record his EP this fall.
Cam shared his song Nothing Like When We Met. Download the lyrics to follow along.
We talked about:
- Our songwriting challenge for 2025 to write a song in an odd time signature
- Writing with a hook-priority approach these days with diminishing attention spans in listeners
- Introducing the right amount of complexity in your song, depending on your story and central idea
- The difference in the rhythmic approach between traditional country and modern pop-country songs
- The evolution of country music and mashing with other genres in the last 10+ years
Show date: Jun. 24, 2025
Natalie Reis is an independent folk singer/songwriter whose music is caught between bittersweet narratives and soaring melodies. Following her debut EP ‘Bones on Fire’ in 2020, Natalie has released six singles that have evolved her storytelling-lyricism and solidified her sound as a distinctive emerging artist. In the past year, she has had the opportunity to showcase her originals all across Ontario. In her latest release, “Elgin Street”, Natalie pairs poetic melancholy with an upbeat chorus that captures the joys and pains of growing up and moving on.
Natalie shared her song Elgin Street. Download the lyrics to follow along.
We talked about:
Show date: Jun. 19, 2025
In this special episode, Phil and Neel talked about cadences, or the different ways to bring resolution to your chord progressions.
We talked about:
- The Nashville numbering system and why it’s important to understand and use when talking about cadences
- Modally interchanging chords – e.g. flipping minor and major chords in your chord palette
- Cadences are often two-chord sequences, but can also be about more than two chords
- How cadences are points of resolution in your song
- Perfect or authentic cadences (V-I)
- How semi-tone relationships within chords are essential to the sound and feeling of cadences
- The Plagal Cadence (IV-I or bVII-I)
- Interrupted or Deceptive Cadences (V –)
- The Phrygian Cadence (V6 – I)
- The Super Mario Cadence (bVI – bVII – I)
- Andalusian Cadence (i-VII-VI-V in a loop)
Show date: Jun. 01, 2025
Toronto-based guitarist, songwriter, vocalist and koto player Jessica Stuart (aka JESSA) has made a music career writing and performing harmonically adventurous, and devastatingly honest indie-jazz-rock tunes around the world. Stuart is also a rare professional female guitarist, with dozens of side-player credits ranging from Mirvish Productions’ SIX to Classic Albums Live to Idioteque, and loves to put her chops in the spotlight when playing her unique, musically playful original songs as the Jessica Stuart Trio.
When not on festival stages, you’ll find Jessica producing albums for other artists in studio, on international and local airwaves, with a Japanese Top 40 single, 5 songs in the Canadian Songwriting Competition finals and as the subject and composer of CBC’s most viewed documentary of all time, Finding Fukueh, with over 15 million views.
Jessica shared her song Price of my Love. Download the lyrics to follow along.
We talked about:
- Our songwriting challenge for 2025 to write a song in an odd time signature
- Did John Lennon INTENTIONALLY Sabotage The Beatles With His Bass Playing?
- The difference between a refrain and a chorus
- How when listeners hear explicit imagery in your songs, their brains light up in the same way as they do with their own memories
- How you can write songs faster when you have more songwriting experience
- How early ideas might not make it into your song (and that’s OK), but they can be used as starting points for other songs
- Collaborating with your former self as a songwriting challenge
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