Rogers Arena preps for Sunday’s party
From Kraft Dinner to ginger ale, plenty of details going into this weekend’s performances
If Michael Buble can’t come to the Junos, the Junos will come to Michael Buble.
The Burnaby crooner had to opt out of hosting last year’s Junos in Ottawa, but will host this Sunday’s gala at Rogers Arena in Vancouver.
“That’s funny, that’s sort of what Michael said,” Allan Reid, president and CEO of the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (CARAS) said Tuesday as work began at the arena.
“After the press conference announcing him as host this year, we were chatting afterward and he said, ‘You know, I don’t have to do this Allan, but you made this really easy for me.’ He loves this city, he loves his country, he loves what we do as an organization, so yeah, it was easy for him to do.”
Buble and his actor wife Luisana Lopilato suspended their careers last year to be with their eldest child, who had been diagnosed with cancer days after Buble had been announced as the 2017 host of the Junos. Noah, 4, reacted well to treatment and Buble began touring again last summer.
“After Michael had to step down last year, coming back and hosting in his hometown is kind of a perfect ending to that story,” Reid said.
Dozens of shipping crates lined the floor Tuesday at Rogers Arena as media got a backstage tour. Arcade Fire’s dressing room is the old NBA Grizzlies locker-room, the Barenaked Ladies’ dressing room includes a pyramid made from boxes of Kraft Dinner (a nod to If I Had $1,000,000) and another pyramid of ginger ale cans (their latest single is Canada Dry).
The Barenaked Ladies’ performances will include a one-off reunion with co-founder Steven Page to mark the band’s induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, the first time Page has played with the band since his departure in 2009.
It’ll also be the first Junos to be broadcast live across Canada with no tape delay by CBC, Reid said, and presented simultaneously on all of CBC’s digital platforms across the world.
“That’s also a first; we’ve never pushed the Junos beyond Canada, it was always geoblocked,” Reid said.
Like many industries, music was shaken to its foundation by the internet. Sales are a quarter of what they once were and there are fewer than half the major labels there once were.
But for today’s new artists, that’s the only world they know, said Reid, a 30-year veteran of the industry.
“It’s a really exciting time for music right now,” he said. “There is a younger generation that doesn’t know the challenges our industry has gone through. They just come at it as new musicians who love making music.
“They have passion, they have a voice they want people to hear. And they don’t just see themselves as Canadian, they see themselves as artists and they want to go out and find a global audience and they’re able to do it.”
One need look no further than Daniel Caesar of Oshawa, Ont., one of Sunday’s performers whose song Get You has been streamed millions of times on Apple Music and Spotify since it was released in August 2016.
A year ago, Caesar performed at the gala dinner. This year, he’s flying from Australia, where he’s on tour, to be part of the broadcast.
“Barack Obama included Daniel on his year-end playlist,” Reid said. “And a lot of people don’t even know who Daniel Caesar is yet.
“It’s been amazing to watch artists such as Shawn Mendes, Alessia Cara literally in two to three years go from unknowns to global superstars. Honestly, the list goes on and on.”
This marks the fourth time the Junos have been to Vancouver and the first since 2009. The awards have been a travelling show since 2002, when they were taken out of Toronto, and have criss-crossed the country from St. John’s, N.L., to Vancouver and points in between.
There are no French-Canadian acts among this year’s nine performers, but there is an act from Nunavut : two-time nominee The Jerry Cans.
CARAS is striving to become more diverse, Reid said.
Noting that typically only four per cent of the engineering submissions and eight to 10 per cent of the producer submissions CARAS receives for nominations are women, he sat down with Alberta twins and international recording artists Tegan and Sara Quin a couple of years ago.
“We had a conversation about the lack of female representation in the awards,” Reid said. “Tegan and Sara really focused in on the technical categories. There are a lot of men in those categories, so how can we as an organization help change that?”
CARAS is looking at creating a technical scholarship aimed at women and working with recording schools such as Nimbus in Vancouver.
“Nimbus started doing reach-outs at high school career days, just to let young women know this exists as an industry and there are technical roles you could fulfil,” Reid said.