Momma's Got the Blues: Volume 196

Celebrating the joys of pop music and the musicians who live to play it; while taking an insider's look at what the digital age has done to the artist, the business and the sound.

The golden days of MaryAnne's singing career, of sold-out concert halls and hit records have given way to shabby rooms and paltry CD sales, battered by YouTube and streaming. But, MaryAnne, nearing 60, refuses to retire. When her party-animal single daughter becomes pregnant, MaryAnne rebels against becoming a grandmother and putting her dwindling career aside to help her daughter raise an infant. It's left to her live-in lover to try and sew the family back together while MaryAnne clutches her six-string for dear life.

David Sherman has worked as a newspaper and magazine journalist and editor, CBC radio producer, playwright, filmmaker, screenwriter, singer/songwriter and now novelist. He abandoned the newspaper business when layoffs and budget cuts decimated the industry and concentrated on writing for the theatre and writing and performing as a folksinger. His latest play, Lost and Found, produced by Infinitheatre and written with his partner Nancy Lee, is a musical, inspired in part, by The Alcoholic's Daughter. They wrote the songs and story and performed the play in Montreal, B.C. and the Laurentiens. Sherman is also a gym rat and was an avid squash layer and cyclist before the body said enough and the medicine chest overflowed. He is now working on another novel in between walking in the woods with his Chocolate Lab named Jesse and swimming in the lake behind his house, a century-old former fishing lodge, where he occasionally obsesses over dinner parties.