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Artist
With arena-sized glam and rock opera-wattage sparkle, Ensign Broderick’s dramatic, piano-driven sound gushes with the opulence and flamboyance of late 70s New Romanticism, Baroque melodrama and timeless teenage angst. A mysterious and reclusive figure, Ensign Broderick has emerged out of nowhere with a fully-formed artistic vision that is completely out of time and wholly compelling, a lavish mixture of personal secrecy and raw, naked emotion bared in song Jason Sniderman started dreaming of rock stardom when he was eight and invented his musical alter ego, Ensign Broderick, when he was 12. It was nearly half a century ago, when he was a teenager, that he first imagined his alter ego taking the music industry by storm. Ensign was a cocktail of influences dreamed up in his bedroom — a dash of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust mixed with Nick Cave’s bold audacity, and a splash of Mick Jagger’s flamboyant swagger. There are a few contributing factors for the decades-long chasm between writing and releasing the music. One, he says, was that, when he played it for his friends in the 70s, reception was lukewarm at best. “Some of this music was just too weird for people back then.” Despite shelving his hopes for Ensign Broderick, Sniderman remained a hidden cornerstone in the Toronto music scene. He worked with his father, Sam Sniderman, for years at iconic Toronto record store chain Sam the Record Man. In the 80s, he joined Canadian new wave group Blue Peter and went on to contribute