CBC Presents: Road to the Junos • $15 Inclusive Of Taxes & Fees • All Proceeds to MusiCounts

LIMITED TICKETS AVAILABLE AT THE DOOR

The Juno Awards are returning to Hamilton in March 2026, and to kick off Juno season, CBC is proud to present Road to the Junos, a six-day concert series featuring some of the best talent from the Hamilton region. Happening in downtown Hamilton across three venues and over two weekends this January/February, Road to the Junos will showcase a wide range of genres and local talent. These concerts will be recorded by CBC Music for broadcast on CBC Radio, CBC Gem and YouTube. You can find more information at cbcmusic.ca/junos.  All proceeds from this show go to MusiCounts.

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Whitehorse

Whitehorse is the prolific partnership of Melissa McClelland and Luke Doucet. Uninhibited by expectation, boldly adventurous and categorically talented, Whitehorse’s signature sound is always guitar-heavy, harmony-plentiful and lyrically deft. With an expansive run of records that freely and thrillingly dip in psychedelic country, pop noir, squalling blues rock and celestial folk, Whitehorse have pushed their musical identity into new realms and sounds for over a decade. As attested by five consecutive JUNO Award nominations in many different genre categories, Whitehorse do a lot of things, and do them well. For artists whose biographies have been written many times over, what’s new this time is how the duo’s previous experiences set the stage for a new thrilling chapter. This is a story of artists coming from a multitude of somewheres, a culmination of the many chapters of two artists who live their lives in and through music.  On their new record, Whitehorse venture deeper into classic country music touchstones than ever before, a move that is both a homecoming and an evolution of their sound. I’m Not Crying, You’re Crying is an immaculate collection of 70s country-inspired songs that showcase Whitehorse at their absolute best.

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Julianna Riolino

Growth takes time, and it’s a dirty, fraught journey. We may decide one day who we want to be but it takes an abundance of effort to get there. Consider, for a moment, flora: each year, we tend to seeds and bulbs plunged into cold, hard ground. Then each spring, we till, nourish, and water, waiting for greenery to grow and appear. There’s hope that this work leads us to, say, lush peony bushes, draped and slunk over under the weight of their own elegance. Something beautiful, something special after all of that hard work. And so, we endure the labour of the transition that got us there. This liminal space of transformation is where we find singer-songwriter Julianna Riolino on her sophomore record, Echo In The Dust. The album arrives October 24, 2025 from Riolino’s own label, MoonWhistle Records, unfurling like a once tight bud into a languid blossom. By Riolino’s own admission, Echo In The Dust is markedly different from her debut, All Blue, released in 2022. She breathes new confidence into her performance—the sort that burns from belly to brain, roaring from her throat but landing sweetly on our ears. The Southern Ontario musician is soft as she is tough on these songs; seeing the benefit of laying down armour and splitting her heart open so that we may get a glimpse of our own. The songs on the record consider relationships of all sorts as the foundation for her awakening into a different creative self and person in this world; working through loss, grief, habits, and decisions she once made, seeking clarity in the past before leaving it there to move forward. The sentiment “you don’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been” rings especially true on this album. What makes Riolino a compelling performer and songwriter on this record, and in her career, is how she inhabits past sensations and feelings, reliving and reviving them again to release. While a lot of these experiences are composites and memories, stitched together into 11 tracks, the impressions are of a real, vivid journey through an immense experience of rediscovery toward intuitive knowing. Riolino needed to unravel before she could clarify who she is now and who she’ll be next, and the result is Echo In the Dust, a beautiful sonic result of what it’s like to stay out of one’s own way. 

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About MusiCounts

MusiCounts is Canada's music education charity associated with The Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and The JUNO Awards. MusiCounts is working to build a thriving culture of music education across Canada that prioritizes inclusivity, sustainability, and innovation. Established in 1997 by the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences in collaboration with media companies, record labels, and high-profile artists, MusiCounts understands that music transforms the lives of young people.