Trivia Night at The Frolic
2025-07-24 20:00 - 22:00, 2025-07-31 20:00 - 22:00, 2025-08-07 20:00 - 22:00, 2025-08-14 20:00 - 22:00, 2025-08-21 20:00 - 22:00, 2025-08-28 20:00 - 22:00, 2025-09-04 20:00 - 22:00, 2025-09-11 20:00 - 22:00 (America/Halifax) | The Frolic’n Folk Pub & Grill, 4115 HWY 223, Iona, Nova Scotia, B2C 1A3, Canada
Come test your wits & win prizes!
3 Rounds – 12 general knowledge questions each round.
Play solo, or form a team. Funniest team name gets showered with accolades.
Hosted by your man – Ruarí Aonghas Lonce Murphy, every Thursday Night

Céilidh Matinee
2025-07-26 17:00 - 20:00, 2025-08-02 17:00 - 20:00, 2025-08-09 17:00 - 20:00, 2025-08-16 17:00 - 20:00, 2025-08-23 17:00 - 20:00, 2025-08-30 17:00 - 20:00, 2025-09-06 17:00 - 20:00, 2025-09-13 17:00 - 20:00
Get a taste of local celtic music & culture with our Saturday ceilidhs (kay-lee).
Expect to see world-renowned talent & budding entertainers from all over our native Cape Breton.
General admission seating $5 cover
First come first serve at the pub. No reservations. Minors allowed up until 10PM

Cape Breton Celtic Trad Sessions
2025-07-27 16:30 - 19:30, 2025-08-03 16:30 - 19:30, 2025-08-10 16:30 - 19:30, 2025-08-17 16:30 - 19:30, 2025-08-24 16:30 - 19:30, 2025-08-31 16:30 - 19:30, 2025-09-07 16:30 - 19:30
Come and enjoy a casual gathering of musicians who have come together to play traditional Cape Breton celtic music.
Anyone is welcome to join in, or just sit back and enjoy the tunes.
Sundays at The Frolic 430 – 730pm
Full kitchen and bar service.
Minors allowed till 10pm

Joel Plaskett Redux
2025-07-29 20:00 - 22:00
For over three decades, Joel Plaskett has proven himself a spinning wheel of reinvention. The Nova Scotia songwriter’s eclectic body of work reveals a restless and playful spirit, always transforming and expanding.

While continuing to celebrate—and be celebrated for—his regional ties and embrace of East Coast musical traditions, Joel’s omnivorous appetite for new sonic horizons is an integral part of his work. His discography includes heavy riff epics, like Thrush Hermit’s now-classic swansong Clayton Park (1999); low-fi and wide eyed solo records like In Need of Medical Attention (1999) and La De Da (2005); lean, loose and lyrical rock and roll with the Emergency on Down at the Khyber (2001) and Truthfully, Truthfully (2003); and a father-and-son nod to English folk traditions with Solidarity (2017). Then there are the endeavours that push the envelope further: the Emergency’s romantic epic concept album Ashtray Rock (2007); the months-long songwriting challenge Scrappy Happiness (2012); and Three (2009) and 44 (2020), Joel’s sprawling, multi-record ventures exploring love, loss, and existential investigation. For his latest release, the 4-track project One Real Reveal (2024), Plaskett strips his songwriting down to its raw materials, allowing everything in—all the human touches the tape could pick up—and letting (almost) everything out.Coast-to-coast and the world ’round, Joel has rocked crowds at clubs, festivals and grand old theatres with longtime Emergency bandmates Dave Marsh and Chris Pennell as well as drawn audiences close with intimate acoustic shows, both solo and with his father, Bill. Then there are the special events that have really allowed Joel to reach the rafters, like headlining Toronto’s Massey Hall with everyone in tow, playing the NAC in Ottawa backed by the national orchestra, and warming up huge stages for artists like The Tragically Hip and Paul McCartney.Joel and the Emergency have also been roundly celebrated within the music industry for their work, racking up awards and nominations from the JUNOs, the Polaris Music Prize, the East Coast Music Awards, Music Nova Scotia, and numerous others.While Joel’s songs are beloved far beyond the community that helped forge his sound, his creative heart is still found at home in Nova Scotia. At 45 Portland Street in Dartmouth there’s Fang Recording, the studio where he’s made many of his albums and produced records for other great artists like Mo Kenney, Steve Poltz, Shotgun Jimmie and Jimmy Rankin.
And through the door to the front of the building lies Taz Records, Morley’s Coffee and Friction Books. Since 2023, Joel has used the space to present Window Inn Wednesdays, a monthly, no-phones-allowed variety show that pushes back—like most of his projects—against the speed and din of modern life, making space for real engagement between art, artist, and audience.

2025 saw the release of ‘Songs From The Gang – A Celebration of Joel Plaskett’ – a deluxe covers album featuring the music of Joel Plaskett performed by Arkells, Sloan, Jill Barber, The Sheepdogs, Julian Taylor, Jenn Grant, Bahamas, City and Colour, Rose Cousins, Frank Turner, and many more.

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Joel Plaskett
2025-07-30 20:00 - 22:00

East Pointers Redux
2025-08-12 20:00 - 22:00
Adding to their volumes of East Coast myth-making, The East Pointers’ forthcoming anthology of celebratory anthems and incendiary tune sets is a natural evolution of playing to ‘hometown’ crowds of thousands the world over, full family kitchen parties and an honest reckoning with heartbreak and victory.
Still channeling Koady Chaisson as a writing partner, Tim Chaisson (fiddle, vocals, guitar) and Jake Charron (keys, guitar, vocals) have alchemised the love, grief and experience of years of musical map-making, traveling, partying and friendship into an album that captures heroic joy, sharp pain, courageous expansion, lonely challenges and triumphant homecoming.
In their ten year career, The East Pointers have gathered many accolades, winning a JUNO for their debut album Secret Victory and further nominations for their double EP House of Dreams and Safe in Sound, and multiple East Coast Music and Music PEI awards. Alongside traveling the world and supporting their community through such initiatives as Koady’s Stay Cool Swim Cold challenge, which has raised thousands of dollars for diverse charities, and Annedemic: The East Pointers and Friends Read Anne of Green Gables, they are also the founding directors of Goolaholla! festival, a gift of love and music to Tim and Koady’s hometown of Souris.
Their base in Canada’s smallest province, Prince Edward Island, provides both inspiration and challenge, and a sensibility tempered by grueling winters, short-lived golden summers and a tight-knit community of some of the best songwriters and musicians in the world. Confidently grounded by the band’s traditional roots and spotlighting their most honest songwriting to date in an album that is jubilant, entrancing and frank by turns, The East Pointers continue their legacy of packing the dancefloor while celebrating the Sisyphian task of being human.
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The East Pointers
2025-08-13 20:00 - 22:00

Old Man Luedecke
2025-08-20 20:00 - 22:00
Old Man Luedecke is the recording name of two time JUNO award winning and Polaris prize nominated singer songwriter Chris Luedecke. A multiple East Coast Music Award winner known for his high energy banjo driven stompers, touching guitar ballads and dry humorous stories, Luedecke has been making a soundtrack to an authentic life for nearly twenty years.
Born in Toronto and long time resident of the country near Chester Nova Scotia, Luedecke began recording in the early 2000’s DIY folk scene of Halifax. He made his two JUNO winning albums for Black Hen Music in the late 00s with Steve Dawson as producer at Vancouver’s famed Factory studio. While on a tour of England in 2009, he met and supported folk roots legend Tim O’Brien who produced Luedecke’s next two albums. Tender is the Night was recorded at John’s Prine’s Butcher Shoppe Studio in Nashville in 2012 and 2015’s Domestic Eccentric was recorded in a cabin Luedecke built himself at his home in NS. 2019 saw Luedecke recording Easy Money at both the Banff Centre in Alberta and at Hotel2Tango in Montreal.
Songs like “I Quit My Job” at the beginning of his career and “The Early Days” at the beginning of his family and dozens of other fan favourites trace a warm line of effort, sadness and joy and provide a soundtrack to many peoples’ own progress through adulthood, touching a rare place of truth and charm in the holiness of the mundane. His performing style with his easy going humour and storytelling creates a rare space of hopeful and intimate magic.
Luedecke has kept up many worldwide concert appearances, playing in Europe and around Canada and the USA and six trips to Australia, including a memorable tour where his whole young family travelled with him around rural Queensland for the Festival of Small Halls.
In May 2022 Luedecke was awarded an honorary doctorate from King’s University in Halifax for his cultural contributions.

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J.P. Cormier
2025-08-27 20:00 - 22:00
Nobody really knows who J.P. Cormier is for sure. That’s to be expected, believe me.
In 1974 he was a five year old boy, discovering an innate talent for playing the guitar, I had a little hand in that, guiding him through the beginning stages. He learned faster than I could teach.
By the mid eighties, not out of his teens, he was a sideman for bands and artists of many different genres in Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, and all across the deep south. As he travelled and worked he added more and more instruments to his arsenal of capabilities. He became indispensable to the bands he worked for.
In the early Nineties, he became a sideman for one of Canada’s favourite sons, Stompin’ Tom Connors and also became a staple of the recordings at Studio H in Halifax. His work with the CBC there, spanned musical, production and arranging duties.
All this before he was 20.
In the mid nineties he reentered the musical scene of his beloved East Coast and the Island called Cape Breton. He exploded onto the trad music scene there as a fiddler, performing some of the most difficult music ever produced by legends like Winston Fitzgerald and Angus Chisholm with a facility that stunned onlookers. Especially those who knew he wasn’t born there, but born in Ontario to Cape Breton parents. Somehow, some way, his music was the real thing, sounding like he had been steeped continually in a handed-down brew of family tradition from the old country.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
His previous gig was in Nashville playing mandolin and banjo in a grammy nominated bluegrass gospel band and performing on the Opry, and playing television shows with the likes of Waylon Jennings. All those people also thought he was one of them, American, reared in the ways of bluegrass, old time and Americana music. They knew he was from Canada, but it just didn’t seem possible.
Then in 1997, something amazing happened.
An album released in Canada, out of nowhere, called Another Morning. This time it was him as a songwriter and a lead singer.
And what a songwriter he turned out to be. Some of the performances on that album are literally part of the musical vocabulary today in the East Coast. Songs like the title cut, and Kelly’s Mountain, The Molly May (co written with his cousin Gervais) and others. It inspired, 25 years ago, some of the biggest names in the business today. People like Dave Gunning, Matt Andersen, David Myles, Joel Plaskett, all of which will tell you: that record changed things.
The Canadian industry thought so too, and it received a juno nomination and won an ECMA.
And that was just the beginning.
36 years later after stepping on stage as professional union musician for the first time at the tender age of 13, JP is still going, and frighteningly, still getting better.
16 albums followed the success of Another Morning, winning 12 more ECMA’s, another Juno nomination, a Canadian Folk Music Award and 5 Music Nova Scotia Awards. Each album was a snapshot of each thing that he can do. There are fiddle albums, Mandolin, Banjo, Guitar, tribute records, songwriting collections, a purely astounding spectrum of talent and musical vision.
His catalogue of recordings and the 150 or so records he’s produced on other artists, resemble the tapestry he weaves in live performance. Where he used to carry 3 and 4 piece bands, he tours alone now.
Just him and the instruments.
People still leave his shows confused, amazed and wondering what they just saw. Did they see a storyteller? A Songwriter? Arguably one of the best guitar players in the business today? Someone who crosses the lines between different instruments like there are no lines? Who was that masked man, anyway?
Accolades aside, and there are many from people like Chet Atkins, Marty Stuart, Waylon Jennings, Gordon Lightfoot; JP sees himself as just a performer. He’s shy, but has a razor sharp wit and lightning sense of humour. He can be reserved or edgy to the point no return. He speaks for soldiers, first responders, other artists, the forgotten and lost. He speaks sometimes only for himself and refuses rebuttal.
Of all the things he is, foremost he is an entertainer. I think one of the best. After you’ve seen what he does, I’m certain you will too.

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Lennie Gallant
2025-09-03 20:00 - 22:00
East Coast songwriter Lennie Gallant has released fifteen albums of original songs which have won him a host of awards and nominations from the JUNOs, Les Prix Éloizes, and The ECMAs. His songs have been described as “true slices of life delivered with a poet’s flair and a rugged emotional sensibility”. His multimedia production, Searching for Abegweit, ran for 190 shows in Eastern Canada. His song Peter’s Dream, from that show, was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Lennie is an international artist who has performed all over North America and Europe. His songs have been covered by many artists and he has shared the stage with several orchestras and with performers such as Lucinda Williams, Patti Griffin and Roger Hodgson. He has performed with the late Jimmy Buffett and the Coral Reefers and with David Foster and his band. Lennie struck up a friendship with Jimmy, has two co-writes on his upcoming posthumous album, and was invited to sing on both songs. One of Lennie’s albums also went up to the international space station and circled the planet 248 times. His album, Time Travel, was voted a top ten Album of the Year by a panel of Canadian music industry personnel, and his recent all original Christmas album has received rave reviews.
He and partner Patricia Richard also record and perform as the popular Francophone duo, Sirène et Matelot. Their songs have achieved strong radio play in francophone circuits and have consistently remained on the charts! Lennie Gallant is a member of The Order of Canada and has been recognized for his humanitarian efforts.
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