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Vancouver music journalist Andrea Warner died on Sept. 27 from cancer.Chloe Krause/Supplied
While Andrea Warner was waiting for her first appointment to see an oncologist after her cancer diagnosis in March, 2024, the first song she and her husband, Carlos Hernandez Fisher, heard was Michael Bolton’s How Am I Supposed To Live Without You. While she felt it should be “illegal” to play that song in the cancer agency waiting room, she also found it very funny.
It was the beginning of her waiting room playlists, which she shared on Instagram alongside updates about her treatment for endometrial cancer. The posts reflected the music journalist’s honesty, gratitude and what she would describe to her editor, Jen Sookfong Lee, as “pathological optimism.”
“Yesterday’s waiting room playlist was as aggressively mid as this news. At least there’s always the music. Long live this wild, cursed hilarious algo,” Ms. Warner wrote on April 23, after learning that some of her tumours had spread.
On Oct. 2, her husband announced that Ms. Warner died on Sept. 27 from the cancer she had fought for nearly three years. She was 47. Surrounded by family, friends and some of her favourite music in her final days, she left behind one last waiting room playlist.
Ms. Warner was a feminist music journalist, author and social justice advocate who championed overlooked artists and challenged how people thought about pop culture. She examined misogyny and questioned why some artists were celebrated while others were dismissed.
“I think she really honestly shows us how ethical, generous, but still entertaining and funny that cultural criticism can be,” Ms. Lee said. “She fundamentally changed the way we write about music in this country.”
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Ms. Warner wrote four books, We Oughta Know: How Four Women Ruled the ’90s and Changed Canadian Music; Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography; Rise Up And Sing! Power, Protest, and Activism in Music; and The Time of My Life: Dirty Dancing. Alongside Susan Aglukark, she also co-authored Kihiani: A Memoir of Healing. Ms. Warner was with CBC Music since 2012, eventually becoming an associate producer and a co-host of the weekly podcast Pop This! for a decade.
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Warner made conscious decisions to focus on the stories of women, women-identifying people and gender-nonconforming people.Carlos Hernandez Fisher/Supplied
Andrea Warner was born on Jan. 25, 1979, in East Vancouver to Bob Warner and Elsie Marie Warner (née Allen). Her father was 21 and her mother was 18 when they walked down the aisle, a month before Andrea’s birth. They later had another daughter, whom they named Jennifer.
While growing up, Andrea spent many Sundays in her father’s secondhand shop. When she was in Grade 5, her parents separated shortly before Christmas. Living in a two-bedroom apartment in East Vancouver above a drugstore with her sister, father and grandmother, she received a precious electronic keyboard, a big-ticket item considering the humbleness of the family’s circumstances.
The first time she can remember writing, it was a poem in the shape of a keyboard, letting the keys give voice to the breakup.
By Grade 6, Andrea was writing long novels by hand every night, and poetry when, she joked, she should have been paying attention in class. Her love of reading started in her early teens, with the Babysitters Club series and books by Judy Blume. Eventually, she devoured Shakespeare and cracked open the works of Maya Angelou and bell hooks.
One of the first places she was published was her high school newspaper although the first issue she contributed to was banned, partly because of an editorial Andrea wrote criticizing a new provincewide mandatory career-preparation curriculum that overlooked students who already had jobs.
Ms. Warner worked part-time after school, and with her earnings she would buy Soap Opera Weekly, Soap Opera Digest, and when she was really flush, Entertainment Weekly. It was how she learned about people; the magazines took TV, film and music criticism seriously.
After her father died suddenly when she was in Grade 12, she became the first person in her immediate family to attend university. At the University of Victoria, she accidentally enrolled in professional writing courses instead of the creative writing ones she had intended; she eventually left to pursue journalism studies at Langara College.
When she secured an internship at Soap Opera Weekly between her first and second year, her professors weren’t impressed. They didn’t care that she was living in New York, or living at the same place Leonard Cohen stayed, or that she was getting bylines. Ms. Warner admired soap operas for tackling taboo topics like abortion, racism, homophobia and mental health, and believed the fans – who were predominantly female – deserved respect.
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After briefly running her own magazine devoted to arts, culture, politics and feminism, she eventually found herself back at the university she once left, taking the creative writing classes she always meant to take.
It was around then that she met Mr. Hernandez Fisher, whom she married in 2009. Together, they went to Seattle’s Bumbershoot arts and music festival, where Ms. Warner heard Miranda July speak about equity and injustice, power and risk.
The experience inspired her to quit her job and move to Vancouver to pursue writing full-time.
Holly Gordon, a digital producer at CBC Music who worked with Ms. Warner for 14 years, remembers her arriving at pitch meetings overflowing with ideas. She wrote about the greats she admired, from Leonard Cohen to the Tragically Hip, without being starstruck.
“She was really good at bringing a lot of love to a project, even if she was fully examining something,” Ms. Gordon said. “It’s so easy to be judgmental or a bit cutting about something, but it’s a lot harder to be kinder, but still be very to the point.”
She made conscious decisions to focus on the stories of women, women-identifying people and gender-nonconforming people.
“I prioritize telling their stories, asking about their art, celebrating and reassessing their historical contribution to our culture, framing their brilliance with purpose and intention because all too often, a woman’s work goes unnoticed, undervalued or dismissed entirely,” Ms. Warner said in a public talk.
At one point in her career, she started looking closely at everything she loved and everything she thought she hated. As a teenager, she believed Alanis Morissette and Sarah McLachlan were the best, and Celine Dion and Shania Twain were the worst. Confronting her internalized misogyny became the basis of her first book, We Oughta Know.
That thoughtfulness shaped Ms. Warner’s relationships with the people she worked with.
At one point after Ms. Warner’s cancer diagnosis in 2024, Ms. Aglukark travelled to Vancouver to ensure that Ms. Warner wasn’t pushing herself too hard to finish the book. She says in the three days they spent together, she saw her commitment to relationships and writing first-hand.
“I left Vancouver having a deeper respect for the humanity of industry. We forget that because we have deadlines, we have stories. But she was the job. She was a professional writer to the core, and respected the story so much that there was a humanness and a deeper connection,” Ms. Aglukark said.
At the end of an interview with Buffy Sainte-Marie in 2018, while Ms. Warner was working on her authorized biography of the singer, the two women shared that they wished they didn’t have to get off the phone. In her research for the interview, Ms. Warner was “struck” by the lack of a historical record about Ms. Sainte-Marie, she later said, compared with her musical peers.
Ms. Warner wrote the book, which involved about 60 hours of interviews, with the musician based in Hawaii and Ms. Warner in Vancouver. Five years after its publication, Ms. Sainte-Marie came under fire after an investigation by the CBC’s The Fifth Estate into her claims of Indigenous identity. The show’s investigation found evidence that contradicted the account of Ms. Sainte-Marie’s family background that is published in the biography. Ms. Warner never spoke publicly to address those revelations.
Whether it was a collaborator on a book or a stranger at a party, Ms. Lee says she “walked into a room expecting to love everybody.”
Mr. Hernandez Fisher says Ms. Warner was constantly introducing people she thought should know one another and finding ways to support those around her.
Looking back on his time with her, he remembers “a series of adventures.” In the past few years alone, they travelled to San Luis Obispo, Calif., to stay at the Madonna Inn, visited Mr. Hernandez Fisher’s family outside Madrid, often renting a car to explore different areas, and went to London.
He also thinks about their quieter moments, like lying in bed together or watching British crime shows with her grandmother.
Mr. Hernandez Fisher says that through her illness, Ms. Warner never stopped wanting to keep writing – even when she couldn’t. Until the end, she was going through her notes and e-mails for different book ideas, such as a young adult fiction and a memoir filled with her waiting room playlists, he says.
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By the early summer of 2026, her latest chemotherapy had stopped working and the cancer had spread. While she never felt well, her husband says, she felt better than she had in a long time.
Mr. Hernandez Fisher remembers her final weeks at home and days at Vancouver General Hospital, as a time that was both sad and joyful. As Ms. Warner’s community streamed in to say their goodbyes, he says, they turned the 10th floor of the hospital “into a real party zone.” That’s what he is holding on to.
Her sense of care for her direct community was inseparable from the one for the larger world, which she was always striving to change.
“She showed us by example how you can be a good person and still be critical of the culture. I don’t think anyone else did it before, and I’m sure many of us will try to emulate [it] going forward,” Ms. Lee said.
In April, 2025, Ms. Warner posted that while she was in the waiting room at BC Cancer, the Carole King song It’s Too Late came on the sound system. The song’s lyrics took on a new, unintended meaning. Even during one of the most difficult periods of her life, she found herself inspired to collect and reflect on the songs she was “subjected to” while waiting for her appointments.
It was another way for Ms. Warner to let people into her life and make them laugh a little more, and think a little deeper.
“It is hard and laughter helps,” Ms. Warner wrote on Instagram, “but so does thinking of ways I can turn toward small acts of kindness, love, resistance and advocacy.”
Ms. Warner leaves her husband, Mr. Hernandez Fisher; mother, Elsie Warner; sister, Jennifer Warner; nephew, Alex Warner-Smith; cousin, Kamiko Allen; and grandmothers, Lena Warner and Donna Allen.
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