I am so excited that its making my stomach hurt...

...and I still have 94 sleeps until Hillside!

Hillside Festival that is. I always feel like there shouldn't be a capital letter... so hillside. yep.

Though I attended once before, last summer was the first year I volunteered at Guelph's hillside festival and had the whole full-weekend/camping-in-volunteer-village/seeing-a-bajillion-shows/doin'-it-the-hillside-way experience. I loved it. Seriously super-loved it. It only took me about fifteen minutes before I declared "I am doing this again next year and every year forever!" or something to that effect...

I adored every minute of the weekend despite only having pre-hillside heard of about six of the bands (and missing two of them cuz we had to leave to go to a wedding!). We discovered countless new bands to swoon over (including the incredible Graveyard Train) and spent hours sitting on the lawn, tent-hopping, swimming and wandering the food and merch tents... it was fab.

So this year, when the hillside lineup for 2012 got announced and three separate people sent me "Holy crap have you seen the hillside line-up!?!" messages I was understandably anxious to check out the list of performers.

Holy Crap is right.

ALX, Arkells, Rich Aucoin, BADBADNOTGOOD, Bahamas, The Be Good Tanyas, Belle Starr, Geoff Berner, Birds of Chicago, Bidiniband, Bombay Bicycle Club, The Bright Light Social Hour, Bry Webb And The Providers, Chic Gamine, Adam Cohen, Cold Specks, The Crooked Brothers, Current Swell, The Deep Dark Woods, Doldrums, Dirty Mags, The Durants, Kathleen Edwards, Elephant Revival, Elliott BROOD, Esther Grey, Christine Fellows, Great Lake Swimmers, Alanna Gurr, Imaginary Cities, The Jezabels, Joel Plaskett Emergency, Keys N Krates, The Magnificent 7s, Maylee Todd, Memoryhouse, Mickey Hart Band, Minor Empire, New Country Rehab, Ohbijou, Open Hearts Society, Sandro Perri, (POP Montreal Presents: Canailles, Jennifer Castle, Mike O'Brien + Michelle Tompkins), Joe Pug, Rival Boys, Lucy Wainwright Roche, Selina Martin Triplets, Sagapool, The Slackadeliqs, StereoKid, The Strumbellas, Tālavya, Sidi Touré, Chad VanGaalen, Valdy, Walk Off The Earth, The Wooden Sky, Young Empires, Zeus.

yeah... Excited.

I am excited about Zeus (first time I will have seen them not as an opening band) 
I am excited about Ohbijou (so beautiful!)
I am excited about The Wooden Sky (perfect hillside fare!)
I am excited about Great Lake Swimmers and Current Swell and the Arkells


But more than all that put together I am excited about Elliott BROOD. 


Since moving back to Ontario a little over a year ago, I've seen them four times (more than in the previous four years all put together!) and its done nothing but make my love of them even more acute. Seriously, if I could only listen to one band for the rest of my life, I would be sad, but I would at least be mostly okay with it as long as that band were Elliot Brood. And EB live? even better.


Obviously I am excited to see them perform. And I am particularly excited to see them perform at hillside (because hillside performances are always magically even better than the best non-hillside performances). But more than that I am super excited to possibly see them two or three times in as many days (workshops! tents! mainstage!). That last realisation just hit me today, telling my roomate about it while doing dishes. And I had a weird experience, a tv/book/imaginary-world type experience: I suddenly got so excited that I felt momentarily nauseous. Seriously. It was weird. but also awesome. 


I realize I have just irrevocably confirmed my status as an absolutely huge live-music dork, but honestly, if you haven't figured that out by now.... just wait until my hillside posts start rolling in...!


Only 94 sleeps until hillside!

When they are good they are very very good, and when they are bad...

As you have likely gathered, I enjoy discovering new bands through live music. Of course there's the radio (mostly CBC, cuz I'm a Canadian, and a dork ;o) and recommendations from friends, but there's nothing like that feeling of being captured by someone onstage who you've never heard of before, picking up their cd and then listening to it in the car non-stop for the next three weeks... Festivals are great spots for this to happen, but the more common (read non-summer) experience of live-band-discovery happens during openers.

Mostly openers are so-so. Come ci Come ca. Fine. sometimes they're awesome and you want to take them home in your pocket (Rah Rah opening for Said the Whale, The Daredevil Christopher Wright opening for Dan Mangan), and every once in a while they just make you mad. because they're wrecking the vibe. seriously. wrecking. it. I went to two shows last weekend covering both ends of the spectrum. And here they are:

Wrecking-the-vibe: One Hundred Dollars opening for Elliot Brood
I love Elliot Brood. I really Really do. And there is nothing that could wreck an Elliot Brood show for me, but One Hundred Dollars came pretty 'effin close. They were alright at first, a little intense but the lead singer's voice was excellent and the guitarist was entertaining, but it was just so.... well weird really. The band members didn't actually seem to like each other very much and the singer acted like she was on heroin. It was like she was starting into your soul, and not in a good way. We were creeped out. And by 'we' I mean we alllllll were creeped out. Every single person around me turned to their friends at least once and literally said "Man, she is creepin' me ouuuuut!" And it just. kept. going. It didn't get less creepy, it just got more so. For almost an hour. A creepy opener for almost an hour. not cool. Thank goodness I love the Brood boys or this might have been an all out wash. Close save.

So-awesome-you-want-to-take-them-home-in-your-pocket: Northcote opening for The Wooden Sky
the following night, on the COMPLETE opposite end of the spectrum... The Wooden Sky were great (though I had my first experience of actually feeling too close as I almost got hit with the guitar neck a few times...), but I had seen them a few times on youtube and was expecting said greatness. Still great, but expected. Northcote was phenomenal and unexpected. Singer Matt Goud is an adorably bearded ginger, who is as friendly as he is talented, and the guitarist and bassist/melodica-ist are equally good-natured and good-skilled. They breezed through a too-short [only because it was awesome, I'm sure it was actually regular-lengthed] set and finished off with a few older songs (one of which I got to play the tambourine for ;o), punctuating the whole thing with cheerful banter, gigantic smiles, and genuine mirth. Their music was beautiful, they were wonderful, and it made the whole evening just vibrate with happiness.

This is what an opening band should be. Heck this is what all bands should be. Thanks Northcote for undoing the momentary disillusionment created by One Hundred Dollars. And thanks for just being generally fantastic.

Melancholia and Music

Sometimes its nice to feel sad. Not usually, usually its not nice to feel sad. Usually something happens, there's some sequence of events that makes it feel like your life is spinning out of control or like you just don't know what to do... Something immensely personal and upsetting gets you down and you just can't run away from it, because its inside of you. Sometimes what makes you sad isn't inside of you, its not something you can run away from, but it is something that affects more than just you, something that seems bad now, but might be okay later on. And sometimes, every once in a while, its kind of nice to feel like life holds some sort of beautiful mystery that will always elude you, like all of the things that seem not-so-great will one day be revealed to be the self same things that led to wonderment and joy.

I'm not good with definitions. I tend to make up my own very specific meanings for words and be willing to argue them 'till the cows come home ("an ass is not a dork, nor is a knob the same thing as a dink" will take me long into the wee hours of the morning...). This is by way of saying that this second kind of sadness, this one-day-it-will-be-important-that-this-sadness-happened type of sadness is what I imagine melancholia to be. And this type of sadness, this melancholia has, of late, been captured for me in the beautiful song Oh My God by the Wooden Sky.

Hauntingly beautiful and quietly sad, its made me feel like crying my eyes out and smiling my face off all day long.  Thank you Canadian music, thank you small timey bands, thank you art for once again proving your awesomeness....