Before we begin today's post, I wanted to send our deepest condolences to the family and friends of veteran local bassist and Borderline radio host Mike Robillard, who just passed away after a battle with cancer at the age of 51. While not a hard rock musician, Mike will be familiar from his work performing with bands like Startlefish, The 4 Really Nice Guys, Spiderback, and Scissors For Erica over the years. More recently, he hosted
The Taxi Passenger Revue on
The Borderline in early 2020, which played off of his day job to interview local musicians like Tym Morrison, DJ Seith, and Colin Nelson before the pandemic complicated things. As revealed in
this GoFundMe campaign, Mike was diagnosed with clear cell renal sarcoma (a form of kidney cancer) in December, and had been fighting it ever since. Having lost my mother to cancer at around the same age in 2020, I sadly know all too well what Mike's family has went through.
A lot of Mike's major musical work either predates social media or didn't produce a widespread album, but he did record with Startlefish (notably on 2005's "Regretfully Yours"), so don't bypass him if you have access to his recordings, as he was a very capable musician, not to mention a kind and funny man by all accounts. I don't know if The Borderline will repost episodes of The Taxi Passenger Revue in his memory (oddly, they had all been taken down), but it'd be nice to see them resurface in his memory. Follow local news media for details on arrangements when appropriate, and R.I.P. Mike! Today's post otherwise looks at updates from a recent concert and a local musician's return, so here's what you should know!
Here's some belated updates from the returning
Clusterfolk Music Festival at
The Rockstar Bar from this past Saturday night! While not held there, Gore Street arts venue
180 Projects co-organized the event, and it looks like they did the brunt of the Facebook promotion for the concert proper (I don't believe promoter Jackson Reed is on Facebook nowadays). I profusely apologize for missing this, but there were lineup variances not reported on
the Facebook event page (launched by The Rockstar Bar), most notably that headlining classic/hard rock quartet
The Uncanny Valley did
not play at Clusterfolk after all, which 180 Projects only announced the morning of the show. They cited "unforeseen circumstances" for their withdrawal, but did not go into further details. This would have been a big platform for them, hopefully nothing bad happened! As well, the planned slot from a Sudbury artist completely fell through, so what should you know there?
Original advertising had folk musician Will Powers playing on Saturday, but he was quietly replaced for unannounced reasons last week by fellow Sudbury folk duo The Bad Actors (who were not among the eight artists to get Clusterfolk music videos), only for them to also drop out for "unforeseen circumstances" on Saturday morning. Local acoustic folk duo Sainte Marie (also not filmed for Clusterfolk) were brought on as a last minute fill-in for both withdrawn bands, with guitarist Jacob Quarrell's other band Jupiter Marvelous promoted to headliners. Hopefully everything went well on Saturday, and stay tuned for more Clusterfolk coverage soon!
Finally, here's a surprise return, as local hard rock solo artist
Mike McCleary has resumed working on new music! Over three years after deactivating
his Facebook page (intentionally or otherwise), Mike brought it back last summer and quietly posted a "revised" version of his 2018 solo album
"Weight of the Truth" to various online music platforms in August, as accessible via
this DistroKid page. The revised version re-arranges the song order and includes two brand new songs ("Superstition" & "Solstice"), plus four songs were either rewritten & renamed or dropped outright. Mike is one to de-list past albums of his and re-record or rewrite them to better reflect his musical intent, talents, and messages, so I can't go back and tell you what's what, but "Wannabees" & "Be The One" are reworkings of two of these songs: "Clarity", "Snakes & Ladders", "Disease", and "Overkill", with the other two seemingly being scrapped.
Regardless of changes, "Weight of the Truth" remains a deeply personal album reflecting on Mike's mental health struggles, so it's good to see him addressing his story like this and perfecting it, as only he fully understands what he has went through! You can (re-)buy "Weight of the Truth" for $5.99 at
this link or on a "name your price" model on Bandcamp. As I noted above for Mike delisting old albums, only the reworking of "Weight of the Truth" and a new version of the title track from his (former?) EP
"Hourglass" are currently posted, and while I have no idea if albums like "In Ruins" and "Hourglass" will ever return in a recognizable form, he has taken to his Facebook page to reveal that he is working on a new album, specifically an instrumental album inspired by his creative pursuits outside of music. He acknowledged that this is a departure from the "controversial material" he's previously released
If you didn't know, many of Mike's prior songs reflected on his left-leaning political views and opinions therein, but such content is not (currently?) available to stream or buy on official channels. Mike does sound like he's having more fun working on his new music, but he didn't specify if he's recording or still songwriting at present. It's good to have Mike back at long last though, he's a talented hard rock musician and songwriter with interesting viewpoints and lyrics, so give his posted material and updates a look above! At press time, Facebook embed codes for videos aren't working on Blogger, but teaser clips from "Weight of the Truth" can be seen there.
That's all for today, but stay tuned for this month's YouTube Channel Profile next, wth more news to follow! Thanks everyone!
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