Welcome to My Country.

What makes me a musical immigrant?

Actually it's not music that makes me an immigrant, it's technology. When I was a little boy, my first music was on 45s. Of course I graduated to LPs. When I reached driving age, I bought my share of 8-track tapes and then the better sounding cassettes. In the late 1980s I bought my first CD player and slowly made the transition from vinyl to CDs. In about 2003 I started downloading music. These days I juggle two iPods - one old school and one iTouch and I pretty much buy music in all formats. Okay, no 8-tracks anymore, but I have been known to buy a cassette or two in the dollar bin if it is rare enough.

The term "immigrant" as applied to technology, refers to people who were around before email and iPods. That's me. I grew up lusting over 45s and LPs. "Natives" don't know a world without digital media and accept it as the way it has always been.

Immigrants know what this is.

As an immigrant, I will never quite get over the fact that I can carry around over 14,000 songs on my iPod that I can plug it into my car's sound system. On the other hand, there are things I miss about the old days like beautiful record covers and all the information and cool extras like posters that came inside them. I'm happy to see LPs making a comeback.

I want to introduce you to my musical discoveries, my favourite music websites - not just artists but bad record covers and other cool stuff and I will link you to my podcasts I produce for the Calgary Folk Festival. (If you aren't familiar with the festival, this ain't your grampa's folk music).

And please, lets make this a two way street. Please intoduce me to some cool music and we can be new best friends.