A.C. Newman

Hailing from Vancouver, guitarist and tunesmith Allan Carl Newman first entered Canada’s music landscape during the early 1990s by joining the alternative rock and grunge outfit Superconductor. His mid-’90s tenure with the power pop ensemble Zumpano proved more sustained, yielding the well-received albums Look What the Rookie Did and Goin’ Through Changes, yet it was the 2000 formation of the New Pornographers that placed his hook-filled guitar pop anthems at the center of the crowded indie rock landscape of the new century. Over the subsequent decade the collective Newman guided issued a succession of popular releases. Scattered among those band efforts were individual side projects by Neko Case, Dan Bejar of Destroyer, and Newman himself, whose Matador Records solo debut Slow Wonder appeared in 2004 followed by Get Guilty in 2009. Shut Down the Streets, unveiled in 2012, revealed a richly layered, frequently acoustic blend of baroque and folk-pop textures. One year later he composed the soundtrack for the romantic comedy What If, which starred Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan.