Sarah Shafey is a Renaissance Woman with a capital T. That ‘T’ could stand for ‘Talented.’ Or ‘Thirsty.’ Or ‘Transcendent.’ Each of the three ‘T’s are equally fitting; yet they only begin to describe her jacktress-of-many-trades persona. Sarah Shafey is a producer and engineer who runs her own recording studio called Squeaky Clean Records. She’s a deft interviewee; her “Shafey’s Palace” webisodes are as much entertaining as they are insightful. In many-a-photograph, she’s a chameleon whose ability to constantly reinvent herself will leave you breathless. She helps manage a creative …

In popular culture the music box often holds magical powers; there’s an allure to it; you know the tune through and through, but it maintains its charm, it’s forever young, and every time you open the box you can close your eyes, hear the tune, and it’ll take you to that place. Canadian singer-songwriter-producer Sarah Shafey’s full-length debut Tiny Music Box is no small achievement, holding all the power and mysticism of a music box on steroids.
The album opens with “C’est Demain” and immediately the mood is set; mixed up …

A deft songwriter and witty lyricist, Clare Love shows more promise in five songs than the most weathered veterans show over entire careers. On her new E.P., Finding Home, the unpredictability of Love’s strumming on her acoustic guitar is reminiscent of early Ani Difranco, as can be the way she brandishes her torrid voice; always potent, it can go from Doris Day sensual to Linda Perry steely in an instant, inveigling your ears into a sonic submission. In the opening track, “Winterbloom Serenade” Love sings, “Stories running wild with you/Plot …

Canadian singer-songwriter, Amelie Lefebvre’s (she goes by Amelie) music is like a stranger hugging you: you don’t have to understand, or know the person doing the hugging to feel the warmth in their embrace. That old cliche about music being universal, that rings true here. All but one song on her debut album, Amelie, is sung in French, a language probably foreign to a lot of people south of the Canadian border. But from the album’s opening track “24 heures” (an acoustic version also closes the disk) your ears tell …

“Come for the breasts. Stay for the heart.”
That’s the tagline to Katie West’s website. Find yourself exploring the site one minute, and an hour later, eyes all bloodshot, mouth still ajar, you’ll see the tagline fitting. West, a photographer from Windsor, Canada is not only not afraid to show either—her breasts or her heart—she’s adept at intertwining the two with an ease that is equally admirable as it is poetic. Through an extensive—and impressive—collection of self-portraits (though not her sole focus, self-portraits are her specialty) you see a gamut of …