Journal: News & Comment

Theme song for CBC Unplugged

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This has never happened to me before. Last night, as I often do these days, I downloaded some podcasts to listen to while going to sleep. Since I've been missing CBC Radio during the Canadian national broadcaster's labour dispute, I was pleased to find out that some of the locked-out staff have been making free podcasts of their own at CBC Unplugged—in yesterday's case, a show from here in Vancouver called "Studio Zero," which was also broadcast on a few campus and community radio stations on the air across the country.

As I was drifting off, some six minutes in, just after a series of short on-the-street interviews about the reduced regular CBC programming during the lockout, I thought I heard something familiar in the background. Sure enough, it was "Hotcake Syrup," one of my instrumental tracks from my own podcast, which I've posted here for other podcasters (and whoever else) to use. It was very faint and only appeared in the background briefly, and maybe I was dreaming it, but I thought, "Hey cool, I sort of got some of my music played on the radio."

The rest of the podcast included performances from the likes of Joey Keithley of DOA, among several others, plus interviews and other programming. Then, when I was really close to falling asleep, we came to the last two minutes, where what seemed like a couple of dozen CBC radio personalities, some of whom I've been listening to for years, all chimed in with variations on, "For CBC Unplugged at Studio Zero, I'm..."

They were all saying it over "Fresh Snow in the Valley"—also one of my songs! And sure enough, "I'm Kathleen Flaherty for CBC Unplugged. The recorded music you are listening to was created under a Creative Commons license by Derek Miller." (I should point out that, if you were wondering if it's this other Derek Miller, who's very good, it's not him—it's me.) Then "Fresh Snow in the Valley" played out till the end of the show.

So if you want to subscribe to CBC Unplugged, open up iTunes and choose Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast, then enter https://feeds.feedburner .com/cbcunplugged as the feed URL. (Here's a list of other podcasts that have played my podsafe music.) Finally, now I can say it:

Holy crap! I made the theme music for CBC Unplugged, and I didn't even know it! That's fabulous!

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