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PODCAST

Soft Opening

Catherine Skinner

Soft Opening features intimate interviews with songwriters, poets, comedians, performers and visual artists who speak candidly about their personal experiences with creativity and resilience. Themes of recovery, grief, spirituality, wellness, sensuality, darkness, and the erotic unfold in each episode and safe space is created for artists to cultivate and showcase new work.

arts mental health

All Episodes

42:16

Looking to Others As Teachers with Steve Goldberger

Soft Opening ·

2025/10/14

Steve Goldberger is a Genie award winning bandleader, producer, songwriter, and musician whose career has spanned over 50 years. In this episode, Steve shares his Musical origins within his Jewish Culture, learning by watching his legendary bass playing uncle. We also talk about his 2025 Autobiography In a Life, a wonderful collection of stories from the span of his musical career, full of personal photographs and rock and roll ephemera. There’s an album of original music with the...

en-ca

50:32

Heart to Heart with C.D. Onofrio

Soft Opening ·

2025/10/03

Carl David Onofrio, or C.D. as he is more commonly known, is a prolific Niagara Falls, Canada based poet, performer, and songwriter in his creative life and a spiritual care provider in his professional life. I’m a long-time admirer of both his written and musical work and was so excited to sit down with him. I’m equally excited to share the result with you. In this episode we talk about attention and intention, consumption and creation, flow experience as a tool for happiness, and C.D....

en-ca

56:07

Staying Here with Joe Lapinski

Soft Opening ·

2025/09/16

Joe Lapinski is a songwriter, producer, performer, and soundscape designer based in St. Catharine’s, Ontario. His fourth full length album ‘New Day’ was released earlier in 2025 and we sit down to talk about music and mental health. This open-hearted conversation covers finding deep, lasting love, building a family, and confronting trauma to show up better for yourself and the people you love the most. Joe is integral to the arts scene here in the Region, and it was a real joy getting to know...

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58:31

Embracing the Unexpected with Eve Atoms

Soft Opening ·

2025/09/02

Eve Atoms is a Niagara Region poet, songwriter, spoken word, and experiential artist. In this soul-connected conversation, we visit so many topics that resonate deeply; motherhood and the necessity of self-care, balancing a demanding career and creative life, spiritual agency, integrating Jedi wisdom, and the healing power of the forest. Eve asks tough questions about disability, spiritual and healing charlatans, and how to engage community in creativity and uses open-hearted curiosity to exp...

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52:47

The Leadership of Helping with Rick McLean

Soft Opening ·

2025/08/19

Rick McLean is singer/songwriter who lives in the Niagara Region of Ontario, Canada. He is Anishinaabe, Odawa Wolf Clan, with roots in Wikwemikong Manitoulin Island. Rick is also a professor of Indigenous Studies at Mohawk College, a traditional knowledge keeper, sweat lodge conductor and pipe carrier who graduated from Brock University. His facilitation and counselling work has been ongoing for 35 years and through McLean Consulting Group, Rick leads a team who bring diversity, equalit...

en-ca

54:33

The Language of Waiting with Courtney Tudman

Soft Opening ·

2025/08/05

Send us a text In this episode, I sit down with Niagara Falls poet Courtney Tudman, who I discovered amidst the pandemic and whose work I quickly came to love as a source of incredible grounding and hope. Courtney and I have the most beautiful conversation in what feel to me like a reflection of souls. We chat about big childhood emotions, finding our writerly voice at an early age, the poetry of single motherhood, healing ancestral wounds through writing, and how the pen gives us a direct li...

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49:01

Standing Up on Things and Singing with Katey Gatta

Soft Opening ·

2025/07/28

Send us a text Katey Gatta is a singer/songwriter born and raised in Welland, Ontario here in Canada. These days, she’s performing under the moniker Sleepy Jean, turning out tunes that are best described as spaghetti western infused Americana that reimagine the sounds of yesteryear in a blend all their own. In this conversation, Katey and I chat about growing up as the musical kid in a family of athletes, and the responsibility of addressing immigration and intergenerational traum...

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53:54

Humbled to the Ground with Aaron Berger

Soft Opening ·

2025/07/08

Send us a text The following episode deals with the subject of suicide. Please take any necessary care of yourself before listening. Aaron Berger is a singer/songwriter who was born in raised in Niagara Falls Canada. He's also one of the most generous and encouraging artists I know, and I credit him with nudging me towards my own artistic pursuits over the last several years. Our conversation covers a lot of terrain. We talk about family, the ever present need to slow down, the dangers of ove...

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67:50

Flowing Precisely with The P.O.E

Soft Opening ·

2025/06/24

Send us a text James Owen Brown is a poet, spoken word artist, and songwriter who performs under the alias The Poetically Organized Entity, or the P.O.E. Our conversation looks at the roots of his lifelong love affair with words and rhythm, the harrowing experiences of his childhood, and his adult commitment to cultivating joy, a sense of playfulness, and embracing tech as a new tool for the muse. The P.O.E shares his resilience, his insight about expressing trauma through art, and thre...

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55:55

Learning Life Choreography with Laurel Minnes

Soft Opening ·

2025/06/04

Send us a text Laurel Minnes is an award-winning singer/songwriter who lives in the Niagara Region of Ontario Canada. She’s also the front woman for the post-modern harmonic choral collective Minuscule, an experience of music that is equal parts joyful and soul-wrenching. Full disclosure, I’m a total fan girl, so just having her agree to be a guest on the show was a big deal. Our conversation spans everything from honouring the muse whenever she comes knocking to bravely voicing o...

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6:37

Dealing With Social Isolation

Soft Opening ·

2025/05/27

Send us a text One of the topics that keeps coming up in Season One of Soft Opening is the importance of community. The opposite of community is social isolation which can lead to loneliness. Both have been found to have a significant impact on mental health, particularly on feelings of depression and anxiety. We’ve seen a slow return to social engagement in this post-pandemic landscape, and a rise in reported cases of depression and anxiety, and I think there might be a link between th...

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48:25

Finding Ways to Share Goodness with Brandon Agnew

Soft Opening ·

2025/05/20

Send us a text Brandon Agnew is a Niagara based singer songwriter who has a deep appreciation for the value of life. A shocking experience of grief in his youth led to his first moment of using creativity as a tool to bring community together, and this valuable lesson in healing through sharing stories has continued to inform his creative collaborations. Brandon is currently involved in multiple musical projects and he explores the genres of blues, folk, and Canadiana, writing stories a...

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3:50

Welcome to Soft Opening

Soft Opening ·

2025/05/19

Send us a text In a time when the media is drowning in images of war, greed, and oppression and an opioid and mental health crisis is unfolding in our city, how do we keep reaching for light? Soft Opening is a podcast recorded in Niagara Falls, Canada that explores the connections between art and healing, and between vulnerability and creativity. Created and hosted by Niagara Falls-based life celebrant, counsellor, and poet, Catherine (Cat) Skinner, Soft Opening features intimate interviews w...

en-ca

13 results

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