The Manuscript Academy brings you conversations with agents, editors, and writers who can help you on your publishing journey.

Welcome to Kindle Love Stories! Kindle Love Stories is a weekly podcast for readers who are unabashedly in love with love, romance, and happy ever afters! Kindle Love Stories is your weekly book club with your best friends, an escape where you’ll hear great love stories, author interviews, new book and author suggestions, and the latest Romance news, trends and buzz-worthy conversations happening online.

Lemon Bucket Orkestra is a guerilla-punk-balkan-folk-brass band massive like no other. Tracing their genesis back to the streets of Toronto, the original quartet of busking troubadours quickly amassed a battalion of like-minded musical souls and the full-blown, dozen plus strong Orkestra was born. The multi award winning ensemble has been heralded as a groundbreaking, genre-bending phenomenon by the Canadian and international media alike and over the past 8 years they have performed on streets and stages around the world, leaving a trail of new friends and dedicated fans in their wake.

 

Equal parts exhilarating precision and reckless abandon, LBO’s live shows are a truly immersive experience - ranging from the ecstatic to the cathartic, and they have exquisitely captured that energy on their new album If I Had The Strength. Released in November 2018, it includes guest appearances from famed soprano Measha Brueggergosman, Latino rapper Boogat, Choir! Choir! Choir! and more. Their new video for the song Freedom has also just been released. Directed by the band's own Michael Louis Johnson, it was shot following an all-night drive home from a gig. Without any sleep, the members donned their best suits and gowns, cracked open a bottle of tequila, and let the cameras roll. “We wanted to create something that presents more questions than it answers,” Johnson says. “A piece wherein the stakes are very high, but we don't know what's at stake."

 

The band is currently supporting their new releases with a 9 date Canadian tour, before heading south to New York City to premiere their two-time Dora award winning folk opera Counting Sheep in December. They will also be featured artists in the made for CBC TV movie Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas – a celebration of the most beloved Christmas songs set to air nationally on December 3rd. With a recent appearance on CBC Q, up coming tapings for The Strombo Show, and a March 2018 tour of New Zealand that includes performing at the WOMAD Festival there, it’s clear that LBO have no plans of slowing down. Expect to hear a lot more about them in the coming year, as the take their unique brand of music mayhem to audiences around the world.

The podcast that celebrates all-things Audiobooks  – Whether we're chatting with authors and narrators, playing games and giving away prizes, or sharing clips of the best new audiobooks, HarperAudio Presents aims to highlight the fun in the world of audiobooks. New episodes every other Wednesday.

Das Fagott Mannschaft (German for 'the bassoon team') is a quartet of classically trained yet slightly unhinged bassoonists whose creativity cannot be contained by your typical symphony orchestra.

Das Fagott Mannschaft has performed for thousands at Yonge-Dundas Square, appeared at the Northern Lights Festival Boréal, and played to standing-room only crowds at pubs, cabarets and burlesque shows in the Greater Toronto Area.

Their covers of great tunes from today and yesteryear have been entertaining audiences in pubs, cabarets and on street corners since 2011, and prove that the bassoon can rock out as well as any hairspray guitarist or disheveled yet unnaturally mellow drummer.

“It takes something special to make a room shaped something like a laundry chute, feel

like a theatre.  The Strumbellas are a band that seems to know what that special quality
is, because from their first song to their last, they transformed the small Railway Club
into a blazing amphitheatre” – VANCOUVERWEEKLY.COM

 Since the release of The Strumbellas’ eponymous 2009 EP, which was peppered
with accolades from Toronto weeklies and prompted a proclamation from the CBC
that they are a “band to watch,” the six-piece group has been slogging it out, earning
their stripes through residencies at The Cameron House and most recently a month of
Home.Sweet.Home Tuesdays at The Dakota Tavern.  The band also left the proverbial
nest in 2012, making new fans with two cross-country tours as well as playing a plethora
of festivals including CMW, NXNE, Pop Montreal, Eaglewood and Hillside in Guelph,
which by all accounts was the equivalent of their cotillion ball.

“The Rivoli was too small to contain the crowd trying to get in to see bluegrass-gospel-
punks The Strumbellas launch their debut disc, My Father And The Hunter” – NOW
MAGAZINE

 Conceived in Lindsay, Ont., but born in Toronto, The Strumbellas are equal parts
small town dream and big city gumption. Sensitive singer-songwriters beware: this ain’t
your meemaw’s country music. The band brings wheat field harmonies and arena-
ready thunder to backrooms and festival stages alike. Folk wisp and country twang are
nowhere to be found as The Strumbellas pound out a bluegrass-inspired indie rock that
rivals punk and hardcore for sweat, blood, and ruckus. 

“The Strumbellas conjure an alt-country Canadian landscape in which home is a

beacon, the graveyard looms large, and it all ends with a piano dirge to carry a body and
bury it slowly”  - THE STAR PHOENIX 

“The album is full of high energy, earnest folk music, coupled with darker-tinged gothic
folk” – EXCLAIM! MAGAZINE

The Strumbellas’ 2012 debut album, My Father And The Hunter, offers a beautiful,
harmonious dichotomy between melancholy heartbreak on songs Carry My Body,

Diane, Windsurfers, Underneath A Mountain, Left For Dead and The Bird That Follows
Me compared to blow-the-barn-doors-off spunk on The Sheriff, Lakes, Sailor’s Blues,
Rhinestone, I Just Had A Baby and Pistol.  The album, which was produced by Cone

McCaslin and recorded at Blue Rodeo’s coveted Woodshed Studio, is the harvest of
talented friends, some whisky and a few rounds of euchre.  Harmonies, stomps, hollers,
claps and gang vocals unabashedly abound as the songs weave compelling stories
throughout the entire album.  Dance, cry, put your fist through a wall or call someone
you love – expect to feel it all. Check out the mini-doc for The Bird That Follows Me in-
studio recording here.

The group recently headed south of the border to record with West Coast producer
Ryan Hadlock (The Lumineers, Metric, The Strokes, Gossip) at Bear Creek Studio near
Seattle.

“If 2012 was their year to introduce themselves to the larger Canadian audience, 2013

will surely be their breakout year.  Chances are, we’ll all be much more familiar with The
Strumbellas sooner rather than later” – BEATROUTE

 The Strumbellas: Simon Ward – vocals, acoustic guitar / David Ritter – piano, organ,
percussion, vocals / Jeremy Drury – drums, percussion / Isabel Ritchie – violin, viola,
vocals / Jon Hembrey – electric guitar, mandolin /Darryl James – bass.



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