About The Last Night

Gotta be off to bed soon, but some quick notes about the final night of NxNE before I turn in.

The last night of the festival started off great. Caught a wonderful set at The Rivoli by Vancouver Island troubadour/cyclist Jeremy Fisher. He had come highly recommended by my friend Howard, who had written Jeremy up in his online column a while back. I worked my way to the very front of the standing, capacity crowd to find Howard and wife Beverly boogying on down to this young man's music, at least as far as one can boogie down to folk music with an acoustic guitar and harmonica -- but you can, and they weren't the only ones.

It was a great performance. This young guy really does have an old soul. The hair and the voice and the music certainly do bring to mind a young Dylan, or John Prine, but I also detected a bit of Paul Simon's touch in some of his phrasing and singing. He's playing tomorrow night at Holy Joe's, an even smaller room with vintage couches for pews. If I don't walk out of there with a copy of his CD, it'll be only because they've sold out. You can hear some clips of his songs here.

Then we zipped up to the Tranzac Club to see someone I had written up: Joe Fournier. Joe performed up on the 17-foot high stage (at least it seems that high) of the old Legion-like Aussie-Kiwi club, accompanied only by a young guy on bass. Wasn't sure what to expect, since I didn't know what kind of a live performer he was, but he was great. Such a clever songwriter, sometimes outright humourous. But each song is grounded in a solid kernel of an idea, and I really respect that kind of songwriting. Like, you're driving along the road into town, and you see someome has spray-painted a marriage proposal on the overpass, and you wonder what happened, when was it written, did she say yes, where are they now? And then you have a song called "Susan Will You Marry Me Love Jake". You can hear some clips of Joe's song's here.

It was nice to be able to get a chance to chat with Joe afterwards. He's been doing pretty well over in Europe, spending several months a year playing there. They love rootsy music and country music in Europe. I think it's a cyclicle backlash to all of that Euro-pop and electro machine music that they've been pumping out over the past 20 years or so. Anyway, seems that my write-up of Joe has been getting lots of mileage over there, with people pulling quotes for posters and other kinds of promotional devices, so that makes me feel good that I was able to help further the cause of some music that I think is worthy.

Ideally, I would have loved to go see the Trews' 12am, 2-hour set at the Rivoli. But there was no way in hell we were going to get back in there. When I left there after Jeremy Fisher's show, at 10 o'clock, the lineup was already half way down the block. Probably as many people in line as would fit in the room. So instead, the plan was to see the Golden Dogs' 10pm set at the El Mo. But when we got there, they were already at capacity. So the fall-back was to see Raising The Fawn at Healey's. They started the night by receiving a $3,000 cheque as the Galaxy Rising Stars award winners. Not a bad way to start your set. They were quite interesting. Kind of moody, atmospheric rock. The singer/guitarist has a bit of a Jeff Buckley thing. Good pipes.

Then it was off to the Horseshoe for Ian Blurton's latest rock incarnation, C'mon, a power, hard-rock trio with a banshee vixen bass player. They were loud and raucous and they rocked the place. I wasn't sure if I was in the mood for a hard rock set, but they just overpowered me. Good way to end the festival.

Too bad I missed White Cowbell Oklahoma at the El Mo. From what I hear (see the comments from the preceeding post), they gave new meaning to "Free Bird".

G'night!