Naomi and Aaron discuss the documentary I Am: Celine Dion (2024). Support Sweater Weather on Patreon. In this episode of Sweater Weather, Aaron and Naomi discuss the documentary I Am: Celine Dion (2024), which is available on Amazon Prime. They explore Celine's image, her massive success, and her corny yet undeniably popular style. The documentary …

*TW: This episode includes discussion of sexual violence.* Today we talk Ducks, Kate Beaton’s celebrated graphic memoir — winner of Canada Reads, a New York Times Notable Book — about her two years working in the oil sands of Fort McMurray, where men outnumber women fifty to one. Harsh economic realities forced Beaton to leave her Cape Breton home …

Reserve your free tickets at our Eventbrite page. Join Naomi and Aaron of the Sweater Weather podcast for their deep-dive discussion of Ducks, the award-winning graphic memoir by Kate Beaton about life in the Alberta oil sands. They'll be joined by special guest Marc Herman Lynch, a literary scholar, comics enthusiast, and novelist. This event take…

Saddle up your quarter horse and grab that flask of whiskey for this ride through the life and works of country music legend Ian Tyson. Born in Victoria, BC, in 1933, Tyson’s recording career spanned six decades, from his time in the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene as one half of the folk duo Ian & Sylvia, to his years as a solo country artist …

Reserve your free tickets at our Eventbrite page: www.eventbrite.ca/e/sweater-weather-live-talks-ian-tyson-with-jeremy-klaszus-tickets-528972780827 Join the audience for Sweater Weather Live! talks the life and music of country legend Ian Tyson. Our special guest will be Jeremy Klaszus, editor-in-chief of The Sprawl and ghostwriter of Ian Tyson's m…

In 1908, thirty-four-year-old Lucy Maud Montgomery published a novel set in the fictional Prince Edward Island town of Avonlea. Her heroine: a loveable and drama-prone red-headed orphan, adopted by an elderly brother and sister who turn out to need her as much as she needs them. The book is Anne of Green Gables, of course, a novel that made its aut…

Join Naomi and Aaron for this live recording of the Sweater Weather podcast as they discuss the enduring appeal of the classic novel Anne of Green Gables. They'll be joined by writer and documentary filmmaker Cheryl Foggo. This event takes place Sunday, February 12 at 2pm in the salon of the Memorial Park Library in Calgary, on Treaty 7 territory. …

In this audio documentary special, Aaron dives deep into the history of Nickelback, the most commercially successful and critically despised Canadian band of their generation. In the aughts when Nickelback dominated the air waves and sold out stadiums, bashing them publicly became a competitive sport for tastemakers and social media users. What spu…

In the spirit of the season, we've brought out from behind the paywall our full episode on The Kids in the Hall. Happy holidays, everyone! Support us on Patreon ~~ Inspired by the recently released sixth season of The Kids in the Hall, Naomi and Aaron discuss this legendary sketch comedy show. We follow the Kids' paths to becoming comic actors, and…

One fateful day in the winter of 1946, a boy in the village of Sainte-Justine, Quebec, opened his Eaton’s package to find, instead of a coveted Montreal Canadiens jersey, the dreaded blue of the Toronto Maple Leafs. That despised hockey sweater was destined for literary, if not sports, fame. That boy became author Roch Carrier, who has published so…

You will remember her—singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan was born in Halifax, studied music from the age of four, started winning singing awards not much later, and was offered her first major record deal at seventeen. Throughout the nineties, she won a boatload of Grammys and Junos for her work on the albums Solace, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, and Su…

The first ever live recording of Sweater Weather is happening Tuesday, November 22 at the Rose & Crown Pub in Calgary at 7 pm. Reserve your free tickets here at Eventbrite. We'll be fumbling towards the ecstasy that is the life and music of singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan. And if you're not already swooning in the arms of an angel, we'll be joine…

In episode 28, we revisit the antics of shock comic Tom Green. In the early nineties, Green rose to local Ottawa fame with a rap album, a radio show, and a program on public-access television. In 1998, The Tom Green Show gained a national following on the Canadian Comedy Network, and in 1999 it jumped to the American big time on MTV. Green was the …

Screenwriter Abdul Malik (Peace by Chocolate, CTV’s Transplant) joins us to talk about Atom Egoyan’s 1997 film, The Sweet Hereafter, one of Canada’s most celebrated movies and the pinnacle of the Toronto New Wave moment. We revisit the melancholic, majestic, and morally compromised town of Sam Dent, a fictional community in BC’s interior that has l…

We've got one question for you, Sweater Wearers: Are You Afraid of the Dark? This Montreal-produced kids' horror series aired on YTV in Canada, on Nickelodeon in the US, and on networks around the world—including in Norway where our special guest, poet Tasnuva Hayden, watched eagerly every Saturday night circa 1992. We light the proverbial campfire…

From high school improv with Seth Rogen in Vancouver, to a spot on the CBC classic This Hour Has 22 Minutes, to his Comedy Central series Nathan For You, Nathan Fielder’s comedic vision has expanded from silly, semi-cruel satire to mirror-funhouse meta-reality TV. We discuss his latest, the HBO docu-comedy The Rehearsal, and ask whether it’s "reali…

Today we’re talking about the novel that named a generation. In 1991, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Vancouver author and visual artist Douglas Coupland became a sleeper hit, an objet d’art that no student living room could do without. How, exactly, did this weird book manage to capture the zeitgeist of twenty-somethings struggli…

We'll be back with a new episode next week, but in the meantime enjoy this content from behind the paywall, our FULL episode on Degrassi from earlier this summer. --- Aaron and Naomi talk about the classic teen drama Degrassi Junior High (1987-1989) and its immediate sequel, Degrassi High (1989-1991). We discuss the show's fascinating production hi…

Isn't it ironic that we finally decided to cover this essential Canadian artist? Alanis Morissette was one of the most successful musicians of the 1990s, selling 33 million copies of her album Jagged Little Pill. We trace her career from child actor to international rock superstar to Instagram mom. We consider the mass appeal of her music, with its…

Naomi and Aaron speedboat through the CBC family adventure show Danger Bay (1984-1990). We discuss the show's infinite animal menagerie, its 1980s environmentalism, and the protagonist, Dr. Grant Roberts, who is both a Professional-Class Hero and Dad of the Year. We also rehearse our favourite lines of dialogue from Danger Bay, including Doc Robert…

Inspired by the recently released sixth season of The Kids in the Hall, Naomi and Aaron talk about this legendary sketch comedy show (1988-1995). We discuss the Kids' paths to becoming comic actors, and how the show was too dark for us to appreciate when we were kids ourselves. We breakdown some of their most notorious sketches, including Cabbage H…

Aaron and Naomi talk about the classic teen drama Degrassi Junior High (1987-1989) and its immediate sequel, Degrassi High (1989-1991). We discuss the show's fascinating production history, our vivid memories of watching it as kids, and the labour conditions for the actors. We also dig into the details of one of our favourite episodes, "All Nighter…

How Leonard Cohen's life and art was shaped by the Cold War-- and the political uses of his most famous song, "Hallelujah." This episode is based on an article I wrote for The Breach titled "Leonard Cohen, Cold War Troubadour": https://breachmedia.ca/leonard-cohen-cold-war-troubadour/ Support Sweater Weather: https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=7353…

Support this podcast. Cabins and cottages have come to represent summer in Canada-- even though most Canadians spend the summer in hot cities. What does the fascination with cabins and cottages reveal about class, inequality and colonization in Canada? This episode we welcome Tonya Davidson, a sociologist at Carleton University and co-editor of the…

Support Sweater Weather! I’m joined once again by my friends from the Alberta Advantage podcast: Clinton, Karen and Joel. We conclude our epic discussion of FUBAR, the classic Canadian and Calgarian comedy franchise, by discussing FUBAR II: Balls to the Wall (2010) in which our protagonists, Terry and Dean, head up to Fort McMurray to work in the o…