Celebrated vocalist and performer MYLA (aka Jennifer Budd) is dedicated to telling deeply personal stories through her music. 2021 brought many changes for the Hamilton, ON success story, starting with changing her artist name to MYLA to reflect the romantic nature of the music she creates. The future is wide open for MYLA to tell her stories and connect deeply with her audience.
New single, “Unrequited Love,” is about feeling led on by someone who sees you as “just a friend.” The love you have is not mutual, and yet not discouraged. First learning of unrequited love back while reading Romeo and Juliet in high school, MYLA often wondered about the story of Romeo’s unrequited love, Rosaline, at the beginning of the play and found herself dreaming of her side of the story. Some love stories have a Romeo, a Juliet, and a Rosaline. Just turns out some of us are often cast as the latter.
A few years ago, Andrew Shaver directed the musical Once in Montréal. Eva Foote walked in to audition for “Girl,” the female lead, and blew him away. This was the beginning of a beautiful friendship and musical collaboration, now known as Clever Hopes.
The duo’s new single, “Shadow Waltz,” is a gentle piece of Americana featuring Shaver and Foote’s soft vocal harmonies, woven together by a reflection on Shaver’s time spent in Australia following the dissolution of a relationship.
“It’s about that conflict you can feel when you know things are changing and you need to say goodbye to who you were without fully understanding who it is you are becoming,” explain Clever Hopes.
Montréal based indie pop duo Down With Space are vocalist/guitarist Rob Helsten and drummer Steve Dumas – the classic Montréal meeting of an English speaker (Helsten) and a French speaker (Dumas) who have found an understanding through music when language can sometimes elude communication. Formed in 2019 just before the world shut down, Down With Space have adopted a DIY ethos to keeping their process in house while creating sounds that are equally balanced between synthesis and organic instruments.
New single, “What You Keep Telling Yourself” is about perseverance. Inspired by a pair of completely unrelated, unfortunate life experiences – a bicycle accident and a reasonably serious kitchen fire (serious enough to involve the fire department, anyway) – the song’s message is about getting past the bad and getting on with the good.
The group shares:
Getting past the bad and getting on with the good is at the heart of our new song.
Inspired by a pair of completely unrelated, unfortunate life experiences – a bicycle accident and a serious kitchen fire – “What You Keep Telling Yourself” is centered around the theme of perseverance.
Break your face, burn your house, or something more
Listen to “What You Keep Telling Yourself” on your favourite platform
Our frontman, Rob Helsten, shot and edited the music video for this track, catching the vibrant summer colours of the sky along with a transition into sunset and the imposing nighttime.
We’re all just people trying to make the best of things and when it comes down to it, nothing is really that bad. We all have our place here.
Hope you embrace the positive mood and spirit of this indie rock tune.
Two Late To The Party is a Calgary, Alberta based indie-folk duo featuring Adam Corkett and Alessandra Enns.
Their earnest, climatic new single, “In The Sunrise,” is a duet meant to inspire hope. Stripped back to just acoustic guitar, piano, and vocals, this song acknowledges the struggle of life and how difficult the journey can be.
The human experience of loneliness and anxiety is normal. “In The Sunrise” offers the reminder that with the dawn, comes new life, and a chance for new beginnings. Horns and percussion join with Corkett and Enns’ voices just as the light of a new day beckons.
The Daddy Raygun Band is a collective of renowned Toronto musicians that collaborate to produce musical soundscapes for the lyrical musings of their friend Danny Regan. Void of a musical background, Regan‘s somewhat unorthodox song structures rely more on storytelling techniques than traditional songwriting formats. He prefers to paint pictures with words to take the listener on an aural journey.
Bordering on gothic country, Regan speaks on new single, “The One Armed Man” – The majority of my friends are musicians. I am not. I am a storyteller. A writer. I wanted to collaborate with them musically. They challenged me to write a song. I did. They liked it. They agreed to provide the music to my words. The Daddy Raygun Band was formed.
The group shares:
I come from a long line of storytellers and have always been intrigued by dramatic songs that take the listener on a vivid audio journey. My musician friends challenged me to write this particular style of ballad and agreed to provide the musical accompaniment to my words. And thus The Daddy Raygun Band was formed.
Our debut single, “The One Armed Man,” was inspired by the captivating, wildly popular, classic television series, The Fugitive.
It’s a suspenseful cat and mouse story of an honest man wrongly convicted of murdering his wife, perpetually on the run from the unrelenting pursuit of the law.
All the while endlessly searching for that dark, elusive shadow he saw escaping the scene of the crime, “The One Armed Man”.
Hailing from the countryside of rural Ontario, Benjamin Dakota Rogers channels his penchant for starry nights and nostalgia into a stylized Americana sound full of heartbreak and grit featuring the guitar, banjo, upright bass, and fiddle. At just 25, the two-time Canadian Folk Music Awards nominee and four-time international songwriting competition winner promises to deepen the path he’s already carved for himself in the years to come.
Inspired by old Western movies, his new single “When I Do Die”follows the murder ballad storyline of boy meets girl and falls in love, but girl has another lover who boy kills. He gets the girl for a short while before his crime catches up to him. At the beginning of the song, he’s asking her to carry his body back home when he’s gone.
Modern Mystery 
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