*** This show was rescheduled from December 6th, 2022. All previously purchased tickets will be honored for the new date. ***

Patrick Watson

Once there was a boy named Patrick Watson who was born on a military base in the Mojave Desert. His father rode around in planes carrying bombs, waiting for a command to drop them that never came. He was the baby in a family of five, which would include a future figure skater, an engineer and an air force pilot, but he was seven years younger than his next older sibling. The trouble with being born this late into a family is they have all already gone mad, and they are engaged in domestic dramas, chasing each other around with knives. He was left to make too many assumptions about love and life on his own, and he still has the philosophy of a wise beyond their years wide-eyed child.

The family moved to Hudson Quebec when Patrick was four. He was asked by an old gentleman by the name of Frank Cobatt to sing in the church choir. Perhaps they met in the cough drop section of the local grocery store. And Patrick sang in the church and his little boy’s pretty, melancholic voice broke everyone’s heart. And the choir director had him sing at the foot of a grave at a funeral. Because there is something in his voice that captures all the lovely things in life we can only hold onto temporarily and how their transience is what makes them wonderful.

Patrick started playing piano when he was a child, of course. The piano used to belong to a boy named Gordon. The boy would appear as a ghost and teach Patrick how to play in the middle of the night. Even if Patrick played at three in the morning, his mother never interrupted these vital lessons. He showed me the photo of Gordon who looked, more or less, like a terrifying psychopath with tuberculosis who probably slit his whole family’s throats while they were sleeping. But I did not say so.

Patrick says he became a singer by accident. He thought he would compose scores for others to play, which seems like an odd thing to say because he is so clearly sprinkled with the pixie dust that causes a person to be transfixing on stage. And it’s now hard to imagine Montreal without the soundtrack of his songs.

But he met the artist Brigitte Henry who was taking surreal underwater photographs of people in their clothes to make a book. This seemed like very important business to Patrick, so he made music for her exhibition. They performed the show at the porno movie theatre Cinema L’Amour. It was sold out. Brigitte Henry still designs some of his album covers, including this one.

Patrick likes to hang on to people. He met his first guitar player Simon Angell playing guitar on the small streets of Hudson. In his first jazz class at college he walked in and Robbie Kuster and Mishka Stein were both sitting there. It was as though they were all waiting for each other. They would play together for the next twenty years.

While they were working on his first album, the band lived in an abandoned church. They were kicked out for ringing the church bells when homeless people came in to be married, waking all the neighbours up in the middle of the night, in a misguided attempt to let them know love existed.

They opened up for James Brown where they learned to manage a large crowd. Every day before a concert James Brown and his team would hold hands and pray the show would be amazing. This taught the band that being on stage is a humbling honor and a music show is where people come to have a mystical experience. In the end, it was not so different than when he sang in church as a boy.

While writing this new album, the drummer Robbie left, Patrick and his partner separated, and his mother passed away. Much of this album is about having a wave knock you over when you realize that everything you have in life can be wiped away in a moment. He brought a notebook underneath the waves and composed tunes about melancholy while listening to the lonely hymns of mermaids. And the songs are about how sometimes you have to sing a love song to yourself when no one else will. Melody Noir is about writing a song to the hole inside us all.

Some of the songs, including Turn out the Lights and Look at You, are about falling in love again and learning how to be intimate in a new way. And how surprizing it is that, although life can change, it can turn out to be better in so many ways than you could ever have imagined. And, ultimately, the album is about rebuilding your life from scratch.

The songs are marked by the idiosyncratic personalities of each of his band members. Mishka Stein grew up in the Ukraine where he wore little suits and accidentally set his building on fire, but he did a brave job helping the firemen put it out. A sweet Soviet latchkey boy, he spent much of his time watching Russian cartoons. The influence of the absurd anthemic melodies of those cartoons can be felt in the songs, particularly Look at You and Melody Noir.

Joe Grass, who has been playing guitar and pedal steel since Loves Songs for Robots, is a jackknife of sounds. He always creates a distinctive voice within the band’s particular brand of music. Evan Tighe landed magically at the perfect moment to take up the drums. The band was very lucky to find such a great drummer in time.

Patrick also worked with Leonard Cohen on one of his last songs before the legend passed away. This had a profound influence on the way he writes lyrics and the possibilities of poetry in song. The collaboration influenced his vocal delivery to be more dry, to have less notes and to simply deliver the words.

The beginning artist’s craft is so intuitive and odd, drawing from a trunk of recipes for happiness and hope. They begin with an idea that the world is good and things and love will work out. The mature artist creates from a place of melancholy and understanding of foibles and accepting a story that has already been written. It’s the difference between singing a solo at a stranger’s grave as a child and singing one at your own mother’s funeral.

It’s the same magical and sweet Patrick Watson on this album, but each of the feelings are deeper and dive down to stranger places, where even happiness seems impossible to bear. So the album moves from a dark place of loss to one of hope and magic and new love. The way you thought life was going to work out, but never does. Then it sometimes turns out to be more beautiful and surprising once it is broken.

Dana Gavanski

There’s something mesmerising about the fingertips of Dana Gavanski. Conducting each note with a light gracefulness, they appear to dance whilst aiding their owner in expressing the stories behind each of her lighter-than-air tones. Stories which, on her new album When It Comes, may never have been heard if not for healing ‘lost’ vocal cords and a lesson in taking the rough with the smooth.

“In many ways this record feels like it is my first,” Dana tells. “When I could use my voice, I had to focus so there is an urgency and greater emotional trajectory than before… it’s very connected to vocal presence, which extended into an existential questioning of my connection to music. It felt like a battle at times, which I frequently lost.”

Arriving where introversion and extroversion meet, When It Comes is Dana’s most vulnerable record to date. A Canadian-Serbian artist unafraid of extremes, she seamlessly blends her love of music from the 50s-70s with mythology. Led by instinct in its purest form, Dana’s latest chapter is an ode to the voice as an instrument – its power, and how intricately it can deliver words to tug at, and tie knots in, every heartstring. “Words can be taken quite literally, but to me, a lot of the time, they are pivots. They point in a direction but don’t necessarily stay there,” she says.

Just as Dana’s debut Yesterday Is Gone and her covers EP Wind Songs were lauded for their intimacy captured through an innate sense of melody to convey a mood, they traced a timeline of Dana’s teenage years in Vancouver, a move to Montreal and visiting family homes for kitchen talks with her “Baka” (grandma) in Belgrade / Serbia. Her latest was started in Montreal before ending in Belgrade and whilst expressive with French Yé-yé flourishes – offers something altogether more atmospheric and widescreen. 

“Yesterday Is Gone consisted of straightforward pop songs, this album is about searching for something to excite me back into songwriting,” Dana reveals. “It’s about finding the origins of my connection to music, that tenuous but stubborn and strong link – why it draws me and what if anything, I can learn from it. The album title has a heaviness to it but also a lightness, depending on your frame of mind. It’s about being open, and letting it come whatever it is, without judgement.”

Recorded in London, the original ideas for the record were played out on Dana’s toy Casiotone. Returning to Capitol K’s Total Refreshment Centre (TRC) with partner James Howard, the pair co-produced the songs together and felt very much at home. “James has an effortless musicality and we work together so well. The TRC is a special place, like a community centre,” she recalls. “It’s very understated but important to the people who come through it. It’s a rehearsal space, a recording studio, and there are a handful of music studios.”

Opening with music box sweetness, ‘I Kiss The Night’s twinkling piano melody paves the way for the baroque Wurlitzer-like nursery rhyme of ‘Bend & Fall’ and mystical lullaby ‘Under The Sky.’ Alongside humour and caricature (‘The Reaper’), mythological romance and spirituality (‘Knowing to Trust’) and idiosyncratic carnival arpeggio grooves (‘Indigo Highway’), the squelchy staccato and subtle jazzy flecks of ‘The Day Unfolds’ and tension release of ‘Letting Go’ dazzle like bokeh in a Nick Drake haze. The autumnal hymnal of ‘Lisa’ meanwhile, was one of the first, more fictional tracks written for the record, from the viewpoint of the sea, watching the protagonist pass by day after day, offering a metaphorical reflection on the natural world around us. “We don’t realize we are surrounded by all this beauty; we’re shut up inside, rushing to get to work, buying books online without ever leaving home. It’s about focus, recognising what’s in front of you.” 

Now planning her headline tour with an expanded 5-piece line-up and taking to the stage for the first time since touring with Porridge Radio, Damian Jurado and Chris Cohen, Dana is currently perfecting her live performance by practising a voice ever more elaborate, and perfecting those subtle hand gestures to match. “I’m so inspired by David Bowie’s performances and discovered he practised mime with Lindsay Kemp early on in his career,” she says of seeking inspiration. “I’ve done some mime classes since and it’s become good practice to go deeper into the body and be less controlled by the humility of the mind.”

La Force

XO SKELETON is the supple, steady, uncanny new album by La Force: a mixture of haunted pop and hot-blooded R&B that glistens at the meeting-point between life, death and love. “In dreams, the dead and living are the same,” Ariel Engle sings on “october,” her voice shimmering. “Maybe that’s why I’m better in the dark.”

The finality of death? The protection that another person’s love can or cannot bestow? These are body questions, matters of breath and flesh and pulse, which is the stuff at the centre of all of La Force’s music—beginning on her 2018 debut and also outward, into Engle’s electrifying work with Broken Social Scene, Big Red Machine, Efrim Menuck, Safia Nolin, and AroarA, her duo with her husband, Andrew Whiteman. La Force’s voice is stunning—somehow luscious and also wise—but so is her point of view—steady, sensitive, physical.

Engle made the album at home, in the house where she grew up, where she got married, where her father died—a place that’s “both completely dead and completely alive,” she says: a structure at the threshold of her inner and outer worlds. Off and on for two whole years, Engle’s old friend, co-producer Warren Spicer (Plants and Animals), would work in her basement until lunch, allowing songs to unfold at heartbeat pace. She’s been “unhealthily obsessed” with death, she says, since she was a child, and XO SKELETON is a kind of reckoning: a coming-to-terms with the oblivion that bookends a life, but also the “gooey centre” of love, loss, touch, and memory.

These nine extraordinary songs are human-scale and intimate, with chord changes like the shifting of limbs. “october”, brings us right inside the protective cloak of kisses (or “XO SKELETON”) cast by love and memory; at the same time, it explores the spookiness of that space, the movement of invisible spirits, like a saxophone rippling through a hall of mirrors. Other tracks were informed by Engle’s participation in “Song A Day,” a COVID-era invitation-only songwriters’ circle, where La Force worked alongside musicians like Leslie Feist, Maggie Rogers, Beck, and Big Thief’s Buck Meek.

Throughout, XO SKELETON is electric + vivid, and also tactile + grimy. It bends and turns with its every shift of pulse—35 mournful minutes; but also searching, turned on. Like a body, you might say. Or the memory of one.