The Music That Belongs Where You Are

Matthew Joel Vanderkwaak on embracing listening limitations, and focusing on the music of a specific place

This week, as I take a breather to prepare for the marathon of Best Of lists that I’ll unleash in the coming weeks, I’ve asked Matthew Joel Vanderkwaak to step in for a moment of reflection and sage advice.

I find that the end of the year is both exciting and fraught for music lovers. It’s helpful to step back and remember that it’s actually impossible to listen to every new record; it’s unrealistic even to sample them all.

Matthew helps us reframe our limitations as a strength we can use to deepen our appreciation of music, and to help us engage with it on a more personal level. We don’t need to always be chasing the newest, hottest thing. There are many strategies to discover new music. Focusing on depth rather than breadth is one of them.

Enjoy.
-Gabbie

Joni Mitchell, photographed by Joel Bernstein in 1972

Human beings make and publish an astonishingly large amount of new music.

Even if all you’re paying attention to are the end-of-year lists, there is so much music to work through. And even as the slop flows, a lot of the music coming out is actually pretty good.

This is one reason people cite for giving up trying to discover new music as they reach their 30s and 40s: “There’s just too much.”

I don’t think this kind of anxiety is totally groundless. The more music gets confused with “content” and the more the stream economy is flooded with algorithmic noise, the more people feel tempted to just take a big step back and stick with what they already know.

I get that.

But I also think this justification to ignore the world of new music (to be deprived of it!) is WRONG.

I have one practical suggestion today, and it looks like this: what if we embraced creative limitations in our listening?

What if we purposefully focused our attention on the music that comes from somewhere?

Discovering the music of a place

This essay is about folk and country music in Atlantic Canada (where I live). It’s also a meditation on the importance of place.

If the overwhelming volume of wonderful new music is your reason for not listening to any of it, that’s a bit like deciding never to leave your house because there’s way too much “outdoors.”

And, actually, I think that’s a great metaphor, because one way to start meaningfully discovering new music is to just look outside your own front door.

On the internet, “trad” becomes an abstraction. Canadians will tag their music “Americana.”

Region/locality/place — these are the embodied realities and contexts that can easily get lost in the pseudo-places where we spend our time on the internet. Human beings have only ever been somewhere. We are ground dwellers. And our art, too, belongs somewhere. It belongs where we are.

Location matters in an especially obvious way relative to folk and country music. Folk music traditions are not merely styles or genres. On the internet, “trad” becomes an abstraction. Canadians will tag their music “Americana.” I can load up a playlist of Appalachian folk music and have no idea who the artists are or where they really come from. But this, of course, is not where folk music traditions come from.

They are canons of tunes, techniques, and traditions that arise out of the life of a community that is grounded somewhere.

Now, while this regionality is obviously true in folk music, the point of this essay is that it’s also true for music anywhere.

The creative act of listening

People want to belong. They want — they need — to feel like they are a part of something. In music specifically, there is the longing to be part of that elusive thing: the scene.

Music scenes can seem like the inventions of historians and critics. They can also feel like cliques guarded by people who are cooler than I am.

Instead, I like to think of music scenes as realities that emerge out of intentional and creative listening.

So if you want to be a part of a scene, my message today is that you already are. You always were.

It’s a truism now that curatorship is the future of life on the internet. What I love about this is the way it reveals something that’s always been true about music.

Music is a medium that is made complete by the listener.

Music must be listened to. It is an ephemeral medium that unfolds in time, and this means it needs someone to pay attention to it. Vinyl, CDs, and MP3s are not the music itself. These are technologies that reproduce a record of a performance. They are potential music. Until someone presses play and attends, the music is not happening.

Music is a medium that is made complete by the listener.

Algorithmic curation (an oxymoron!) produces the illusion that listening to music is a passive and consumptive activity. It’s not. When we listen, we are creating the context for that music to exist in.

So I think it matters what you listen to, because when you do, you are creating a world. It is the listeners, not the cultural gatekeepers, who delimit, identify, and understand where music belongs.

The New Canadiana: a how-to guide

My final point is this: if listening is a creative act, then in the same way that artists will consciously adopt creative limitations, I think the world of music will open with even more generosity if we adopt listening constraints inspired by where we are.

I’ve been working on this playlist that I call The New Canadiana. It started off as an attempt to locate my own music in the landscape of Canadian folk and country music after 10 years of musical hibernation as a grad student.

I decided this playlist would exclusively feature new music (or at least, newish). I wanted it to be the embodiment of the music that belongs to the place where I am.

Canada, though, is a big place, and over time, the playlist has featured more and more music from my own region (Atlantic Canada) and, more specifically, my own city (Halifax).

This playlist is special to me because it is home equally to some of my dearest friends and my biggest songwriting heroes. It is the record of my own journey as a listener and it is a love letter to a place.

There is painfully beautiful music on here with artists who have 9 monthly listeners on Spotify. I can only know this beauty by taking a step back from the abstracted totality of streamable music to see and hear what is happening around me right now.

In the rest of this essay, I want to introduce you to a few of the people on this playlist.

These introductions will also serve as a method.

This is how you too can embrace a generative limitation in your journey with music.

1. Start with the hometown hero

This is a good first step because you probably already know who this person is — that person who has been making amazing music where you are for decades, that person who has stuck around and pointed the way for others. This is where to start.

Let me introduce you to Joel Plaskett. He lives across the harbour from me in Dartmouth and has been making music with success across Canada (and beyond) for over two decades. He also runs this local coffee shop/record store/book store/recording studio complex at 45 Portland St., a place which has been an inspiration for generations of songwriters and music enthusiasts¹. The really special thing about Joel, though, is just that he never left. I live in a small city. It is not really the place to spread your wings when your music starts to catch on. And yet, here he is — one of my favourite songwriters, a repository of local lore, a champion for the music that belongs here.

2. Who has that local hero championed?

The next place to look in our quest for the meaning of local music is in the circle of artists who are related in some way to your local hero. People help people, and people are always and only ever in a place. Who has your local hero worked with? Check out their music next.

This is the leading track of Mo Kenney’s latest album. Joel has been called the “Rick Reuben of Halifax,” and in our local scene, there is this now apocryphal story about how he discovered Mo Kenny. It’s one of those stories that I’m sure everyone involved is sick of hearing (especially given that Mo is a totally established force in their own right), but I think the story is still illustrative. There’s plenty of water under the bridge since Mo’s first album, and here are Joel and Mo working together again on another beautiful song.

Alexander Gallant works at Morley’s Coffee — the same coffee shop at the Joel Plaskett complex. I first discovered his music in a post by Joel right here on Substack. I love the way Alexander locates himself in the “guy with a guitar tradition.” His 2023 and 2025 albums are some of my favourite new music, period. In this song, the stand-up bass and clarinet accompaniment is an inspiration. Alexander’s songs are also welling with good humour. For me, they are a lesson in what music is. And by all accounts, he is just getting started.

3. What are the local record labels?

By this point in our experiment, you’ll likely have already discovered one of your local record labels. That’s the next step. What else are these labels putting out? Who runs them? What are they working on?

If you keep hanging out at Morley’s, eventually you’ll meet Dylan Jewers (either because he’s running a show there or because he’s just getting a coffee). Dylan runs Big Turnip records which has been putting out folk and roots music for almost 10 years now. This year, they released an astonishingly beautiful album by Sal. Some are calling Sal the Pakistani-Canadian Bob Dylan, but I think you’ll hear that’s only part of the story. Sal is Sal, and when he’s accompanied by C.A. & Sonny (Canadian heroes in their own right), it’s like wandering into a new dimension of what folk music can be.

There’s also the local legends in the making, the McMillan’s Camp Boys who have put out several astonishing records in recent years. The Camp Boys, Josh and Levon, are from out West, but have been playing in bands and showing up at bluegrass jams in these parts for a while now. They play originals and standards. The project involves a study of traditional music, but what they bring into the present, they bring as artists and not only as historians. If you listen to this original, I think you’ll see what I mean.

4. Who is cutting all these great records?

The next thing to find out is who has been recording all this music. When you find a local producer who has had a hand in albums you love, that is a trail of bread crumbs you don’t want to miss.

The hyper locality of this list of songs becomes especially clear when I reveal that the songs by Sal and the Camp Boys were both recorded with the same person, Kurtis Eugene. This gorgeous song by Jenny Lap is another of his collaborations. Jenny taps into that Joni Mitchell, canadiana magic. Jenny lives in Montreal, but we first met here in Halifax. Her songs are arresting and of deep importance.

Of the songs I’m sharing today, this is the most recent. Kurtis’ “With You” is the single on a new EP that just came out this month by The Dusty Halos, an ensemble that brings together folk techniques with the spirit of Jazz improvisation. I was speaking with Rebecca, the group’s main songwriter, and she explained that Kurtis’ contributions to the arrangements as the EP’s producer practically make him a member of the band. The songs manage to be both mournful and sweet. The upright bass performances — almost completely improvised — open caverns of space and texture. It’s an almost impossibly gorgeous collection of new music.

Embracing listening limitations

You can’t listen to every amazing album that comes out this year. You probably can’t even listen to every amazing indie rock album.

Thankfully, reality is far too abundant for that.

But I bet you could listen to every single noise rock release coming out of Des Moines.

What’s so promising about this intentionally limited approach to music curatorship is that not only can you realistically master the music of a scene, you will also most likely be able to see this music live in concert. You can champion the artists discover. And in a world where they probably only have 112 monthly listeners on Spotify, you will actually have the pleasure of knowing them.

You might even decide to set up some interviews, publish your findings, and share the secrets of the place where you are with the rest of us!

I really want to know:

• What’s going on in the Tokyo city pop revival?

• Who knows about the bleeding edge of London’s underground garage scene?

• What’s the EDM like in Lincoln, Nebraska?

• Is there a ska scene in Fresno? (Gosh, I hope so.)

You are uniquely equipped to encounter and engage the spirit of the music that is happening where you are now. The rest of us need you to tell us about it.

Become the archaeologist of your own present!

Ok, Gabbie here to take the reigns again for a short post-script.

If you loved Matthew’s piece as much as I did, I would love to know how YOU slow down your music listening so you don’t get too overwhelmed.

Riddle me this:

1) What ratio of new to old music do you listen to?
2) Does the amount of new music coming out overwhelm or excite you?
3) What creative limitations do you impose on yourself when it comes to consuming new music?

Tell me in the comments. Send me an email with an article pitch. Make a wish list.

xo
Gabbie

1. For instance, there is this wonderful father-son folk duo, the Johnsons, who recently did a concert where they performed only Joel Plaskett covers.