Guitarist, singer, and a founding member of New York City’s Spin Doctors, Eric Schenkman returns with “Avocado Eldorado,” a driving rock ’n’ roll track inspired by his grandfather’s Cadillac.

In “Avocado Eldorado,” Schenkman looks back at his grandfather’s green Cadillac Eldorado, presently rusting away in an old Vermont barn. The relic – a wide-ass, loud, stately car – represents freedom and the romance of the open road. For Schenkman in particular, it also honours the “old men” who played pivotal roles in his life.

The song’s title has its own history. In 1995, Schenkman traveled from San Francisco to legendary guitarist David Lindley’s Reseda, CA home with drummer Wally Ingram. When they arrived, Schenkman spotted Lindley’s big blue 1970s Cadillac Eldorado sitting in the driveway.

“My grandfather has the same car, only it’s an avocado Eldorado,” Schenkman remembers telling him. Lindley’s response was immediate: “That’s a song you should write.”

“It only took 30 years!” Schenkman says.

That long pause is fitting for a song Schenkman describes as deeply autobiographical. It brings so many things back to life: his grandfather, his childhood, and the Cadillac itself with its bench seats big enough to sleep on, the chrome grills reflecting the road and the avocado paint giving it all of its funky glory.

I see the chrome grill and the avocado paint

Is it runnin’? It probably ain’t

The track also carries Schenkman’s preference for feel and spontaneity into the studio. Produced by Schenkman and Aaron Goldstein, “Avocado Eldorado” was recorded with “no click track. As unprecious as possible. Immediate rock ’n’ roll, like my experience.”

The recording features Schenkman on vocals and guitar, the dynamic rhythm section of Al Cross on drums and Stan Miczek on bass, with Carleigh Aikens on backup vocals. It was mixed and recorded by Goldstein and Kristian Montano, who mastered the track.

“Avocado Eldorado” was nearly complete, but it needed a bridge, so when Schenkman brought it to longtime friend and collaborator Jono Manson, during a writing and recording session in Santa Fe, Manson supplied the missing lyrics, completing a song whose origins stretched back decades.

Ahead of their upcoming fourth studio album’s 2027 arrival, New York’s Earthquake Lights share “Mr. Always-What-He-Had-To-Be,” a confident, brooding new single that turns psychedelic alt-rock swagger into a character study of arrogance, narcissism and questionable wisdom. Inspired in part by the unruly spirit of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the track inhabits the mind of a self-described artist whose certainty in his own worldview is as compelling as it is misguided.

The song began with a handful of chords the band initially considered disposable. Once they played them together, however, the feeling proved too good to abandon. The confidence of the emerging arrangement soon suggested a personality of its own, providing the foundation for vocalist/pianist Myles Rodenhouse and collaborator Will Cavanaugh to develop the character at the centre of the song.

The result is a narrator who is arrogant, self-important, and convinced he has life figured out. Yet rather than reducing him to a caricature, “Mr. Always-What-He-Had-To-Be” leaves a small but uncomfortable possibility hanging in the air: somewhere beneath all that narcissistic bluster, he might actually have a point. The question is whether he’s someone whose advice you would ever want to take.

The song’s unusual title emerged from one of its defining lyrics, a line that seemed to capture the character so completely that it ultimately sparked the broader lyrical concept. That sense of self-assurance permeates the arrangement as well, allowing the personality of the narrator and the music surrounding him to become increasingly difficult to separate.

A driving force behind that atmosphere is guitarist Cameron Underhill’s spacious, deliberate guitar work. Reverb-drenched chords stretch across the verses without crowding them, leaving deliberate pockets of space for the drums, bass, and vocal. The result is open yet imposing, giving the song a psychedelic haze without sacrificing the muscular momentum of its alternative-rock foundation.

That looseness also carried into the recording itself. Rather than constructing the performance piece by piece, Earthquake Lights recorded the core of “Mr. Always-What-He-Had-To-Be” together at Douglass Recording in Brooklyn with very little comping or editing. Guitarist Justin Garcia improvised the song’s solo on the day, preserving the session’s spontaneity, while vocals, Rhodes and strings orchestrated by Mitchell McCarthy were added later.

The track was co-produced alongside Phil Joly, formerly Chief Engineer at Electric Lady Studios, continuing the creative partnership introduced on the band’s previous single. Its sweeping strings were recorded at London’s legendary Abbey Road Studios as part of a single-day orchestral session for much of the forthcoming album, with additional passages later punched in with an orchestra in Brooklyn.

“Mr. Always-What-He-Had-To-Be” arrives as the second single from Earthquake Lights’ upcoming fourth full-length album, due in early 2027. Where previous single “Too Late” explored longing and regret through soulful, neo-classical songwriting, the new release reveals a decidedly darker and more confrontational side of the record, driven by character, swagger and the uneasy line between confidence and delusion.

Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist Teagan Johnston unveils her sophomore album, Big Time, a candid exploration of ambition, identity, family, heartbreak and the often absurd pursuit of success. Written and recorded over two years between Taurus Recording in Toronto and Sonic Ranch in Texas, the record pushes further into alt-country territory while retaining Teagan’s distinctive collision of singer-songwriter folk, emo and indie/alternative rock. Previously released singles have been met with critical acclaim from CBC’s Q, Exclaim! and Sirius XM.

Big Time emerged during a period when Teagan deliberately stepped back from her music career and began reflecting on a decade spent struggling to “hit the big time.” Rather than arriving at a simple answer, the album questions what that idea actually means, moving between darker experiences of familial trauma and heartbreak, and moments of brevity, humour and recognition of life’s inherent absurdity.

Those reflections are deeply intertwined with Teagan’s understanding of home. After severing ties with several family members while confronting childhood trauma, she began reconsidering the places, relationships and ambitions she had previously looked toward for a sense of belonging.

The title track was the first song Teagan wrote for the record, arriving before she was even certain the music would become something she wanted to release. Its lyric, “We got on like a house on fire,” unexpectedly connected the song to an image sent to her that same night by photographer Christopher Jerome: his photograph “House Fire.”

The image depicts a burning “Vancouver Special” surrounded by an otherwise dark, quiet neighbourhood. Having spent much of her childhood in Victoria, BC, Teagan immediately connected its familiar architecture to her own childhood home and experiences. The contrast between a seemingly ordinary suburban setting and the urgency of a house engulfed in flames mirrored the disconnect between how a family can appear from the outside and what may be unfolding within it. The photograph ultimately became the album cover.

That imagery carries into the “Big Time” music video, co-directed by Teagan and filmmaker Ryan Glover, whose previous collaborations include the Canadian horror film The Strings. Returning to the DIY approach that has long defined their work together, the pair used a projector, Hi8 camera, and Ryan’s family home in Burlington, ON, filming until four in the morning to create a dreamlike exploration of home, identity and memory.

“I wanted to incorporate the album and song’s imagery of a burning home but present it in a way that could feel joyful, explorative and almost childlike,” Teagan explains. “I think when I was writing Big Time, the question of home and identity were really at the forefront of my mind.”

For Teagan, that search for home also became inseparable from her ideas about success. Having grown up moving frequently, she spent much of her twenties consciously or subconsciously looking for belonging in other people and in her career, hoping something “big” might fill the space left behind. Ultimately, both the song and album turn that pursuit inward, questioning whether the “Big Time” is something external to reach at all.

Musically, that journey took shape through two years of writing, recording, and testing the songs in front of live audiences. Sessions stretched from Taurus Recording – whose history includes July Talk, Tokyo Police Club and The Sheepdogs – to Sonic Ranch, the Texas studio associated with artists including Waxahatchee, Fiona Apple and Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Following “Fleury Street” and “Love on the Way Down,” Québec-based singer-songwriter Sébastien De Francesco shares “Leaving Now,” an intimate and bittersweet folk-rock single that imagines the final moments between two close friends from the perspective of the person preparing to leave. Moving between companionship, reassurance and acceptance, the song finds tenderness within loss while holding onto the belief that love and connection continue after someone is gone.

Inspired by the final afternoon Sébastien spent with a close friend who was dying of cancer, “Leaving Now” gradually became an imagined conversation between the two. Some lines are voiced from his friend’s perspective, asking for companionship as his memory and strength begin to fade, while others capture Sébastien’s instinct to comfort and protect him.

“The shifting point of view makes the song feel like an intimate conversation between two friends rather than simply a song about grief,” Sébastien shares.

The song’s title arrives only at its conclusion. Sébastien spent nearly an entire day working on the ending, knowing the conversation needed to reach its final goodbye without becoming overly dramatic. Eventually, the words “But I’m leaving now” emerged, as though his friend were gently acknowledging that it was time to go.

“‘Leaving Now’ expresses the immediacy of that goodbye, but the song also suggests that love and connection remain after someone leaves,” Sébastien explains.

Working once again alongside producer and multi-instrumentalist Lauren Bélec, Sébastien shaped the arrangement to mirror that emotional journey. The track begins restrained and conversational before gradually introducing additional layers and dynamics, allowing the music to expand alongside the weight of the exchange without overpowering its intimacy.

During the guitar solo preceding the song’s grand finale, Lili-Ann De Francesco contributes angelic background vocals that give the passage an almost otherworldly quality, as though the song is briefly moving beyond the physical world. From there, the “Can’t you see / Love is the key to it all” section opens into something wider and more uplifting before the arrangement falls away around the repeated words “Leaving now.”

That rise and release gives the song its emotional arc, moving from a private conversation into a larger expression of enduring love before returning to the simplicity of goodbye. Throughout, the vocal remains deliberately vulnerable and conversational, with Sébastien and Lauren favouring emotional honesty over an overly polished performance.

Canadian singer-songwriter Shiloh Lindsey shares “Wolves In Your Head,” a haunting, restless and ultimately resilient folk-noir track and the second single to be revealed from her forthcoming album, The Western Veil, set for release on November 6th, 2026. Pairing bluesy acoustic guitar with hypnotic rhythms and otherworldly electric textures, the song turns familiar Western imagery inward, transforming a wilderness stalked by wolves into a metaphor for the fears, thoughts, and difficult parts of ourselves that can prove impossible to outrun.

The song grew from Shiloh’s concern for the mental health struggles she witnessed around her, informed by both her own experiences and her work as a mental health worker in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. From there emerged an image: someone alone in the wilderness, huddled around a tiny fire, searching for the language to tell another person how they’re really doing.

“The wolves represent the fears, thoughts and difficult parts of ourselves that can circle in our heads,” Shiloh explains. “The Wild West imagery eventually becomes an internal landscape – the ‘wildest’ territory can sometimes be our own mind.”

As the song unfolds, its relationship with those wolves begins to change. Initially something to fear and fight off, by the end they are invited to sit beside the fire. Drawing on lessons Shiloh encountered through therapy and shadow work, the transformation reflects an understanding that healing does not always mean defeating or eliminating our darker impulses. Sometimes it means learning why they exist and changing the way we meet them.

That idea extends into the bridge, which references the familiar “Two Wolves” parable about opposing forces within ourselves and the belief that whichever wolf we feed will ultimately grow stronger. Shiloh, however, pushes the story somewhere less binary. “Instead of deciding one wolf is good and the other bad,” she asks, “What if we learn why they’re both there and invite them to the fire?”

The recording builds its own strange wilderness around that idea. Producer Jesse Waldman spent considerable time searching for the right guitar voice after a conventional approach failed to capture the world of the lyrics. Using ambient electric guitar through a TC Electronic Flashback 2 pedal on its reverse setting, he created ethereal, almost animalistic sounds that hover around the arrangement like the wolves themselves.

Those textures are paired with Shiloh’s bluesy acoustic guitar and almost disco-like drums and bass, creating an unusual tension between darkness and movement. Beneath the brooding subject matter is something unexpectedly propulsive and hopeful, while the reversed electric guitar ensures a sense of unease never entirely disappears.

That contradiction is central to “Wolves In Your Head.” Rather than promising that darkness can simply be conquered, the song asks what might happen if we stopped running long enough to understand it. The wilderness remains. The wolves remain. What changes is who gets invited closer to the fire.

Lebanese-Canadian artist Raphaela shares “Take It Back,” a nostalgic, uplifting pop single caught between memory and uncertainty. Vivid and cinematic, the track looks back at a love that once felt effortless while confronting how different it has become.

The idea took shape during a writing session in Nashville with Jordan Lake. When asked what she wanted to write about that day, Raphaela noticed an old Dolly Parton vinyl titled I Wish I Felt This Way at Home. Surrounded by the excitement and inspiration of Nashville, the phrase made her consider what happens when a person who once felt like home suddenly doesn’t anymore.

The title initially suggests wanting a relationship back, but its meaning gradually shifts. “Taking it back” becomes less about reversing an ending than revisiting an earlier time when everything was new and full of possibility. “There’s a sadness in knowing you may need to let something go while still longing for the version of it that once felt like home,” Raphaela explains.

That conflict crystallizes in the lyric, “Would it be all for nothing if I leave you now?” It’s a question Raphaela sees extending beyond romance to friendships, careers, or anything into which we have poured significant parts of ourselves.

“When we’ve invested so much of ourselves into something, even when we know in our gut that it’s time to leave, we can spend so much time wondering whether walking away somehow erases everything that came before it,” she says. “I think the song lives in that tension – knowing something can have been meaningful, beautiful and real, even if it isn’t meant to last forever.”

Months after the initial Nashville session, Josh Bogert joined Raphaela to reshape and produce the track, translating that push and pull into cinematic pop. Its structure mirrors the progression: verse one lives in memory, verse two introduces doubt, and the chorus is where the two collide.

“Take It Back” marks the first chapter in a larger body of work that moves through memory, doubt, grief, longing, relapse, and eventually hope. Here, Raphaela establishes the story at its point of uncertainty, before the songs that follow venture deeper into its emotional fallout.