Toronto rapper Shad announces a Canadian tour in support of his latest album, Tao, with dates in Fredericton and Moncton next spring.
In these complicated times when planning and scheduling can be anything but certain, the more leadway, the better. That seems to be the approach Toronto rapper Shad is taking in support of his latest album, Tao.
To promote the follow up to his 2018 album, A Short Story About A War, Shad will embark on a 21 date North American tour which will begin with dates in Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick next spring.
Shad is one of Canada’s most revered rappers, a peerless wordsmith who embodies hip-hop’s power to entertain and educate. Since releasing his DIY debut in 2005, the Toronto-based MC has pushed his style of socially conscious yet infectiously playful hip-hop across five increasingly ambitious albums that have received widespread critical acclaim and coverage in outlets like Rolling Stone, Complex, The Ringer, Fader, NPR, and more.
His mission to inspire and inform goes beyond his own music: a former host of CBC Radio’s flagship arts and culture program q, Shad can currently be seen talking shop with the legends of rap on the Emmy/Peabody Award-winning Netflix Original docuseries, Hip-Hop Evolution.
Shad began building his sixth record, Tao, from a much simpler concept: an image of a circle. Though, in true Shad fashion, he saw something much more profound within its basic round boundaries.
“The thing that inspired this record was this image in my mind of a circle, but it’s getting fragmented, and then the pieces start floating away from each other,” he explains. “And that felt to me like a picture of ourselves as individuals. If you think of our humanity as one whole, there’s all these different aspects of that, whether that’s work, or our relationship to the land, or our relationship to the transcendent, or our relationship to our bodies, or to our inner child?”
Tao was released October 1, 2021.
Upcoming Performances:
Tide and Boar | Moncton, NB | May 12, 2022
Boyce Farmers’ Market | Fredericton, NB | May 14, 2022
