There’s a high probability that you’ve already heard Saidah Baba Talibah sing and didn’t know it. The Toronto soul singer (and daughter of Canadian jazz and blues icon Salome Bey) has belted backing vocals for everyone from Maestro Fresh Wes to country singer Johnny Reid, and even put in three seasons with the Canadian Idol band. Her impressive resumé makes it all the more surprising that it’s only recently that she’s begun to focus on her own solo material.

I arrived in Haiti in the middle of a perfect vacation.

Who’d have thought the psych-folk pile, already teetering on the brink of over-saturation, would peak with Yeasayer’s second album? With the exception of opener The Children, which sounds like a forgotten Fever Ray track, Anand Wilder, Chris Keating and Ira Wolf Tuton have gone bigger, better and more cohesive.

Amanda Seyfried’s having trouble getting into interview mode. The Mamma Mia! and Jennifer’s Body star is listless and, strangely, barefoot.

“I haven’t slept, and I’m not a shoe person,” she says grumpily, dropping a pair of high heels on the floor beside her chair in a Hyatt hotel room.

Andy Bichlbaum is an easygoing guy. Campy, animated GIFs dance on his laptop, and he cites beer as a big factor in his work. He’d make an awesome-cool prof, and in fact, he is one.

Those gotta-get-’em red mittens are the hit of this year’s Olympic shopping haul. After selling out over the holidays, Toronto’s flagship Bay store has restocked the woolly hand warmers just in time for the Games’ February 12 opening and added more must-have buys, like CANUCK-printed T-shirts and buffalo check scarves, to its second-floor Vancouver 2010 shop.