CASSIDY MANN UNVEILS NEW TRACK FROM UPCOMING EP

CASSIDY MANN’S NEW EP, IF IT’S NOT FOREVER, OUT APRIL 1 VIA DONOVAN WOODS AND MICHELLE SZETO’S NEW LABEL, END TIMES MUSIC

WATCH / SHARE “SINCE I MET YOU” VISUALIZER HERE
BUY / STREAM “SINCE I MET YOU” HERE

PRE-SAVE IF IT’S NOT FOREVER EP HERE

TOUR DATES SUPPORTING DONOVAN WOODS BEGIN APRIL 20 // TICKETS HERE

Photo Credit : Adam Kelly // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

Today, Cassidy Mann is unveiling another track off her upcoming EP, If It’s Not Forever, set for release on April 1, 2022 set for release on the new label, End Times Music, created by Donovan Woods and Michelle Szeto

As a lyricist, Mann often reshapes a small moment into a powerful and poetic song that feels both personal and relatable. What makes these recordings stand out, though, is the way the sonic approach enhances the storyline, allowing her to share her most intimate memories in a singular way. On “Since I Met You”, Mann writes about that moment when a relationship changes.

“I’m a sucker for a ‘friends first’ kind of love and I like the idea of telling someone who’s been in your life for a long time that you’re falling for them,” says Mann. “There are all these subtle, intimate moments you can have with a close friend that is magnified when you also have a crush on them. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if you’re the only one feeling those big feelings. You just have to take that leap, tell them how you feel and hope for the best. This song is that leap.”

WATCH / SHARE “SINCE I MET YOU” VISUALIZER HERE
BUY / STREAM “SINCE I MET YOU” HERE

“Since I Met You” Single Artwork // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

MORE ABOUT IF IT’S NOT FOREVER
By entwining her acoustic roots with gentle electronic textures Mann finds her true voice on the upcoming debut EP, If It’s Not Forever. Co-producing with her friend Roman Clarke, Mann wanted to find a cinematic yet wistful sound to complement these emotionally driven pop songs. They achieved that effect through reverb and delay on the guitars, along with crafting lyrics about specific moments in past relationships. 

“My favourite thing is to write about tiny things that make the bigger picture more important somehow,” she says. “I was wondering a lot about how two people can be in the same situation and have different memories attached to those times. It’s interesting to me how memories are interpretable that way.” 

The songs on If It’s Not Forever also serve as a catalogue of how Mann’s early relationships ended and why – and she hopes that other people will feel seen and comforted by her stories. While processing one particular breakup, she remembers sitting on her bed and eating the same sour candy she once shared with the person she missed. When she discovered the metaphor – “this thing that seems sweet, but also physically hurts you if you have too much,” as she describes it – the song “Tropical Sour Candy” emerged. 

She wrote “Election Night", tweaking the melodies with Clarke, to capture the intense awakening and transformation that many people experienced over the four years of the prior presidency. The lyrics focus on a couple that moved beyond just friends that night but ultimately ended as strangers. Her skill as a writer is especially clear on “Fine” as that simple word takes on multiple meanings in the context of a heartbreak.

WATCH / SHARE “FINE” VISUALIZER HERE
BUY / STREAM “FINE” HERE

Certain moments in a relationship are almost always at the core of her songs, whether it’s the potential start of something special (“Since I Met You”) or the inevitable end (“Stop A Heart”). There’s also an acknowledgement that listeners can carry those important parts of the past through the rest of their lives (“If It’s Not Forever”). 

“A lot of the time, whenever I’m remembering something, I find myself connected to these subtle moments that made me feel alive in some way. Those are the things that I replay in my mind a lot.” 

LISTEN AND SHARE “STOP A HEART” HERE
BUY / STREAM “STOP A HEART” HERE

Growing up in the Prairies of Winnipeg, Mann has been singing since she could talk. Her parents bought her a guitar as a birthday present when she was 9. By 14, she started taking songwriting more seriously and her emerging talent led to a nomination for Aboriginal Recording of the Year at the Western Canadian Music Awards. Still, she felt uncertain about the next step.

“In my early teens I wasn’t sure what music was going to be to me,” she says. “I was writing and playing shows a lot but after high school I studied film for a while and worked in restaurants. I definitely meandered a bit before really deciding that this is what I was going to do.” 

Her family’s Indigenous community of Sagkeeng First Nation offered encouragement and support throughout her journey-- and she notes how Indigenous tradition influences her. 

“When it comes to my Indigenous heritage and cultures, it is based around oral storytelling – songs and spoken stories,” Mann observes. “That is so fascinating to me and it ties into my music a lot because that’s how memories and experiences have been captured in my culture forever. Storytelling is something I feel compelled to do. I think it probably has a lot to do with the fact that that’s what my ancestors did.”

WATCH / SHARE “ELECTION NIGHT” VISUALIZER HERE
BUY / STREAM “ELECTION NIGHT” HERE

Still, in her formative years, Mann struggled to blend her introspective writing style with her love of the enticing pop influences of her generation. Plus, she often found it difficult to communicate her creative concepts to the older men she worked with in the studio. Knowing she needed to be more involved in the process, she opted to learn as many production techniques as possible on her own by watching online videos, taking courses in audio engineering, listening to older music as a study in song structure, and doing a deep dive into her favourite artists and their influences for inspiration. 

“I felt like I was given permission to do whatever I wanted to do,” she says. “Becoming really involved in production is what helped me come to a place where I feel fully represented in the music that I make.” 

Relocating to Toronto after a difficult breakup, Mann made a bunch of demos on her own while relentlessly searching for that certain sound. She brought the demos to Roman Clarke and they experimented on the new songs together, ultimately transcending genre and tapping into the evocative feelings that permeate If It’s Not Forever

“When I listen to these songs now, I feel a sense of peace because I have captured the story I wanted to tell, and I’ve also captured a lot of the nuance surrounding it,” she says. “I’m telling a story of my evolution and the relationships that I’ve gone through, but this is only my version of the experience and the way I remember it. It took me a while to figure out how to express that lyrically and sonically but I feel really proud of the fact that I do think that’s pretty clear in the music.”

PRE-SAVE IF IT’S NOT FOREVER EP HERE

2022 TOUR DATES // TICKETS HERE
Mar 24 - Winnipeg, MB - Times Change(d)
Apr 20 - Sarnia, ON - The Imperial Theatre *
Apr 21 - Sarnia, ON - The Imperial Theatre *
Apr 22 - Meaford, ON - Meaford Hall Arts & Cultural Centre *
Apr 23 - Huntsville, ON - Algonquin Theatre *
May 4 - Vancouver, BC - Hollywood Theatre *
May 5 - Vancouver, BC - Hollywood Theatre *
May 8 - Edmonton, AB - Winspear Centre *
May 9 - Calgary, AB - Jack Singer Concert Hall *
May 10 - Saskatoon, SK - Broadway Theatre *
May 11 - Saskatoon, SK - Broadway Theatre *
May 12 - Winnipeg, MB - Burton Cummings Theatre *

* supporting Donovan Woods

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IF IT’S NOT FOREVER TRACKLIST
01 Tropical Sour Candy
02 Election Night
03 Fine
04 Stop A Heart 
05 Since I Met You
06 If It’s Not Forever



CASSIDY MANN ONLINE
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MORE ABOUT END TIMES MUSIC
The core of End Times’ mission is transparency and adaptability. In the world of streaming, the data is available. Artists should understand their expenses and their earnings as well as anyone they work with. It allows us to interpret and react to how, why, and where songs are being discovered. 

There are many pathways to success, and success looks different to everyone. Every artist and every project is unique and artists should be confident that the team built around them is being created thoughtfully and purposefully in service of their individuality. 

We’ll focus on songwriters, regardless of genre, and work together to make their music valuable by getting it to people who will use it and love it.

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BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE TO PERFORM AT MASSEY HALL THIS APRIL WITH OMBIIGIZI AND GEORGIA HARMER

CELEBRATING 20 YEARS AS A BAND, BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE WILL MAKE THEIR MASSEY HALL HEADLINING DEBUT ON APRIL 20 AND 21, 2022

TICKETS AVAILABLE NOW
APRIL 20 (WITH OMBIIGIZI) // APRIL 21 WITH (GEORGIA HARMER)

Credit: Richmond Lam // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

Next month, Broken Social Scene will make their headlining debut at the legendary Massey Hall after 20 years of making music together. For each show, Broken Social Scene will be supported by Arts & Crafts labelmates OMBIIGIZI (April 20) and Georgia Harmer (April 21). Tickets for both shows are available to purchase today.

TICKETS AVAILABLE NOW
APRIL 20 (WITH OMBIIGIZI) // APRIL 21 WITH (GEORGIA HARMER)

Recently, Broken Social Scene revisited two decades worth of releases to compile Old Dead Young: B-Sides & Rarities, a career-spanning collection of B-sides, rarities, and outtakes pulled from 20 years of 7-inches, compilations, soundtracks, and hard-to-find releases. 

BUY / STREAM OLD DEAD YOUNG : B-SIDES & RARITIES

Once a two-person basement recording project, Broken Social Scene came to life onstage as a shadowy improvisational entity with a revolving-door roster, each concert a wholly unique experience dependent on the room, the weather, what they ate for dinner that night, and who was dropping in to play. Where the band’s 2001 debut album, Feel Good Lost, presented BSS as an anonymous ambient project that reflected its humble, homespun origins, their electrifying live performances from that era rallied an extended family of performers with roots in post-rock (Justin Peroff; Do Make Say Think’s Charles Spearin), Latin jazz (Andrew Whiteman), art-folk (Feist), synth-pop (Amy Millan and Evan Cranley, also of Stars), dance-punk (Metric’s Emily Haines and Jimmy Shaw), and country rock (Jason Collett).

But by pursuing improvisational freedom over commercial considerations, Broken Social Scene set a new gold standard for indie rock in the 21st century with 2002’s You Forgot It In People, an album that pushed the genre far beyond its noisy ’90s slacker roots toward a more sonically expansive, emotionally expressive vision. And with follow up releases like the blissfully chaotic Broken Social Scene (2005), the rapturous Forgiveness Rock Record (2010), and the intricate, insidiously melodic Hug of Thunder (2017), Broken Social Scene have amassed a thrillingly amorphous, unpredictable body of work. Old Dead Young: B-Sides & Rarities is everything that happened in between.

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MORE ABOUT OMBIIGIZI
The debut release from OMBIIGIZI – a collaboration between Zoon (Daniel Monkman) and Status/Non Status (Adam Sturgeon) – Sewn Back Together is a rumination on family, a celebration and holistic cleansing, with a strong sense of brotherhood and loving support. An amalgam of their indigenous heritages and their personal musical architectures, Daniel and Adam imbue the lyrics with their families' storytelling, revealing truths and finding common ground amidst their differences.

OMBIIGIZI ONLINE
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MORE ABOUT GEORGIA HARMER
With a wisdom and poise that belies her youthful age, Harmer has penned an emotionally resonant collection of songs that articulate the ways in which even the most fleeting experiences can forge bonds between strangers, create families out of friends, and one by one form the joys and sorrows that make up a life. Debut LP, Stay In Touch, out April 22 via Arts & Crafts

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JORDAN KLASSEN REVEALS NEW VIDEO FOR “ASH WEDNESDAY” FROM UPCOMING LP

WATCH / SHARE “ASH WEDNESDAY” HERE
BUY / STREAM “ASH WEDNESDAY” HERE

GLOSSOLALIA OUT APRIL 8, 2022

PRE-SAVE GLOSSOLALIA HERE

“quietly contemplative meditations on finding your place in the world” - Exclaim!

“Insightful and vulnerable in equal measure” - The Line Of Best Fit


Recently, Jordan Klassen announced his new upcoming LP, Glossolalia, which finds the internationally renowned songwriter reimagining himself as a lyrical poet, as much as a musician. Throughout the record’s ten tracks, Klassen evokes early modern American poets such as T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost. The songs’ lyrics are thoughtful and intelligent, beautifully set against rich harmonies and melodic ballads. One such track, “Ash Wednesday”, is loosely based on the Eliot poem of the same name. 

“Ash Wednesday”, in Klassen’s own words, is the most ‘religious’ song on the record, as it reflects on being invited to the table despite his own deficiencies. It focuses on the battle that ensues when one who has lacked faith in the past strives to move towards divinity. This was a struggle that T.S. Eliot knew well when he wrote his epic poem of the same name following his conversion to Anglicanism. Both Klassen and Eliot wrestle with hope and despair as strange bedfellows. In Klassen’s take on Ash Wednesday, he sings that while he is ‘dressed in ashes’ (which symbolize the certainty of death), he simultaneously longs ‘to see if you’re able/ To raise the dead’. The age-old question remains: can salvation actually be realized through faith?

The song arrives today, the first day of the Lenten Calendar also known as Ash Wednesday, complete with a video directed by Wayne Moreheart. “Ash Wednesday” is really “a song about redemption and hope, and I love how Wayne contrasted that with a horroresque video,” says Klassen. “There’s something jarring about it that really makes me want to listen.”

WATCH / SHARE “ASH WEDNESDAY” HERE
BUY / STREAM “ASH WEDNESDAY” HERE

MORE ABOUT GLOSSOLALIA
Glossolalia is classic and essential Jordan Klassen: ethereal, dreamy, mystical, and reminiscent of times gone by and the folk singers of yore. This album is a lyrical essay, with each song like a chapter in a personal journal. ‘Glossolalia’ itself is the phenomenon of (apparently) speaking in an unknown language, more commonly called ‘speaking in tongues’. 

The album is almost elegiac, with its pervasive sense of something that has been lost to the past. Perhaps it was inevitable that Klassen would produce this record now, reflecting on the promise we have all felt of something better just on the horizon, that has since been erased by life in a pandemic that has entered its third year. In Klassen’s own words on this record, “Everything is about longing - longing for change but trying to be realistic about change as well.” 

The album’s lead single, “Milk And Honey”, hones in on this pining for nostalgia. It is a modern folk composition that explores the gap between the shadow and the light side of waiting. About this song, Klassen notes, “It is a strange thing to live in a time when everyone is looking ahead for things to return to normal, and wondering if you are failing or succeeding in that process. We want Utopia but forget that it is in the cracks and gaps that we often are transformed.” 

WATCH / SHARE “MILK AND HONEY” HERE
BUY / STREAM “MILK AND HONEY” HERE

Rather than becoming paralyzed by our desire for perfection, “Carried Away” is an exploration of what it’s like to jump into something with abandon, whether that takes one down dark pathways of the mind into mental illness and addiction, or being swept up by something that is good and right, like a greater cause, or falling in love. Either way, in retrospect we say that we “lost ourselves for a moment”, as we surrendered to forces too powerful to be contained. 

WATCH / SHARE “CARRIED AWAY” LYRIC VIDEO
BUY / STREAM “CARRIED AWAY” HERE

Record opener “Lotusland” is an ode to Klassen’s hometown of Vancouver, but specifically, the Vancouver of yesteryears, before the city grew to become an overinflated and vastly different landscape of what it used to be; a former shell of itself, where the weight of the cost of living seemingly crushes its oldest inhabitants. As friends move away, the singer asks the city to convince him to stay, and laments what ‘West Coast living’ could have meant. Similarly, Klassen stays in that uncomfortable place of yearning in “Hard On Myself”. The song deals with the choice to take the road through life that represents the “third way”, in a world that is polarized and binary. This is a conscious movement away from religious rigidity, absolute certainty, and toxic black and white thinking. But the other road, “the road less traveled”, to quote Robert Frost, is one of strangeness and deconstruction, and there is a sadness in this choice as well. In a contemporary take on a poetic classic, Klassen sings: “There are two roads where I’m standing, and each one has called itself good. But there’s light in the sky and I’ve got some supplies; I just might make my way through the woods.” Frost ruminated, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” 

The back half of Glossolalia flips from an observational standpoint, to a more personal, introspective one. “Brothers In Arms” is a personal reflection on the need for reconciliation, with painful rifts in society and within families and friends’ groups, heightened by vaccine anxiety, isolation, restrictions, quarantine, and lockdowns. We are reminded that we are still “Living our days as brothers in arms”, regardless of what goes on around us in a pandemic world. It is a mature, reserved commentary from Klassen that none of us has the residue of innocence anymore: “Oh you aren’t some little boy who needs the world explained”. “Pangea” draws parallels between Klassen’s personal love of history and a past when the world was truly one in a great continental mass. The artist, who can be seen as a kind of Renaissance man himself, takes up the defense of great movements and thoughts of the past, and declares, “I’m caught up in stories from before”. 

LISTEN / SHARE “NIKO” HERE
BUY / STREAM “NIKO” HERE

In another spin on heartfelt beliefs, Glossolalia takes a satirical look at the conspiracy thinkers, who have certainly experienced a resurgence in numbers since the pandemic began, with the track “Niko”. What do we do when someone we know has bought into the hype that “the taller tales are proof”? He begs the imaginary ‘Niko’ not to “go down this dark road”, perhaps knowing that individual’s tendency to get “carried away” by such things. 

The celebrated American poet Robert Frost said that retreating into the realm of a poem, whether as a writer or as a reader, begins with a kind of “homesickness”. It is longing for the place where you know who you are at your core. Glossolalia explores what is found at the core of each of us when we find ourselves estranged and disoriented in society.

PRE-SAVE GLOSSOLALIA HERE

Photo Credit : Rachel Pick // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

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GLOSSOLALIA TRACKLIST
1. Lotusland
2. Milk and Honey
3. Hard On Myself
4. Carried Away
5. Good Intentions
6. Brothers In Arms
7. Pangea
8. Ash Wednesday
9. Niko
10. Sleeper In The Cabin

 JORDAN KLASSEN ONLINE
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