Shivering Songs to host performances by The Barr Brothers, Hey Rosetta! and Hawksley Workman this fall.
Shivering Songs have not one, not two, but three concerts planned for the fall season leading up to the annual mid-winter festival. To help you make that transition from outdoor festivals and concerts to enjoying music and community inside where it’s warm and comfortable, check out this fall lineup happening across three separate venues in Fredericton.
The Barr Brothers
October 18 | Charlotte Street Arts Centre | View Event
Brothers Andrew and Brad Barr had spent most of the 90s criss-crossing North America, playing music with their spirited, improv-based rock trio, The Slip. In the spring of 2004, the band was playing a small club in Montreal, QC when a fire broke out in the venue. They grabbed a few guitars/drums and rushed out onto the rainy street with the rest of the concert goers. As the club’s mezzanine was swallowed by flames, Andrew offered his coat to one of the waitresses from the bar. One year later, Brad and Andrew Barr were living in Montreal. That waitress is now one of their managers.
In his first apartment in the new city, Brad shared an adjoining wall with Sarah Page, a classically trained harpist from Montreal, whose melodies would seep through the cracks of the wall and into the music Brad was writing. From this nebulous relationship, a friendship developed and the brothers, with Sarah, began recording and performing around Montreal. Soon, their friend and multi-instrumentalist Andres Vial was brought in to lend his wide array of expertise to the outfit, playing keyboards, bass, vibes, percussion, and singing. They called themselves The Barr Brothers.
THE BARR BROTHERS WEB | FACEBOOK | TWITTER
Hey Rosetta!
October 22 | UNB Campus | View Event
SECOND SIGHT, Hey Rosetta!’s first album in nearly four years represents the longest musical gestation in the band’s history. In part, the delay was due to the lengthy touring cycle following the success of their last album Seeds, which was short-listed for the Polaris Music Prize, and resulted in the band’s first JUNO nomination and a performance on the JUNO telecast.
There was also the band’s determination to expand their sonic horizons and, as songwriter Tim Baker puts it, “let each song come on its own terms and become what it will, unencumbered by some predetermined structure or symbolism or thesis.” So when the band started recording at Montreal’s MixArt studio in late 2013 with producer Marcus Paquin (The National, Stars, Local Natives, Arcade Fire)
SECOND SIGHT began as a long list of these new songs with “no real concept, no over-arching theme to the work,” says Baker. “We had enough songs for an album – but what was the album about? What were we trying to say as artists? How did these songs relate to one another?” As the session progressed, things got clearer, but another familiar hurdle arose, “We didn’t have a single, which seems a perennial problem for us. We’ve never really had a single, but boy do people want one” Baker says. “At first we kicked against it, but then, eventually saw it as a challenge.”
A second studio session was booked at MixArt from which “Kintsukuroi” emerged. It’s a song about real, broken, messy love, the title drawn from the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold, thus producing a new object of beauty with flaws highlighted instead of hidden – the idea being, that the object is actually more beautiful for having been broken. SECOND SIGHT would also experience a rebirth – a re-breaking and the album’s vital lyrical connective tissue would reassemble to clearly define the common threads in Baker’s lyrics. “I’d been thinking about potential, about the great promise within all of us that we never seem to fully realize. And as an artist, I’d been fixating on how to get there. Which led to another of the album’s main themes: this idea of shifting your vision slightly – moving away from your everyday, rational, denotative, leftbrain way of seeing the world and embracing a more suggestive, intuitive, animalistic and ultimately more interesting ‘second sight’.”
HEY ROSETTA! WEB | FACEBOOK | TWITTER
Hawksley Workman
December 13 | Wilmot United Church | View Event
Singer and songwriter. Broadcaster. Performer, producer, poet, and playwright. Multi-instrumentalist and Mountie. Hawksley Workman is all of these things and others still – an ambitious, ever-busy global ambassador of Canadian culture and creativity. The pun on the surname? It’s just too easy.
A staple of the Canadian arts scene for close to 15 years, Workman boasts a catalogue of solo releases currently 14 strong, showcasing his now signature spectrum of sonic influence, from cabaret to electro-pop to anthemic rock and plenty in between. The accolades they’ve amassed include JUNO nods and wins and widespread critical acclaim.
As a producer, his fingerprints grace releases by JUNO and Polaris Prize nominees and he has also penned melodies with a myriad of major artists.
Workman’s most recent release is the soundtrack to his acclaimed one-man show, The God That Comes – a theatrical tribute to the Greco-Roman god of wine and ecstasy that benefits beautifully from Workman’s peerless panache and vivacity. The show is much like Mounties, Workman’s on-the-rise lo-fi indie rock trio, in that it offers an alternate creative outlet and gives him some breathing room to decide on a direction for his future solo output.
And with that, Workman is currently part way through the composition and creation of his next solo album, due to drop in 2014, featuring material that explores how we interact with our various environments. It’s a virtually bottomless well of ideas for a man with a virtually endless imagination and creative outlets.
HAWKSLEY WORKMAN WEB | FACEBOOK | TWITTER
