Folk singer-songwriter Dan Pallotta has a delicate and hopeful new single to share entitled “Kendra’s Pictures.” The Kendra in question was a neighbour of Pallotta’s who “took the most beautiful landscape and nature photographs that were filled with light.”
The song features a gently rolling melody which seeks to transmit a feeling of light and of beauty that transcends mortality. Pallotta took many approaches to the song’s production, experimenting with synthesizers, piano, and upright bass.
After trying out many renditions of the song that didn’t quite fit, it was Marc Muller’s lap steel guitar playing that gave “Kendra’s Pictures” its dreamlike quality. “It was big without suffocating the negative space we needed for the lyrics to come through,” explains Pallotta. “It gave the song an other-worldly feeling that the story was calling for.”
Sim Bansal, the bandleader of four-piece Action Forever, grew up in Brantford, Ontario. His obsession with music began at age five and, for the next two decades, his natural talents were fostered by a musical family upbringing and constant exposure to a unique and eclectic mix of influences ranging from ’80s pop, to progressive rock, to jazz, and indie.
The music of Action Forever, while lively, electric, melodic and danceable, explores darker themes such as loneliness in a digital age, abusive relationships, loss of identity, and mental health. New single, “Stay With You,” loosely tells the story of the troubled relationship of two lovers from the point of view of the abused.
Victoria Staff is an indie pop songwriter who uses the written word to communicate the complex themes of love, loss, and her struggle with mental health to her audience. Her debut project, Records & Honesty, was released in 2023, under the guidance of Canadian music producer Dan Hosh. The heavy undertones of her music are offset by her comedic personality on stage, on social media, and amongst her peers.
Her comedic personality is exhibited on her song, “Niagara,” about a trip to Niagara Falls with a relationship that didn’t work out. Thus began her “smear campaign” against Niagara Falls, which has lost its magic for Staff. You’re introduced to this cheeky attitude at the start of the song with a candid conversation between Staff‘s producer, Hosh, and her sister, talking shit about Staff‘s previous relationships.
At the time she wrote it, she felt frustrated. It’s a little bit silly, and perhaps moodier than her other music, but the song ended up being an absolute joy to create.
Nelson Sobral is a singer-songwriter and guitarist hailing from Toronto, equally inspired by the vast, wide open spaces of the country he calls home and the labyrinthine maze of the city in which he resides. His music is as much Americana and blues as it is soul and rock ‘n’ roll, perfectly balanced with the energy and sound of each of his respective influences, uniting them all with one, singular mission: to move and energize audiences into an all-night frenzy and travel the world on the might of his song.
His gritty new single, “Hang On,” is delta blues shot up with electric rock and roll. This is the third taste of his upcoming full-length album, the follow up to 2022’s Second Arrow.
