B.J. Snowden with Fred Schneider from The B-52s

On July 1, 1867, the British North America Act united three colonies under the name Canada. For all of our northern neighbors, I’d like to extend a warm “Happy Canada Day” with this posting of B.J. Snowden’s mighty “In Canada” music video, taken from her Life in the USA and Canada CD.

BJ Snowden is a very interesting talent. A graduate of Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music, her songs are catchy, they are original and they are fully formed. They are also malformed, but I don’t mean that in an insulting way, I’m just trying to describe her music accurately: B.J. could have been another Andrew Lloyd Webber, except that her music is missing a few chromosomes.

The story of BJ’s musical career, such that it is, is that she sent a copy of her demo cassette around and one of the places it ended up was in a NYC record store where the employees became obsessed with it, leading eventually to an independent release. Irwin Chusid wrote about her in his classic book Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music and she’s become something of the “queen” of “Outsider music.” You can get a copy of BJ’s album here. I have it. It’s honestly “good” in a very unconventional way.

Suffice to say, once you have heard this song even one time, you are never, ever going to forget it.

BJ Snowden on the “Humans WOW!” cable access show:
 

 
Bonus video… because this couldn’t wait for Valentine’s Day!

 
Teen heartthrob Justin Bieber may just be a kid, and yet in a recent Rolling Stone interview, he demonstrated a level of political sophistication (not to mention common sense) that these brain-dead Tea bagger-types lack when he told journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis that he had no plans to ever become an American citizen:

“You guys are evil,” he says with a laugh. “Canada’s the best country in the world. We go to the doctor and we don’t need to worry about paying him, but here, your whole life, you’re broke because of medical bills. My bodyguard’s baby was premature, and now he has to pay for it. In Canada, if your baby’s premature, he stays in the hospital as long as he needs to, and then you go home.”

Seems like a good system to me.

However, instead of one of JB’s hits, let’s listen to BJ Snowden’s paean to our northern neighbor, “In Canada”:
 

 
Here’s a blast from the past (well my past, not yours): some kind soul has put the outsider music piece I did for the Disinformation series years ago on YouTube. I haven’t seen this clip in years and it was weird to see myself nearly ten years younger. (It’s my birthday today, so I keep trying to tell myself “You haven’t changed much!”).

Featured in this clip is the wonderful Irwin Chusid, author of Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music, which is well worth your time. It may even launch a few new musical obsessions.