The Key City Theatre, along with Western Financial Group, are presenting the latest in the concert season as the Great Lake Swimmers and guests will be performing in Cranbrook on Sunday, May 31, 2015 at 6:30 p.m.
Based in Toronto, the Great Lake Swimmers will headline the show, while The Weather Station and the Good Ol' Goats will also be performing in support.
Tickets are available at the Key City Theatre box office or online at www.keycitytheatre.com
GREAT LAKE SWIMMERS
Great Lake Swimmers is a Canadian band built around the melodic folk rock songs of singer-songwriter Tony Dekker. Originally from Wainfleet, Ontario, the band is currently based in Toronto. The current touring line-up includes Tony Dekker on lead vocals, acoustic guitar and harmonica, Erik Arnesen on banjo, electric guitar and harmonium, Joshua Van Tassel on drums, Bret Higgins on upright bass and Miranda Mulholland on violin and backing vocals. Past members included Julie Fader on backing vocals, Sandro Perri on guitar, and Greg Millson and Colin Huebert on drums.
The band's style has been compared to Red House Painters, Nick Drake, Iron & Wine and Neil Young, as well as Will Oldham (Bonnie "Prince" Billy) and Sufjan Stevens. Dekker has said his influences include Gram Parsons and Hank Williams.The band released two albums, Great Lake Swimmers in 2003 and Bodies and Minds in 2005, on the independent label (weewerk) before signing to the larger Nettwerk in 2007.
The band released its third full-length album, Ongiara, on March 27, 2007 in Canada and in May for the rest of the world. Although signing to Nettwerk early in 2007, Great Lake Swimmers continue to be managed by (weewerk). In September 2007, (weewerk) released a limited edition vinyl version of Ongiara. It was available in Australia through native indie label Speak N Spell. Their fourth album, Lost Channels, was released on March 31, 2009. It was short-listed for the 2009 Polaris Music Prize, and was nominated for a Juno Award, in the category of Roots & Traditional Album of the Year – Group, and a Canadian Folk Music Award.
In 2009 Great Lake Swimmers took part in an interactive documentary series called City Sonic. The series, which featured 20 Toronto artists, had Tony Dekker talk about his daily underground commute along Toronto’s subway system. In 2011, Dekker participated in the documentary series National Parks Project, visiting Cape Breton Highlands National Park in Nova Scotia with filmmaker Keith Behrman and musicians Daniela Gesundheit and Old Man Luedecke.
The band's fifth studio album, New Wild Everywhere, was released on April 3, 2012. The band also composed an instrumental soundtrack for photographer Ian Coristine's One in a Thousand, an e-book of photography from the Thousand Islands region of Ontario, also released in April 2012.
Dekker released a solo album, Prayer of the Woods, in October 2013. The album includes eight original songs as well as covers of Gordon Lightfoot's "Carefree Highway" and Human Sexual Response's "Land of the Glass Pinecones". In 2014 he followed up with Sings 10 Years of Zunior, an album of covers of other Canadian artists — including Old Man Luedecke, Chad VanGaalen, Christine Fellows, Ohbijou, Rae Spoon, Matt Mays, Martin Tielli, Jennifer Castle and Cadence Weapon — released to mark the 10th anniversary of Canadian web music store Zunior. The sixth studio album by the full band, A Forest of Arms, was released in April of this year.
THE WEATHER STATION
The Weather Station, the musical project of Toronto artist Tamara Lindeman, has announced a new album, entitled Loyalty. The project's first release on the Outside Music label in Canada wrestles with knotty notions of faithfulness and faithlessness to our idealism, our constructs of character, our memories, and to our family, friends, and lovers representing a bold step forward into new sonic and psychological inscapes. It's a natural progression for Lindeman's acclaimed song writing practice.
Recorded at La Frette Studios just outside Paris in the winter of 2014, in close collaboration with Afie Jurvanen (Bahamas) and Robbie Lackritz (Feist), Loyalty crystallizes her lapidary song craft into eleven emotionally charged vignettes and intimate portraits, redolent of fellow Canadians Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and David Wiffen, but utterly her own. Loyalty brings a freshly unflinching self-examining gaze and emotional & musical control to The Weather Station's songs. Sonically, the record is a quietly radical statement, with certain passages achieving an eerie harmonic and rhythmic tension new to The Weather Station.
An extraordinary singer and instrumentalist on Loyalty, Lindeman plays guitar, banjo, keys, and vibes but she has always been a songwriter's songwriter, recognized for her intricate, carefully worded verse, filled with double meanings, ambiguities, and complex metaphors. Though more moving than ever, her writing here is almost clinical in its discipline, its deliberate wording and exacting delivery, evoking similarly idiosyncratic songsters from Linda Perhacs to Bill Callahan. Lyrically, Loyalty inverts and involutes the language of confession, of regret, of our most private and muddled mental feelings, by externalizing those anxieties through exquisite observation of the things and people we accumulate, the modest meanings accreted during even our most ostensibly mundane domestic moments.
THE GOOD OL’ GOATS
The Good Ol’ Goats begin their journey nearly four years ago, nestled away in the mountains of the East Kootenays where they call Cranbrook B.C home. Since forming they’ve gone on to awards such as 2nd Place in 2013 CBC’s nationwide Searchlight Contest, 2013 Artist of the Year – Kootenay Music Awards and 2013 Best Roots and Blues Album – Kootenay Music Awards.
This energetic band brings their own brand of bluegrass alt-folk to the dance floor with infectious rhythms, beautiful acoustic instrumentation, heartfelt melodies, five part vocal harmonies and clever lyrics that are unexpectedly mature, nuanced and just plain fun. The group features Nolan Ackert (lead vocals, banjo, guitar, Julian Bueckert (drums), Clayton Parsons (guitar, dobro, banjo), Theo Moore (bass, vocals), Joelle Winkel (vocals, auxiliary percussion) and Danica Martin (trumpet, vocals, piano).