Indie

Still merry after all these years, the Good Lovelies will be headed across Canada this November & December with their annual Christmas show. And what better way to celebrate than the way it all began, with classic holiday and winter selections, timeless and original material polished to a warm and welcoming glow!

Accompanying the Good Lovelies (Caroline Brooks, Kerri Ough and Susan Passmore) is their band of merry men - Steve Zsirai and Robbie Grunwald on upright bass and piano. As a five-piece, this band will have you humming along, laughing, and full of mirth by the show's end.

The Good Lovelies first united in 2006 for a one-off performance and has since compiled a catalogue of studio albums, EPs, a live album and a Christmas collection.  They have toured extensively across Canada, the US, Europe, UK, and Australia and have earned a Juno Award (2010), a Juno Nomination (2012) and four Canadian Folk Music Awards along the way.

Keep an eye out for their new release, Shapeshifters, coming February 2018.

Celebrate the holidays with Newfoundland’s The Once, playing a collection of seasonal favourites! With their folk roots still firmly in hand, Phil Churchill, Geraldine Hollett, and Andrew Dale have spread their distinctly-modern sound around the world receiving JUNO Award nominations, Canadian Folk Music Awards, East Coast Music Awards, and being recognized by their province as the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council’s Artist of the Year. The Once have created a unique blend of rootsy Christmas favourites to celebrate the holidays with on their album, This Is A Christmas Album.

This is a charity event where proceeds will go El Sistema Aeolian.

A Forest Of Arms is the sixth album from Tony Dekker’s Great Lake Swimmers and the follow up to 2012’s New Wild Everywhere. With a surging rhythm section, razor sharp violin, and flourishing banjo and guitars, Dekker and band mates have pushed their sound significantly, creating some of their most dynamic songs ever recorded.

Those familiar with the decade-long output of Great Lake Swimmers will recognize the thematic threads of beauty in the natural world, environmental issues and explorations of close personal ties that hold us together. The familiar versus the strange theme is also running through this record, both in the instrumentation and in the songwriting (“Zero In The City”, “I Was A Wayward Pastel Bay”).

As with past Great Lake Swimmers albums, A Forest Of Arms was recorded in several locations over the span of several months, covering extensive new territory while remaining true to the group’s refined sound. One of the unique and unusual locations was Tyendinaga Cavern and Caves in Tyendinaga, Ontario, where a number of the vocal and acoustic guitar tracks, including the main parts for “Don’t Leave Me Hanging,” “The Great Bear” and “With Every Departure,” were recorded amid haunting acoustics, stalactites, and circling bats.

The violins were recorded at the Heliconian Club of Toronto, while the bass and drum tracks were largely recorded at the Chalet Studio just outside of Toronto, a unique chalet-style recording space located on 40 acres of rolling hills and trails, in proximity to the shores of Lake Ontario. The pastoral and elemental nature of these spaces surfaces throughout the album.

The title, A Forest Of Arms, is taken from album track “The Great Bear,” a song inspired by a trip Dekker took to the northern rainforests of British Columbia in September 2013 with the World Wildlife Fund. It’s a pristine wilderness area that is under threat of being compromised by the construction of a pipeline, and Dekker and the group have been very vocal in their opposition to it. In a broader sense, the title is also a reference to the sense of community surrounding the Toronto-based band, as well as the band’s own growing families, exhibited in the songs “Something Like A Storm” and “Expecting You.”

Recorded and engineered by their long time live sound technician Justin Shane Nace, and mixed by the wonderfully talented Howie Beck (Feist), A Forest Of Arms also marks Dekker’s 8th release of new material. In 2013, he released the solo album Prayer of the Woods, and in 2014, he released a tribute album for the artist-loving digital music distribution site Zunior on the occasion of its 10th year anniversary, entitled Tony Dekker Sings 10 Years Of Zunior. Last year saw their debut headlining performance at Toronto’s historic Massey Hall, which was documented for the Live At Massey Hall series. The band also participated in the Polaris cover sessions with their version of Sarah Harmer’s “I’m A Mountain.”

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Signed to Atlantic/Warner Records at the tender age of 19, three-time Juno nominee and modern-day Renaissance woman Sarah Slean has since released 11 albums in over 10 countries worldwide – but perhaps the most astonishing aspect of her artistry is its breadth. Over her 20-year career, Slean has published two volumes of poetry, starred in short films and a movie musical (spawning two Gemini Award nominations), penned two string quartets, held numerous exhibitions of her paintings, and shared the stage with 8 of the country’s professional orchestras. Classically trained from the age of 5, she routinely collaborates with cutting-edge contemporary classical ensembles like The Art of Time, and has been invited to sing world premieres by Canada’s leading living composers. Citing such diverse influences as Leonard Bernstein, philosophy, Joni Mitchell, Buddhism and Bach, her music borrows aspects of cabaret, rock, pop, and orchestral: all knit together by the startling poetry of her lyrics, virtuosic piano-playing, and that voice, described by the CBC as “a 19th century Kate Bush”. In addition to headlining theatres across Canada, Sarah has also toured Europe, the US and Scandinavia and has opened internationally for such artists as Bryan Ferry, Rufus Wainwright, Alanis Morissette, Andrew Bird, Feist, Ron Sexsmith, Chris Isaak, and Buck 65. Metaphysics, her first recording in 5 years, is described as a breathtaking amalgamation of Slean’s dramatic orchestral arranging and her signature take on songwriting.