music | The Walrus

The artist Taylor Swift smiles and looks toward the top right of the frame. The image is covered in purple glitter, except for the area around Swift's face.

Arts & Culture / Music

Taylor Swift Is the Surprising Face of Millennial Anxiety

March 2, 2020March 6, 2020 - by Joelle Kidd

Like most of my generation, Swift knows the exhaustion of constantly selling yourself as a brand

The singer Grimes, wearing a red velvet dress and with her hair in puffy orange-and-black pigtails, sits on a concrete throne and stares at the screen.

Arts & Culture / Music

The Terrifying, Techno-Dystopian Visions of Grimes’s New Album

February 27, 2020March 3, 2020 - by Simon Lewsen

The singer’s new album explores a dark truth: the most dangerous social forces are also the ones that fascinate us

Six cassettes with unspooling tape coloured in pink, red and orange

Arts & Culture / Music

When Sexism Makes for a Catchy Song

November 11, 2019 - by Tariq Hussain

My songwriting students pen misogynistic lyrics. But the music industry tells them that’s okay

Cover Story / September 2019

Céline Dion is Everywhere

August 28, 2019March 27, 2020 - by Suzannah Showler

At fifty-one, Dion is wrapping up her Vegas residency with a world tour, an album, and two movies in the works. Why has it taken forty years for the world’s most talented singer to finally become cool?

A photograph of a woman with a drawing of a hut behind her.

Arts & Culture

When a Juno-Nominated Musician Lives in a Refugee Camp

June 20, 2019July 9, 2019 - by Luke Ottenhof

Her album was up for a major prize, but recognition doesn’t change the reality of being a displaced person

Music

In Times of Crisis, We Need Classical Music

March 19, 2019July 12, 2019 - by Kent Nagano

What will we lose if Bach and Beethoven disappear from our schools and concert halls?

First Person

Learning to Forgive My Distant Father

January 17, 2019November 14, 2019 - by Mark Abley

I always knew my dad loved me. But he often seemed to love his music more

Arts & Culture

Leonard Cohen’s Afterlife

November 14, 2018March 31, 2020 - by Charles Foran

A posthumous collection, finished days before his death, reveals the artist at his most intimate

Colin Dutcher playing piano with room with high-vaulted ceilings

Music

How Jeremy Dutcher Keeps His Ancestors’ Language Alive

June 21, 2018January 4, 2020 - by Sarah MacDonald

Fewer than 10,000 Wolastoq people live in First Nations communities. The twenty-seven-year-old sings their songs

March 2018 / Music

How to Make a Hit Song in 2018

March 5, 2018March 27, 2020 - by Tariq Hussain

Why artists are rethinking old formulas for chart-topping music