Latest news with #TomPower
CBC
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- CBC
Amy Millan realized grief didn't need to be a secret, so she wrote an album about it
Amy Millan tells Q's Tom Power about her new album I Went To Find You Social Sharing
CBC
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
How Crystal Shawanda found her peace through song
Arts · Q with Tom Power On May 27, you can catch Crystal Shawanda creating her new song, This Peace, on an episode of Amplify on APTN. (Wolfwalker Productions Inc.) What do you do when the world around you is anything but calm? For the Juno-winning Indigenous blues artist Crystal Shawanda, the answer was to go inward. She joins Tom Power to talk about her powerful and deeply personal new track This Peace , which channels her family's strength, her culture and her own journey of self-discovery to find calm in the midst of life's storms. The full interview with Crystal Shawanda is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power . Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts. Interview with Crystal Shawanda produced by Niza Lyapa Nondo.
CBC
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
After Gilmore Girls, Yanic Truesdale had to relearn how to talk at a normal pace
Social Sharing Yanic Truesdale is best known for playing Michel, Stars Hollow's passive aggressive French hotel concierge, on the hit show Gilmore Girls. In an interview with Q 's Tom Power, the Montreal-born actor recalls how he landed his first big break in the French Canadian hockey series He Shoots, He Scores (Lance et compte) despite not knowing how to skate, and the time he invented a fake assistant named Bernadette to help him negotiate a production of The Birdcage (La cage aux folles) in Quebec. But it wasn't until Truesdale moved to L.A. that his career exploded with his very first Hollywood audition. "I was in L.A. for a year without being able to find an agent, getting a job, getting an audition, being quite depressed, running out of money — it's not pretty," he says. "And so I had decided by my birthday, if I didn't have a clear sign of something, I would just go back home. And I got Gilmore a week before my birthday." WATCH | Yanic Truesdale's full interview with Tom Power: Though Gilmore Girls put Truesdale on the map, it was a tougher gig than it appeared to be from the outside, particularly due to the rapid-fire dialogue that's become a trademark of the show's creator, Amy Sherman-Palladino. "The truth of the matter is Gilmore was a very complicated, difficult show to film because we didn't have a big budget back then," he says. "We also had an average of 25 pages more than your average one-hour show of dialogue, but we had the same amount of days to shoot it, which is 10…. We were always on overtime. We were always trying to finish the day and to finish what we needed to shoot every day. So it was very stressful for everyone on set and it was a very difficult show." The director would come to me and say, 'You don't have to speak that fast. That's way too fast.' - Yanic Truesdale Truesdale emphasizes that filming the show was a "beautiful experience" that changed his life, but the reality was that it wasn't always easy. After Gilmore Girls, he says he had some trouble adjusting back to speaking at a normal pace. "I would do another show and the director would come to me and say, 'You don't have to speak that fast. That's way too fast,'" he recalls. "We were just so trained to have that pace that it took me a minute to go back to my normal pace." WATCH | Official trailer for Étoile: Now, Truesdale has reunited with Sherman-Palladino on her latest fast-talking series, Étoile, which is about two world-renowned ballet companies, one in New York and one in Paris, that swap their most talented stars in an attempt to save their institutions. Unlike Gilmore Girls, Truesdale says shooting Étoile has been a much less stressful experience because the show has more time and a bigger budget. But he did have one special request of Sherman-Palladino this time around: he didn't want his character to have a French accent. "I was a little concerned because I didn't want to do another version of Michel," he says. "So I suggested that we should drop the French accent for sure…. But, you know, [the writers] have a way of writing, and sarcasm and cynicism is in their writing … so I just had to work in order to create a different dynamic with my leading lady [Charlotte Gainsbourg], which couldn't be more different than Lauren Graham."
CBC
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Iceland's former first lady Eliza Reid on her debut novel
The bestselling Canadian writer joins Tom Power to talk about her new book, Death on the Island Social Sharing
CBC
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Max Richter's music put dozens of soldiers to sleep
This year marks the 10th anniversary of one of the most streamed classical records of all time: Sleep by the acclaimed composer and pianist Max Richter. It's an eight-and-a-half-hour epic that you're meant to listen to while you're asleep. In an interview with Q 's Tom Power, Richter says the project got its start in 2013 or 2014, when 4G technology was making the internet more accessible and convenient for the first time. "I was talking with Yulia, my partner, and we were thinking about how creative works can, in a way, function as a kind of alternate reality," he says. "So we thought about this idea of a piece of music as a kind of a pause, or a holiday from this kind of 24/7 data blizzard. And so that's kind of the origins of Sleep." WATCH | Max Richter's full interview with Tom Power: At some performances of the piece, audiences could sleep or lie in a bed as they listened to the music. Richter says Sleep tends to operate on people in very meaningful ways. "The piece works a lot on subsonics," he explains. "Very low frequencies — you feel it physically. In a way, it sort of lulls you, you know, neuroscientists would call it 'rhythmic entrainment.' It sort of synchronizes your body's tempo, in a way, with the tempo of the piece. "The other thing is that the spectrum of the piece mirrors the spectrum that the unborn child hears in the womb because the mother's body filters out all of the high frequencies. So this low frequency pulsing, which is at the heart of Sleep, reminds us of something. It reminds us of something that we've all experienced, even before we knew we were a person." In October 2019, Richter gave a historic performance of Sleep at the Great Wall of China. "We get to the venue and it's surrounded by soldiers with guns, you know, really quite hard-core, scary security," he recalls. "It's kind of stressful, everyone is a bit freaked out. So we start playing the thing and after about two hours I get a break … and I see all these soldiers with their guns asleep on the floor. Dozens of them, just sleeping. And I was just like, 'Yeah. That's it. That's why we're doing this.'" Though Richter made Sleep to be experienced while sleeping, he says many fans have told him they listen to the piece at the office, while doing yoga or while studying. He says music is an art form that you feel, and it can have a real effect on your day. "Maybe this is sort of naive, but I do have faith in music," Richter says. "That sounds, maybe, slightly crazy, but I do sort of believe in the potential of creative work to elicit changes in the world. I experienced that in my own life. If I get out of bed in the morning, I'm making the coffee, I stick the radio on, and it's like [Beethoven's Eroica symphony] or something, my day is going to be a bit better. It just is. One per cent better. But, you know, I really believe in that one per cent."
