[Opening theme music]

[Diane:] Hello, and welcome to this episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation. My name is Diane Kolin. This series presents artists, academics, and project leaders who dedicate their time and energy to a better accessibility for people with disabilities in the arts. You can find more of these conversations on our website, artsably.com, which is spelled A-R-T-S-A-B-L-Y dot com.

[Theme music]

[Diane:] Today, ArtsAbly is in conversation with Kaleb Hikele, a Canadian singer-songwriter living in Toronto, in Canada. You can find the resources mentioned by Kaleb Hikele during this episode on ArtsAbly's website in the blog section.

[Kaleb Hikele playing "Mind Like a Radio" - Soft guitar intro]

[Kaleb whistles] My mind is like a radio. Turn the dial, change the channel. When I want to turn it off, babe, what do I do? What do I do? My mind is like a radio. Choose a style, hit the cruise control. When I want to turn it off, babe, What do I do? What do I do? Better think of you, babe, you better think of you, babe, you better think of you, babe, better think of you.

[Kaleb whistles]

[Soft guitar bridge, end of the excerpt]

[Diane:] Welcome to this new episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation. Today, I am with Kaleb Hikele, who is a Canadian singer and songwriter living in Toronto in Canada. Welcome, Kaleb.

[Kaleb:] Hello. Thank you so much for having me, Diane.

[Diane:] Thank you. Okay, so you have an impressive career of guitar player and also piano player, which I discovered in one of your videos of the tours you've made. I would like to first start with the beginning. Can you tell us who you are and where this music started, this music career of yours started,

[Kaleb:] Yes, of course. My name is Kaleb Hikele, I'm in Riverdale, Toronto, on the East End. I was born and raised in St. Thomas, Ontario, which is outside of London. It's a small town, but it's not a village. When I was there, it was about 30,000 people maybe, and now it's 40 or more, I think. I lived there from when I was born until I was 18 years old, and I moved to Toronto. In that time, when I was about five or six, I was put into classical piano lessons. The piano was actually my first instrument. I played classical piano for about almost 10 years before I even picked up a guitar ever. I really just spent a lot of time learning how to play and how to perform classical piano. I dabbled a little bit in composition. By the time I was even seven or eight years old, I think I tried to write down my very first thing that you would consider an original piece. But mostly performed piano recitals, and I sang in a show choir called Cleavage, who was run by a woman that I have to name, named Sarah Asselstine, who changed my life and so many others in St. Thomas. She ran a show choir that was, I don't even know how many people, 30 to 40 people maybe on stage all at once, singing Broadway tunes and classical pieces and putting on concerts all throughout the year, Christmas concerts and variety shows. I was doing that from the time that I was, again, about six years old up until I was a teenager, and I started playing guitar instead and writing punk songs and playing in punk bands. That was where my whole life just switched over to this new musical being. But really, that's where I come from, and it's influenced a lot of my music later in my life. I let go of the classical thing for a little while, especially when I was in punk bands and everything, because when you're 13, 14 years old, it felt really cool to be in a punk band. I was bullied when I was a kid for playing classical piano and for singing in a show choir. I was bullied quite a bit, and I didn't have a lot of friends. I'm glad I stuck with it because by the time that I picked up a guitar and had more confidence and started playing cool shows, and I was a little more popular in small town and everything, it gave me the confidence to go out into the world and to move into the biggest city in all of Canada and become a songwriter and to start playing piano again. By the time I was in my early 20s, I really came back to the piano and started to play it again and write again and turned that into a full album full of piano songs. Now I'm very proud to sit at the piano and play and perform. I'm gladly found that because the thing is, most of my music nowadays is performed on the guitar because it's a lot more portable than a grand piano. The piano, a lot of people, I have to explain to them, Oh, I do play the piano, too. It's my first instrument, and I'm much better as a pianist than I am as a guitarist. But I love all sides of it, and I still love classical music. I listen to it on a regular basis. I still love punk music. I listen to it on an almost daily basis. And all of those influences really are just a big part of who I am. So is the small town that I came from, and so is the big city that I live in now. I shouldn't go without saying that I actually am even wearing a Beethoven T-shirt. I didn't realize that until I just saw the top of his hair. Yeah, that really is the best summary that I can give of just where I've come from and that it's still all such a big part of me in my life.

[Diane:] When you moved to Toronto, did you move to study music and did you go to music school or what did you do?

[Kaleb:] Yeah, I did. Like I asked you before, if you were up at York University. Actually, I went to Seneca at York. I went to the Seneca College campus on York. That was when I was 18 years old, so I moved to the city with a fake ID. I was living all on my own at 18 years old, going to Seneca College for the independent music production program. I was class number nine, so the course had just started, run by a brilliant, brilliant music industry mogul named John Switzer. I met some of my best friends that I'm still best friends with now and people who really changed my life in that first year of music college. It was only one year of a program. When I graduated I graduated from Seneca. I then moved downtown to the place that actually I'm living in now with this home studio I built in 2009. I moved here and went to one more year of music college at Harris Institute. It's a private music college downtown that a lot of the Canadian music industry folks have graduated from. By the time I was 20 years old, I was working at a major record label full-time and was out of school, and I haven't been back to school I've just been living the school and education of being a songwriter in Canada and everything that comes along with that.

[Diane:] As both a guitar player and a piano player, you compose on both? I think you have two different aspects in your music, your solo career and another career that you have also. Can you talk a bit about both aspects of this career?

[Kaleb:] Yeah, of course. So, the separation of the two sides of me and my solo music career and my rock and roll band that I'm in, and the two different names that I'm presenting is all quite recent. When I was in high school, I was recording and releasing my first solo albums under my name, Kaleb Hikele. That was in 2007 and 2008. Then I moved to Toronto and almost immediately within that first couple of weeks, I had the idea of not using my real name and coming up with a stage name, a pseudonym, mostly because it's hard to pronounce and to write and to remember my name. And most people ask, How do you pronounce it? And all these things. And that, to me, was enough to consider, Oh, maybe I should come up with something else. I came up with the Sun Harmonic and played my first show as the Sun Harmonic as a solo artist in January of 2009. And then in June of 2009, I released my first Sun Harmonic solo album and ended up releasing solo albums as the Sun Harmonic all the way up until the pandemic. Until 2021, I released Coast to Coast, which was my last solo album as the Sun Harmonic. And all along, I started putting together a band behind the Sun Harmonic, which are my two bandmates now. They're best friends of mine Dave Skrtich on drums, and Ian McLennan, who's actually from St. Thomas as well. We both sang in the show choir that I talked about. They became my bandmates for the Sun Harmonic. In and around 2018, 2019, we were going out and playing shows and being a rock band, but I was also being a solo folk artist. It got very confusing, and then the pandemic hit, and I had a lot of time to figure out what am I doing really with my music. And there was even a point after I released Coast to Coast, there was a point in the end of 2021 where I recorded a solo album and a band album within one month of each other. One of them was rock and roll and the other was folk. It was just so obvious that I was doing both of those things at the same time under the same name. I wanted them to be different. I wanted to present them differently, and they sounded different. So in 2024, the beginning of 2024, I really took a dive into what has become, I think, one of the best decisions I ever made, which was to go back out as Kaleb Hikele, and I have this album here ready to show off, which is my album that I released in 2024 as Kaleb Hikele. That was the first time I released a record under my real name since 2008. I had been The Sun Harmonic for 15 years and felt like it was time to turn it into something new and I gave the stage name to my rock band and turned it into a rock band from here on out for this foreseeable future, and then started going on tour as Kaleb Hikele as a solo artist. It really is the separation of classical folk side of solo Kaleb and the rock and roll. We're writing almost punk songs now for a new album as the Sun Harmonic and letting it go and turning it into something new for the first time in a while. I'm excited about it. There's a lot more to come, and I just feel good about the decision. It was scary at first because I had to change all of my social I have my media names and tags and handles and everything and my biographies and everything. I spent almost two months just working on the transition to the whole new thing, which was scary because I was so many years into my music career, but it felt like I was starting from scratch. But I knew that I shouldn't be worried. I shouldn't be scared of it. I should embrace something that's scary to me. Yeah, that's where I'm at now.

[Diane:] Why The Sun Harmonic? Why this name?

[Kaleb:] Why the name? Yeah. To be honest, it did. I remember I came up with it in my tiny little college dorm room that was on Boake Street outside of York University. I remember coming up with it in that room late one night. I really was just throwing a lot of names and a lot of words around. I think at first I thought of the Harmonic Sun or something like that, and then I moved Sun Harmonic around. But what I liked about having the Sun, S-U-N, Sun, having that be a part of the name was that it... To me at that point when I was 19 especially, it said that music in my life was what I was revolving around. I still feel that way very much, except now I do have a whole other career, and I have a partner, and I have a dog, and everything that I didn't have when I was 19. But having the sun in there, really, to me, that is what it meant, was that I was revolving myself around. The sun was almost the music to me. Then harmonics, of course, are those extra notes and harmonies on top of the melody, which is the centerfuse of the sun, and that the harmonics then were all of the extras, the accoutumons of what comes with being a musician and the beautiful sounds that come from harmonics and everything. It really just was trying to have some reference to the importance of music to me.

[Diane:] How many albums do you have on both sides of your musical career?

[Kaleb:] This album, from my bio, I think this latest album is, I think it's my 12th or 13th studio album. I've released a couple of EPs on the side of that. The Sun Harmonic, I think, is officially about maybe we're putting out the sixth, if not seventh studio album of the Sun Harmonic. And Kaleb Hikele, I released three solo albums before I moved to Toronto, and now this is my first coming back again. Then I've got other side projects. I've got a solo album I made as The Broadview Band and a rock and roll album I made under King Snake Crawl. I've got all of these other funny little records that are here and there that I love. So it's a lot. It's about a baker's dozen albums. There's two more coming that I'm working on right now. There are a lot more songs that I haven't been able to record because I wrote a lot at once. But yeah, they keep getting better and more interesting, and that's all you can do as a songwriter is try and just keep making better and better music. By the time that the album is finished, most of the time, at least personally, in my experience, I'm tired of it. I'm sick of it. The excitement is in the making of the album. It's not in releasing the album. By the time the album is being released, it's almost like going and doing your groceries and then putting them away when you get home. It's just work. The creation of the music is the most exciting part. The second that it's done, and it's finished and it's mastered and I can't touch it anymore, I have to go back to another project and start to work on it because I want to get back to that fusion of creativity. They're being something new that's happening.

[Diane:] What are your upcoming projects then?

[Kaleb:] I am working on a solo Kaleb Hikele album, and I'm working on a rock and roll band Sun Harmonic album. When I recorded both of those records, I thought that they were both going to be the Sun Harmonic. It's very cool that now the fact that they've taken me a few years during the pandemic to even get around to finishing, they now have a different path and trajectory than they did when I first started them, which is cool. Sometimes you want to just let something become what it's going to become rather than trying to force it to be what you dreamed it was going to be, especially during a pandemic. Now that the Mind Like radio album is out and it's done and it's a year old as of a couple of days ago, I'm really focusing on finishing the new Sun Harmonic album, which we've released one song as a single. It's called Homesick, which is a very, very old song of mine that finally has been released. Then we've got the rest of the album, too. I just have a lot of studio work to do to finish it, but I'm going to do that this summer, and we'll be releasing that sometime in 2025, I hope in the fall. Then I have a solo album called Storytelling that is a collection of songs that are all stories either that I wanted to tell from my own experience or stories about other people, some stories about a family of mine, a story from the eyes of my grandfather saying goodbye to my grandma when she passed away, a song about my Oma and my experience when I was young, painting her front porch. I collected songs that would fit together and recorded them in this beautiful church in Hamilton. I did that a couple of years ago, and it's just sitting there. I can't wait to finish it because I think it's one of the best very, very personal and intimate creative works that I've ever done. But I've had to exercise my patience a lot with getting around to it. Aside from that, I just have a very random brand new song that I wrote two weeks ago, two weeks ago tomorrow. I'm actually sending it off to mastering either tonight or tomorrow, depending on it's up on my computer screen right now. I'm really just trying to finish the mix and send it off to mastering and get it out of my hands. But I only wrote it just sitting at the grand piano upstairs at where I work, which I'd love to talk about next. It's called Firefighter's Son, and it's It's a beautiful song that was inspired by Loretta Lynn, of course, with her Coal Miner’s Daughter, and it speaks to my dad and his career, and it speaks to my mom and my sister and growing up in a small town. It's been very exciting because I wrote it and I recorded it in the studio three days later and recorded a B-side version of it and Kuzik version of it, and kept my dad's firefighter helmet that he gave and sent the picture to him being like, Hey, I found use for this finally. After he retired, he gave me that. I've really just been diving into that. A brand new song that I did not expect to come around, and I'm going to release it, by the time that this comes out, I'm hoping it's out a couple of weeks after that. It's always exciting. I work on a lot of stuff all at once, and it's exciting when something new comes along that just breaks me out of the old tiresome stuff. Just for a second before I get back to it. That's what this album was, to be honest. I wrote and recorded and released this album within a few months. It took an entire year away from everything I was doing because it was just something new and exciting, and it was more relevant to me than anything I was working on. Sometimes you just want to share that from your heart rather than a song that maybe is even better than anything that's on that album. You're not always putting your best foot forward in a way. Obviously, your best efforts, but it's not like I'm always releasing my very best song over and over and over again because I think it's up to interpretation. A lot of people don't love the songs that I love the most, and they love songs that I don't love the most. Sometimes you want to let people decide what they like and give them what you can give them, right?

[Diane:] Yeah. So, you mentioned another place where you're working. What is this place exactly?

[Kileb:] Yeah. So, I work just in my neighbourhood here. I've been living in Riverdale now since 2009, and I have seen the Don Jail be demolished, and I've seen the new Bridgepoint Active Health care, what wasn't previously known as Bridgepoint Active Health care, be built in 2013. I lived by this health care rehabilitation clinic for so many years while I juggled so many different jobs. And during the pandemic, I lost the job that I had at the moment and ended up becoming a grocery delivery driver as basically like a first - kind of frontline worker during the height of the pandemic when you weren't allowed to even take transit unless you were going to work. I had to carry a card on my phone to show the police that I was traveling to my frontline worker job. That's when I was doing that work as a grocery delivery driver for about two years. Then by about 2022, I had such an urge and such a growing heart to do something and to find something that I really, really believed in and I really, really cared for. I couldn't believe that I didn't think of this earlier, but I walked my dog by the hospital that is so close to me here in Riverdale, about a 10-minute walk. I walked my dog by there for two years before I… I had the idea in my head, I wonder if I could work there. And I just started looking. I did not go to school for nursing. I don't have the prerequisites that are required for a lot of the jobs in the hospital but I found a job in the kitchen working in food service, and I got in and started working in there and working very, very long days, 13 and a half hour, double shift days in the kitchen, serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I did that for about a year and a half and had my eyes set on moving upstairs somehow. I had no idea how, whether it be housekeeping or what it would be. But I kept looking at every job post that came up, just trying to find something that I could do just by being a kind-hearted person who wanted to work in health care but really had no experience or no... No training whatsoever. Then a job came up and I put my name in to work as a therapy porter. I had never even heard of the job before. I knew what a porter was, but I didn't know what a therapy porter was. And I got the I got the job and took it at the beginning of 2024. It's truly been the best job. But to me, it's more than a job because I've I had so many jobs. When I got the job at the hospital, I counted that I had 23 jobs in my life at that point. I had never settled into anything because I always had music, and I was always juggling everything besides the music. My job as a therapy porter really is the best... It's the best work that I've had to do and to clock in and clock out, but feel like I'm really doing something that I've... It's just been ready for and been ready to do, to take care of people and to care for people who really need it. I porter patients at... It's now called Hennick Bridgepoint Hospital. It's the big glass building hanging over the DVP if you're driving up and down the highway there. It has the most amazing views of the city because the whole building is all glass on the outside. It's just floor to ceiling windows everywhere that you go. And I porter patients to and from dialysis appointments, and I take patients in and out of therapy and recreation therapy sessions. Anything from Bingo, I was just playing a game of Bingo with patients about an hour ago, to music therapy, which, of course, really just lights my heart on fire to see it being used in that sense in a clinical setting, to see music being used as truly as medicine. And art programs, visual art, activities like adapted sports. So patients that stay in their wheelchairs and are playing versions of Bocce ball or basketball or any sport that you usually would think, Oh, you're going to have to stand up and use your legs to do that. The incredible therapeutic recreation team at Bridgepoint really just will not give up in finding ways to let people with all levels of disability to let them participate in these sports and activities. They adapt the sports to being able to just literally play a game of... They did an Olympics last year where you went around and did different sports and everyone got points and everything. It's incredible to see what they can do. But the most important part of it to me is the music therapy, seeing what they do with patients who are, some of them are nonverbal. Most of them are in some... They either are using their walker or I bring them in their wheelchair and porter them to the program. And they either participate and play tambourine or play drums or play the piano or they sing. Or if, say, some of them are paralyzed and they're not able to move, I know that even though I speak to them, and they're nonverbal, and they're not able to speak back to me, I know that they are listening to the music and that it is just magic. It truly is just magic to watch a room. The first time that I watched a room full of patients from the ninth floor, which is mostly a lot of palliative care patients, and to watch a room of them just sit in this wash of live music being performed on a grand piano. I'll speak about those people soon, but it really is just - It's given me a new perspective on what music is and what it can do and how important it is to people, whether or not they are young and healthy and vibrant and they're going down to punk shows downtown Toronto, or they are towards the end of their life, or they're recovering from a stroke, or they are just trying to live their life in a hospital where music therapy doesn't have to be provided. I think a lot of hospitals likely don't have it, especially emergency types of hospitals, more trauma centers and stuff like that. But Bridgepoint is a rehabilitation, a complex care hospital. The fact that they have utilized music to really change people's day and to save their life in a way, to bring it back to life. I've seen people just in tears before I picked them up or after I picked them up from music therapy. It really is just the most beautiful thing. It really is. That's my very long speech.

[Diane:] Are you performing sometimes with them or not?

[Kileb:] I have once. I sang Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas on the grand piano to everyone who was in the room around Christmas time. I sat down and I asked them if I could play. I'd like to do a proper concert if I could. We've talked about it with some of the rec therapists, and it would be very nice because I've got some Beatles songs and some old classics that they would love. But no, for the most part, it's trained music therapist. Or we're even watching concerts. I bring them in to watch documentaries or to watch, for example, we just watched, by my recommendation, we watched a Gordon Lightfoot concert from the 1970s. We bring patients in and they all sit around the TV, and we crank the music up, and they'd sit and watch a 45 minutes concert. They sway, and they sing along, and they clap at the end of songs. It's the coolest thing. When I first started in this job, I really couldn't believe how special it was. I'm trying not to let it... Trying not to lose that excitement or take it for granted or anything. Now that I've been doing this job for about a year and a half now.

[Diane:] How is it from the stage where you're performing, which are sometimes bars, sometimes stages that are not necessarily accessible, things like that, how did it transform your vision of accessibility and disability in the arts?

[Kaleb:] I would say... I mean, first, I do want to say I just feel like I have so much more to learn and to open myself up to in all of this world. I... My experience... In my experience of clinical settings or any kind of trauma, when I was 25, I had tendonitis that struck both of my wrists and took me away from being able to perform for about three years. So that was a repetitive strain injury that took me off guard and took me by surprise when I was very young. And I still struggle with that on a daily basis now, but I have got on to the other side of it and I've recovered and I'm able to play a three-hour concert, which at the height of my injury, I was only able to play... There was a show where I played three songs in a row, and that was it. I had to go home and ice my wrist. It really was that bad. I think about that all the time, and I struggled to brush my teeth at that point in my life without having a lot of pain. It was very intense. From that point on, I've tried to take away from that the empathy that is needed when you're, especially now that I'm working with patients who have either been in car crashes or they, again, stroke recovery or whatever trauma they have had and whether or not they will walk again or they won't. I've seen every angle and every story. I've had so many stories that I've been able to learn and to see in people and the resilience that they have. But from my own experience of going into a hospital a couple of times a week when my wrists were really at their worst and I had my braces on and all of those things and was going to physiotherapy and all of those things, From that moment in my life, I have known that there's a part of me that is and will always be a patient in a way, and I think everyone has that in their own way. Of course, there's different severity of it. But when I started working in healthcare, then it opened my eyes to what it is to go into a music venue and have it be accessible, and that when I'm working then with patients during the day, and I'm portering them to and from in their wheelchairs, then maybe that night or that weekend, I go and play a show at a venue, and I see someone like our friend Julie (Sawchuk), who we were talking about, when I see her at Farm League Brewing, when I was opening for Royalwood and I was playing this show in Cambridge, and I see Julie in the front row, and she is in her wheelchair. Honestly, while I was on stage, because the way that I came in wasn't accessible. That was through the one side of the venue, and there were many stairs, and there wasn't a ramp or an elevator. But even when I saw her on the stage while I was playing, and while I'm playing, I can think about a lot I think about, What am I going to play next? What's my band are going to be? My fingers are moving and I'm singing, but I'm able to think about other things. I don't necessarily have to concentrate very hard on my performance because I just have sang so many of my songs 500 times. So I really started thinking. I was looking around and I was looking and thinking, Where is the accessible entrance at this venue? I was blown away that she was there right at the front row. It was so special to me to see her there that when I finished the show, I packed all of my stuff, moved everything off the stage, and the first person that I went over to speak with was Julie in her wheelchair, in her wheelchair. I knelt down on the side and I said, I'm so happy to see you here. I asked her right away, How did you get in? And she said, Oh, I came through the brewery side of it. There's an entrance where you can come in and you go through all the brewery, all the brewer's set up that remains accessible, and then you come in down through this other side. I just hadn't seen that. And so she explaining that to me, and I just said, I am so happy that that is an option, and I'm so happy to have you here in the front row. I know how much this means to be able to enjoy live music in this way, and that a lot of venues aren't accessible. A lot of the time, because I'm so busy loading my stuff in or playing the show, a lot of the time, it's not like you notice that right away, that the venue is or isn't accessible, especially when I'm someone who is able to walk myself into the venue. But when you start to notice that, how many venues are up a flight of stairs, and that's the only way to get there, or how many venues could or should be accessible, but they don't have it in place. And it opens my eyes to the shows where there are people in the front row or in the accessible locations of the venue. I notice them right away. I see it so quickly and very, very, very happy and excited about that. It makes me... I'm not at a point where I can really choose where and... where I perform all the time. A lot of the time, I'm just playing wherever I can. But it really makes me think of if I were successful and popular enough to have a choice of, I want to play here, I only want to play here, it really opens my eyes to the power that you would have to be able make, say, an entire tour accessible. That that would be a very special and important part of my mission as a singer-songwriter, especially with that genre. Folk music should be for everybody. And not every venue... If it is not accessible, it's not for everybody. It is something that should be talked about more, should be addressed. Of course, that's the work that you are doing and that I was speaking with Julie about when I met her. She was so proud to tell me that ever since she started on this mission of really going out into the world and showing people what is accessible and what isn't. Since that mission started for her that just being able to have people see that. That's what I was so excited about, was that I felt that I saw her there. Before talking to the 75 other people who were in the room, it was so important to me to go over and to tell her who I am and where I work, and that I work with patients with accessibility and disabilities that have opened my eyes to this world and how much it means. Like that music is medicine and it is therapy, and that a folk concert and a punk show is music therapy in ways that I never thought of it like that before, but now I do. And I give that speech at a lot of my shows, that this is medicine for everybody, whether or not you have a visible disability, an invisible disability. It is so important.

[Diane:] Yes, but let's now reverse the situation. Now, next time you go to a venue, Of course, you don't have a choice, but let's imagine that you are the one with a disability.

[Kaleb:]Yes. To be able to be onto the stage.

[Diane:] You're the one performing, right? Most of the venues that say they are accessible, yes, they are accessible to the audience. What about the performers? There are many performers with disabilities. We don't have - I say we because I'm one of them. We don't have the choice of the venue. We have to choose the venues that are stage accessible. Of course, the first thing they're going to accessibilize these venues are the audience. But then for them, it's enough. Then it stops here. Right? So, the idea that music is therapy for everybody, it's still discussable because no, not everybody has access to the venue. Not everybody has access to the stage. And us, as performers, our "therapy" is to go on stage and to perform. Many, many musicians are cut from this privilege. So maybe next time you go to a venue, it's great to look at how accessible it is for the audience. But we are advocating for an accessibility of the performing venues, like the performance spaces. It's always a struggle. Plus, sometimes, accessibility means that... Look at Julie. What she did is that she went through the brewery. It's not the same entrance as everybody else. We're not treated as equal. Now, it's coming more and more. We have laws, we have some organizations that are helping those who want to make accessibility better in their environment. But sometimes it's frequently forgotten that accessibility doesn't mean just the entrance. It means wheelchair accessible bathroom, which is Julie's forte. It means stage accessible. It means some spots where we are not hidden behind the pylon or whatever in the accessible spots, right? Or sometimes in big theaters, the accessible spot is on the back. There is no way for us to go on the front. It's coming, but there is improvement to go, right?

[Kileb:] For sure. I've also worked at a lot of music venues, too, or performance spaces, theater spaces, St Lawrence Center for the Arts, which I do believe the one theater for sure. I do believe that that back entrance, I'm not sure if that goes through to the stage, but I know at least that I was a part of taking patients in wheelchairs. As well as Massey Hall, there were accessibility issues for a very long time, and now a lot of that has been addressed in wheelchair accessible spots on the balcony level, which wasn't available before because the venue was built in 1894. I've seen a lot of it. Budweiser Stage, too.

[Diane:] Roy Thompson Hall and Koerner Hall is entirely accessible. There is a way of going as a performer behind. These big venues where they have money and they have laws, even if their building is protected by historical laws, the accessibleization law is also here. There is a way of compromising and finding a way. But sometimes, I'm thinking of a venue where there is accessibility to the stage, but then if you are a choir member or a chorister and you need to go to the balcony where the choir is, it's not accessible. I'm thinking of Roy Thompson Hall. I'm thinking of other venues in the city that are... These are all Torontonian venues that we are mentioning here. But of course, this is everywhere. It's a global issue, and we really try to advocate for that. We will get there, but it's slow.

[Kileb:] For sure. Well, It's such important work that you are doing. I do think that it is so strong to be coming from someone like you who is saying, I am in a wheelchair and I am a performer. See me as both of those things. Don't just see me as one or the other. But I think it should also be coming from, and this is why I'm saying, I feel like I have so much more to learn and to see and to go out into the world and see these venues that I'm performing at and to look at the accessibility and to pay attention to that when I'm booking tours. That it would be very powerful to have artists who either do need accessibility or don't need it themselves, but want to advocate for it and want it to be seen in the venue to be there in the venue that they're playing at. I think it really... Yeah, the power and the pressure should be coming from all sides. Like I said, it just really goes to show that it's just so... It is important to have it be for everyone. It really is. And I don't know that I noticed that when I was in my early 20s and I was playing punk gigs downtown all over Toronto and most venues that are not accessible and where the bathrooms are in the basement. So even if you can get into the venue, you probably can't get to the bathroom, stuff like that. And, I don't know. I'm just very happy and proud to have found my way into not only into health care, but into opening my eyes and my heart to this world and seeing there's multiple venues where I've been able to notice, especially outdoor shows. I should mention that I have a new friend named Gord in London, Ontario, who came out to one of my shows at the Western Fair. It was an outdoor show, an outdoor fair, where the whole fair was accessible, except for, I'm sure, almost all of the rides, I'm sure, probably would not be, but that the grounds to the fair were accessible, and especially the live music was accessible. Gord came to... I played four shows at the Western Fair, and he came to one of the first ones and ended up coming back with his caregiver. He was nonverbal, and I was so happy to get off the stage and run over and to speak with him. I gave him a sticker that he put on his wheelchair, on his communication board on the front of his wheelchair, and I was able to see him a couple of times after that. I took a couple of pictures with them that the caregiver was wanting to take and to take back to the home that he was at. It was so special to me to just really feel like my eyes were open to it. Yeah, I'm very happy and proud to have this be just a new angle of what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.

[Diane:] Thanks for this perspective. It's really important. It's pretty.

[Kaleb:] Yeah, and like I said, it really is still in its early stages. I feel like there's so much that I can learn and that there is some perspective that I can give, but I know that there's so much more to know about it and to share with others. It's a part of me now. I don't think it ever won't be. I do feel forever changed in a way by it.

[Diane:] Well, I have a last question for you to wrap up this interview, and it's about people who might have counted in your career, who might have changed your perspective like we were talking, or who might have shown you a path that you were not expecting. If you had people to think of, who would it be and why?

[Kaleb:] I read that question, and right away, I knew my answer would be... You asked for one person, and I'm going to make it two because they're a team. Obviously, there's so many other people in my music career and in my life that I could speak about, but particularly to the point and the intersection of art and disability, my experience at Bridgepoint, and especially in music therapy, has absolutely been enriched and changed by watching these two incredibly talented and powerful and innovative women who I'll only name them by their first name just because the hospital, of course, there's a lot of privacy and confidentiality and patient's names and everything. But there's two music therapists, one named Melanie and one named Jackie. They work together as a team, and they work on the... Well, They work on all floors, but my introduction to them was walking a patient, portering a patient in their wheelchair into the 10th floor auditorium of Bridgepoint, and hearing a grand piano, but I hadn't seen it yet, and hearing a fiddle. Jackie plays the fiddle and she plays the piano. Melanie plays the piano and she sings. They both just have beautiful voices, and they harmonize, and they sing to the patients. They sing with the patients. The way that they interact with the patients is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. My job is really just to bring the patient in and interact with them while we're in the elevator, whether or not we can have a conversation back and forth or if they're nonverbal, I am telling them, Oh, we're going to music therapy. That's where the grand piano is, and we're going to be singing these songs today. But then when I bring them in and then drop them off in this music therapy session, the second that I walk a patient in, they'll start to play a song for that patient, knowing their background, knowing where they've come from in the world, where they're from, sometimes their religion, sometimes just their name is in a song. They'll start singing a song to that patient with their name in the song. The way that I've seen it just light up a patient who is in so much pain. The second that I bring them into that room and drop them off, and I see just this… It is magic. I just have to give all the credit to them. Truly, it's been a very, very eye-opening experience to seeing just not only what music can do as medicine, but who you can be as a musician. They're both just incredible musicians. I'm a musician, too. I could sit at the piano and play for them, but I let them do their thing, and I sit back and I watch in amazement and awe of how incredible they are at reaching people and tapping into people, regardless of what kind of disability they have or what kind of experience they are having in their life, whether or not they're recovering from a traumatic event or they're in palliative care and they're in their final stages of their life. It's incredible. They were the first people that I thought of, and I haven't changed my answer. I thought that they really deserve to... They're heroes. They really are. They deserve so much credit. But surely don't... They have their own little magical thing that's happening, and I'm so lucky to be able to see it because there's no cameras on, there's no pictures. It just is what it is, and it happens, and it is so special and so important for these patients.

[Diane:] Thank you so much for your stories and everything. Good luck with everything in your career. Maybe you will be able to work with them at a certain point, right?

[Kaleb:] I would like to. I would like to. I should say, actually, that that grand piano that they played in music therapy, that's where I ran off on a 15-minute break during my shift. I had just ported patients away from a Loretta Lynn concert, and this was just two weeks ago. I portered patients away from a Loretta Lynn concert and had this Coal Miner's Daughter idea, and I thought, Oh, I should write a song called Firefighter's Son. I ran upstairs and the music therapy room was empty, and there's a grand piano, and there's a guitar. And I went upstairs with that little tiny idea, and I was on the palliative care floor, so I was playing very, very, very quiet, as quiet as I could. I wrote the Firefighter's Son song in about 15 minutes. I sat down and I wrote the lyrics. I figured out the chords. I came up with a few other little ideas that eventually turned into the bridge. That little place where magic is happening every single day for patients, I was able to tap into that somehow, and I'm just so grateful for it. I can't wait to release that song and to be able to tell that story of where the song was born out of. I'm inspired by it, and I just think it's such reciprocal inspiration and magic happening within that building, and especially within music therapy.

[Diane:] Well, thank you so much and all the best for everything. I know I might see you in one of your tours or something like that.

[Kaleb:] That would be wonderful. That would be very nice. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for the work that you do. I mean, even being able to speak about this for me is a first in this kind of setting. I talk about a lot of this at my shows and to audience members, especially if they're in a wheelchair or they are coming in with a walker or a cane, and I'm seeing all of these different stories and all these different lives that are being lived. But it's, yeah, I would absolutely love to see you at one of the shows. I think that the work that you're doing is very, very important. I wish you the best of luck with it, too.

[Diane:] Thank you. Take good care and see you next time.

[Kaleb:] Yes, of course. Thanks for listening, everyone.

[Diane:] Thank you. Bye.

[Closing theme music]