You can tell you've been in Montreal for some time when the name Jay Watts III instantaneously rings a bell. This local music aficionado and ex-Mirror columnist has been throwing down DJ sets around town for some time now and worked for Pop Montreal for half a decade. He's currently managing the burgeoning career of DJ Svengully and putting together a fashion and film festival called Cinema Maquette.

The song you're obsessing over today?
Garcons' French Boys

The best concert venue in town?
La Sala Rossa for the sightlines, Club Lambi for the memories.

Strangest local indie rock formation?
A well-kept secret: perfectionist former boy genius Jordan Robson-Cramer.

Montreal hip hop acts are usually...
Making all their money through telemarketing fraud.

Music blog you follow religiously?
Waves at Night

The musical guilty pleasure that's just plain uncool no matter how you break it down?
Bruce Cockburn's If A Tree Falls, which I put on repeat whenever I'm battling an extreme hangover.

The best show so far this year?
Truthfully, I've grown weary of attending shows - all that standing, clapping, and enduring encores, whether or not the audience demanded it.  That said, Beach House was outstanding and the Blue Hawaii record launch with the Silly Kissers and (soon to be) beloved Pop Winds was great, too.

The perfect soundtrack to heal breakup blues?
If I'm wallowing, it's Abba's trio of devastatingly honest and pathos-laden divorce songs: Winner Takes All, When All is Said & Done and Knowing Me, Knowing You. If I'm trying to find the joy in the pain, Sam Cooke and Otis Redding help.  If I'm making the break, I'll forward her a ringtone of the Rolling Stones' You Can't Always Get What You Want along with the break-up text.

The most unique performer out there?
In Montreal, I think it's Sean Nicholas Savage. If the Silly Kissers can get it together, book a tour or two through the US, you'll hear gigantic things from them within the next year. And yes, more than an appearance on MusiquePlus in the afternoon.

If you had to audition for a reality TV singing contest, you'd belt out...
Mitsou's Dis-moi, Dis-moi

All the critics are going gaga over them, but you just don't get it.
Anything I've heard by tUnE-YaRdS strikes me as overly precious music for yogurt commercials. And that inter-capitalization is annoying, too.

If you could send a performer to musical jail for being criminally derivative, who would you lock up first?
There are far too many potential candidates for me to list, but I'm going to grant them all clemency in the hopes that they, like so many other rip-off artists before them, are just learning from the masters and will one day go on to great, or at least listenable, things.