All-around entertainer Hugh Dillon has been around the block a few times. The former frontman of The Headstones is now exploring the acting world while simultaneously maintaining a music career, thanks to his current project, The Hugh Dillon Redemption Choir. With The Choir hitting the stage at the Across the Causeway benefit this Sunday, Hugh paused for a moment with the Journal to reflect upon his past, present and future.

Vancouver-based Matthew Good, once solely the frontman of the Matthew Good Band, has since chosen to strike out on his own. The proudly-Canadian performer joins the bill of Sunday’s Across the Causeway benefit, and spent some time chatting with the Journal this past week.

The Tragically Hip are coming home.
After becoming one of the most popular bands in the history of Canadian music, Kingston’s favourite sons are returning to the place where it all began.

It would be very difficult, almost inconceivable, for The Weakerthans to play a bad show. Their songs are too well-crafted, their playing is too proficient and their unity onstage is always intact—they are simply too good.

I’ve always thought the best interview would be to be able to just sit and pick the brain of Jack Kerouac. Recently, I got to do the next best thing…sort of. I interviewed Queen’s own Jack Kerouac Knapsack Band.

The summer music festival can be a troubling entity. It can reflect summer’s finest moments: relaxing with friends, soaking in the sunshine, hacking a little sack and listening to some great music. Lately, however, it seems as if the summer music fest has become little more than a self-promotional tool for commercial radio stations and beer companies, not to mention a cash grab for opportunistic food and drink vendors.

Edgy, raw, brilliantly ironic and satirical, artist Eric Edson’s exhibition fable is a breath of fresh air in the sometimes overwhelming world of contemporary art. On display at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre until Aug. 29, fable is an exploration of the narrative function of nature as it exists and is transformed by culture. Individually the works are interesting, but together, the collection creates a profound and enlightening statement of the human impact on nature.

Severed limbs, rusty chainsaws, gratuitous blood and choreographed dance numbers? That’s right, Evil Dead 1&2: The Musical has arrived, and musical theatre will never be the same.

It’s not enough for Dave Bidini to be one of Canada’s greatest musicians, he wants to be one of its finest authors too.
His band, The Rheostatics, have firmly established themselves as one of the most important Canadian bands of all time. Despite lacking much commercial success, the band has reached musical and cultural iconic status as purveyors of unique, and distinctly Canadian, art-rock for nearly two decades.

Usual throng of post-show smokers huddled outside: check. Personal sobriety intact: check. This, although unusual, was not the root of the queer, unsettled feeling in the pit of my stomach. At last I pinpointed the cause of my lassitude: I was in mourning. I had just witnessed the death rattle of the career of Matthew Good—formerly one of Canada’s brightest musical hopes, now doomed to the downward spiral of stifling mediocrity and eventual obscurity. And for the exorbitant cost of a $23 ticket, mediocrity just doesn’t cut it.

Call it a sociological experiment. An aspiring reporter attempts to breach the drunken notoriety of a Queen’s Players show . . . sans alcohol. Could such a feat be accomplished? Would I still laugh at the dirty jokes? Would I finally be able to dance atop the flimsy chairs without tumbling to an embarrassing and painful end?

The Trailer Park Boys are back, and they’re greasier than ever.
The always hard-done-by Ricky, Julian and Bubbles, along with the rest of the Sunnyvale Trailer Park gang have returned, and this time they’re poised for superstardom. In just three short seasons, the controversial mockumentary has grown from relative obscurity into a cult phenomenon, and now appears ready to make the leap into the mainstream.

It’s a story of hopelessness and despair, a story of perspective, and of unending disappointment in an unforgiving world. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, a Single Thread Theatre Company production, was at once wonderful and horrid—just as it was meant to be. Punctuated by comic interplay between the characters and morose talk of suicide, from the beginning the play is both funny and sad.

Cuff the Duke are all heart.
While the Flames and Canucks were battling it out on-screen in the Grad Club’s TV room, across the hall, Cuff the Duke were putting on a playoff-like performance of their own.

Tonight’s launch is ostensibly Bedouin’s last show as Queen’s students, and it’s also an exclusive chance to get a hold of their latest album, Sounding A Mosaic, before it hits stores nationwide a month from now.