Tim Baker (of Hey Rosetta!) with The Weather Station
At the end of 2017, twelve years after their inception, the multi-award winning band, Hey Rosetta! went on hiatus, after selling 10,000 tickets to five farewell shows. For the band’s principal songwriter and lead vocalist Tim Baker, this was the start of a new chapter.
On his debut solo album Forever Overhead, Baker warmly welcomes you to it. The first words we hear him sing, on the first single “Dance,” is akin to a toast: “here’s to the other side.” What follows are eleven songs that centre on kinship and show that Baker’s sharp songwriting, the heart of Hey Rosetta!, is as affecting as ever.
When crafting the album, Baker drew from 70s songwriters, like Jackson Browne and Randy Newman, whose music filled his childhood home and from his contemporaries (Feist, Leif Vollebekk, The Barr Brothers). Produced by Marcus Paquin (The National, Local Natives), Forever Overhead blends piano ballads with ebullient folk-rock tracks featuring Liam O’Neill (Suuns), Ben Whiteley (The Weather Station), as well as Mishka Stein & Joe Grass (Patrick Watson).
In the album’s opening track “Dance,” Baker moves alongside soft piano chords as buoyant, 70s pop style instrumentation and a piercing guitar riff steadily build, bolstering his words of longing. He sings of connectivity and the tender emotions that are coupled with glances across a gym’s confetti-lined linoleum floor, the air thick with potential. Like Forever Overhead as a whole, Baker brings beauty and hope into listeners’ lives.
Ages: 19+
Christina Martin
“Impossible To Hold” won the 2018 Music Nova Scotia Award for Pop Recording of the Year, and is Martin’s sixth and strongest studio album, achieving a perfect balance between organic ambience and impeccable production.
Christina began recording her own music while slogging it out on the Austin, Texas bar scene. A multi award winning singer-songwriter, she has been relentlessly recording and touring in Canada and in the UK and Europe, building connections at venues big and small, singing songs about loss, love and perseverance. Her songs have been featured in films and television, and she’s performed at music festivals around the world (Rolling Stone Weekender Festival, Belfast Nashville Songwriters Festival, Folk Alliance International and Reeperbahn Festival).
At her Canadian tour dates, Martin partners with The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health to promote the work of Canada’s largest mental health and addiction teaching hospital.
For more information about Christina and her music please visit: www.christinamartin.net
Adam Baldwin
There is a darkness in all of us, a force that tears us away from love and toward self-destruction, hell-bent on devouring the light we each hold precariously onto. And there are moments in our lives when we embrace that shadow self deeply enough that it threatens to consume us completely. A couple years ago, at his home beneath the MacDonald Bridge in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Adam Baldwin exiled himself from his friends and family to try to understand the substance abuse that had spun his life out of control. Writing until he couldn’t write anymore, he eventually distilled the 20+ songs that poured out of him into No Rest for the Wicked, a haunted reckoning of his relationship with his own wicked self. The result is no triumph, though it often sounds like one – opener “Half a Mind” explodes from the firepower of it’s snare shots into the kind of ‘80s-tinged, synth-heavy arena rock that begs for fist-pumping. Baldwin doesn’t bend reality to create a happy ending. Instead, he tells his story so far honestly, hunting down the beast in himself in order to hopefully figure out how to live with it.
While he turns his song-writing lens further inward on No Rest for the Wicked, he shoots for the rafters with bold, brash guitars, earth-shaking drums, and synths that by turns build doomy atmospheres or provide the rocket-fuel that propels a chorus to its interstellar heights. Recorded in Halifax and New York City by Gus Van Go and Werner F., the album builds on the promise of Baldwin’s award-winning No Telling When (Precisely Nineteen Eight-Five) and reveals a new sharpness to the skills he’s honed over the better part of 15 years, toughing it out on the road and in the studio, both solo and as part of Matt Mays’ band. During the writing process, he worked out song ideas over long drives through the streets of Dartmouth – “the gritty, sad, burnt out parts of the city,” he says – and Lawrencetown Beach, surrounded by the serenity of emptiness and the hum of the Atlantic Ocean. It was between these two places that the perspective of each song would manifest, presenting itself as either ghastly and anxiety-riddled or a vessel bound unsteadily toward calmer seas.
Each path is fraught and electrifying in equal measure. “Salvation” pulses with unsettling buzz-saw bass as a sinister voice hisses into our protagonist’s ear, trying to charm him into temptation. There’s a crack of light in the acoustic strum and shuffling tambourine of “Dark Beside the Dawn” as Baldwin hopes out loud that he might be capable of sustaining some brightness in his life while acknowledging its dual nature. “Delirious for Serious” rises and rises as its subject unravels through metallic jangles and flourishes from a muscled-up six-string. And “Shattered” arrives sweat-soaked and dance-ready, riding on a driving beat that belies a heartbreaking admission of guilt and recklessness. “Something wayward beckons toward a shallow grave,” Baldwin sings. “Is that your face in the wreckage?”
True to life, No Rest for the Wicked’s finale doesn’t provide any resolution to the conflict at its heart. The title track finds our ‘hero’ deep in the darkness at the edge of Dartmouth, coming to terms with the fact that floating wasted here, among the ghosts and shadows of the city, there is no peace to be found. As Baldwin, battling against the night, howls its coda, the song fades out on a jarring wave of feedback, leaving the future uncertain. But uncertainty holds the door open for hope, and any war between darkness and light is only lost when the fighting stops.
Ages: 19+
Port Cities 2nd Show
In the brief period of time since Port Cities unleashed their incendiary debut—a wildly self-assured collection of sparkling, rootsy pop that showcases the Nova Scotia trio’s devotion to songwriting—the band’s been hard at work bringing it to the masses. They’ve continued to explore and evolve their ambitious pop sound, melding diverse musical backgrounds to create an alchemy that’s part art, part songwriting science, and all magic: the nimble dynamism of Breagh MacKinnon’s smoky, jazz-indebted delivery, Dylan Guthro’s simmering and soulful R&B swagger, and Carleton Stone’s razor-sharp, romantic rock ‘n’ roll. In 2018, that memory-making mix of unforgettable melodies, high-flying harmonies, and electrifying heart on Port Cities is set to reach audiences worldwide.
It’s a chemistry that’s been perfected during the 100+ dates they’ve toured in the past year, in hotel rooms and songwriter circles, in vans rolling through foreign countries to rowdy pubs, and on the fog-bound shores of Canada’s misty east coast. It’s helped lead the band to numerous accolades, including a whopping five Nova Scotia Music Awards, a SOCAN #1 Award (for “Back to the Bottom”), and stints at #1 on CBC and Spotify charts. Port Cities has amassed over 1.5 million streams internationally, showcased at The Great Escape, Focus Wales, and the Reeperbahn Festival, and will be releasing their debut in the U.K. and Germany this year.
Beyond Port Cities’ deep devotion to their craft, their success is largely built on a simple but timeless approach: a good song is a good song is a good song. Whether it’s awash with synthesizer (“Sound of Your Voice”), pumped up with an overdriven crunch (“Where Have You Been”), or stripped down to the bare essentials with just an acoustic guitar and three voices. No matter what music the melody might call for, the best song always wins.
Ages: 19+
Adam Baldwin 2nd Night
There is a darkness in all of us, a force that tears us away from love and toward self-destruction, hell-bent on devouring the light we each hold precariously onto. And there are moments in our lives when we embrace that shadow self deeply enough that it threatens to consume us completely. A couple years ago, at his home beneath the MacDonald Bridge in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Adam Baldwin exiled himself from his friends and family to try to understand the substance abuse that had spun his life out of control. Writing until he couldn’t write anymore, he eventually distilled the 20+ songs that poured out of him into No Rest for the Wicked, a haunted reckoning of his relationship with his own wicked self. The result is no triumph, though it often sounds like one – opener “Half a Mind” explodes from the firepower of it’s snare shots into the kind of ‘80s-tinged, synth-heavy arena rock that begs for fist-pumping. Baldwin doesn’t bend reality to create a happy ending. Instead, he tells his story so far honestly, hunting down the beast in himself in order to hopefully figure out how to live with it.
While he turns his song-writing lens further inward on No Rest for the Wicked, he shoots for the rafters with bold, brash guitars, earth-shaking drums, and synths that by turns build doomy atmospheres or provide the rocket-fuel that propels a chorus to its interstellar heights. Recorded in Halifax and New York City by Gus Van Go and Werner F., the album builds on the promise of Baldwin’s award-winning No Telling When (Precisely Nineteen Eight-Five) and reveals a new sharpness to the skills he’s honed over the better part of 15 years, toughing it out on the road and in the studio, both solo and as part of Matt Mays’ band. During the writing process, he worked out song ideas over long drives through the streets of Dartmouth – “the gritty, sad, burnt out parts of the city,” he says – and Lawrencetown Beach, surrounded by the serenity of emptiness and the hum of the Atlantic Ocean. It was between these two places that the perspective of each song would manifest, presenting itself as either ghastly and anxiety-riddled or a vessel bound unsteadily toward calmer seas.
Each path is fraught and electrifying in equal measure. “Salvation” pulses with unsettling buzz-saw bass as a sinister voice hisses into our protagonist’s ear, trying to charm him into temptation. There’s a crack of light in the acoustic strum and shuffling tambourine of “Dark Beside the Dawn” as Baldwin hopes out loud that he might be capable of sustaining some brightness in his life while acknowledging its dual nature. “Delirious for Serious” rises and rises as its subject unravels through metallic jangles and flourishes from a muscled-up six-string. And “Shattered” arrives sweat-soaked and dance-ready, riding on a driving beat that belies a heartbreaking admission of guilt and recklessness. “Something wayward beckons toward a shallow grave,” Baldwin sings. “Is that your face in the wreckage?”
True to life, No Rest for the Wicked’s finale doesn’t provide any resolution to the conflict at its heart. The title track finds our ‘hero’ deep in the darkness at the edge of Dartmouth, coming to terms with the fact that floating wasted here, among the ghosts and shadows of the city, there is no peace to be found. As Baldwin, battling against the night, howls its coda, the song fades out on a jarring wave of feedback, leaving the future uncertain. But uncertainty holds the door open for hope, and any war between darkness and light is only lost when the fighting stops.
Ages: 19+
The Town Heroes
They’ve toured the world, released three critically acclaimed albums and won an array of industry awards. Anthemic choruses, 3-part harmonies, tender falsettos and big drums highlight their riff driven, dirty-yet-nuanced barrage of sound. On stage they move like intense caricatures – soaked in sweat, pushing every chord, note and beat to the limit. A structured wall of sound emerges; familiar yet distinctive. Camaraderie shows in their musicianship, their songwriting highlights what they are: friends playing music for the love of it, in it for the long haul.
Musically, TTH are reminiscent of the 90’s Alt-Rock bands they grew up listening to. Lyrically, at the root of every song is a passionate exploration of the things that make us all human. Whether good or bad, they’re the things that make us who we are: heartache, longing, society in the modern age, dreams and family.
Through comedic videos, social media hi-jinks, blogs, unexpected wardrobe, late night sandwich stands at music festivals, amusing acceptance speeches and interviews, the band has earned a reputation for making people laugh.
Though vastly different, the band has found a way to balance these two sides in a seamless, cohesive manner. They see it as a crucial, necessary part of what they do. In a world where so much negativity fills the news, where the media endlessly focuses on the bad, The Town Heroes want to bring something positive into it all – as small as it may be. They see it as necessary because it is – it’s who they are. That’s something they’ll never change.
For the past 6 years, TTH have played as a duo – Mike Ryan (guitar, vocals) and Bruce Gillis (drums) – captivating audiences with their remarkably full sound and energetic performances. With a desire to push the envelope even more, in November 2016 the band expanded to become a 4-piece, adding Aaron Green (guitars) and Tori Cameron (bass) to the band. The new lineup reflects and effectively captures the growth, vision, and musical progression of the band.
Ages: 19+
Port Cities
In the brief period of time since Port Cities unleashed their incendiary debut—a wildly self-assured collection of sparkling, rootsy pop that showcases the Nova Scotia trio’s devotion to songwriting—the band’s been hard at work bringing it to the masses. They’ve continued to explore and evolve their ambitious pop sound, melding diverse musical backgrounds to create an alchemy that’s part art, part songwriting science, and all magic: the nimble dynamism of Breagh MacKinnon’s smoky, jazz-indebted delivery, Dylan Guthro’s simmering and soulful R&B swagger, and Carleton Stone’s razor-sharp, romantic rock ‘n’ roll. In 2018, that memory-making mix of unforgettable melodies, high-flying harmonies, and electrifying heart on Port Cities is set to reach audiences worldwide.
It’s a chemistry that’s been perfected during the 100+ dates they’ve toured in the past year, in hotel rooms and songwriter circles, in vans rolling through foreign countries to rowdy pubs, and on the fog-bound shores of Canada’s misty east coast. It’s helped lead the band to numerous accolades, including a whopping five Nova Scotia Music Awards, a SOCAN #1 Award (for “Back to the Bottom”), and stints at #1 on CBC and Spotify charts. Port Cities has amassed over 1.5 million streams internationally, showcased at The Great Escape, Focus Wales, and the Reeperbahn Festival, and will be releasing their debut in the U.K. and Germany this year.
Beyond Port Cities’ deep devotion to their craft, their success is largely built on a simple but timeless approach: a good song is a good song is a good song. Whether it’s awash with synthesizer (“Sound of Your Voice”), pumped up with an overdriven crunch (“Where Have You Been”), or stripped down to the bare essentials with just an acoustic guitar and three voices. No matter what music the melody might call for, the best song always wins.
Ages: 19+
Villages
Villages is an indie folk group heavily inspired by the spirit of the Maritimes. However, creating music inspired by their Cape Breton roots seemed like a long shot when the members first started performing together. Back in the late aughts, Matt Ellis, Travis Ellis, Jon Pearo and Archie Rankin formed the indie rock group Mardeen and fled Cape Breton Island for Halifax. Aiming to participate in a music community with a penchant for melodic indie rock, the group strove to carry on the torch of their heroes in Sloan, The Super Friendz and Thrush Hermit.
After releasing several acclaimed albums and EP’s, there was a turning point in that endeavour. “One late night, a few years back, a singalong of Rankin Family tunes broke out” says vocalist Matt Ellis. “I remember saying to the rest of the band that we need to write something that evokes the sound of home.” Soon after that night, Ellis wrote just that song. It was called “Hymn After Hymn” and it captured the Maritimes musically and lyrically in a new and authentic way. This song was followed by a burst of creative output and the group quickly jumped into the studio to record these songs with east coast stalwart and producer Joel Plaskett. “Joel has such a strong knowledge of folk music from the UK and Ireland, he really brought our songs to life”. The problem was, these new songs had nothing in common with the edgy indie rock that Mardeen is known for. These songs needed their own home.
Inspired by an essay that comic artist Kate Beaton wrote about her hometown in Cape Breton, the project was named Villages. The group released their first single in October 2016 and have been writing, recording, and touring in the time since.
In March 2019, Villages released their self-titled debut album. Recorded at their home studio in rural Nova Scotia with producer Thomas Stajcer (Joel Plaskett, Erin Costello), and mixed by Kevin Ratterman (My Morning Jacket, Basia Bulat), Villages solidifies the group’s vision in capturing the spirit of the Maritimes in a fresh, yet familiar way. Combining Celtic and British folk music influences with the atmospheric arrangements of groups like the War on Drugs and Fleet Foxes, Villages’ debut record is just the first step of a journey into rediscovery and reinvention.
Ages: 19+
Lucy MacNeil
The only girl in a family of five boys, Lucy MacNeil can be described as the heart of The Barra MacNeils. Her crystalline vocals are immediately identifiable with the group’s quintessential sound.
For Lucy, music has always had a heartbeat and she recalls it as the centre of her childhood
home where family, neighbours and visiting musicians were often known to gather — the perfect rhythm of everyone’s feet tapping with the music would lull her to sleep on many nights.
Lucy’s own musical journey officially began when she was 9 years old, but even before that she was step dancing alongside her mother, a well-known local dancer and teacher. Her career with The Barra MacNeils has seen her opening tours for international stars such as Celine Dion, Kenny Rogers and fellow Canadian Rita MacNeil. Yet, with all the many rich and rewarding experiences Lucy’s fondest memory of performing took place in grade 10 at Memorial High School. A contestant in the winter carnival pageant, she put together a performance for the talent portion that drew on all her talents – singing “The legend of the St. Anne’s Reel” playing the fiddle between verses and then ending with a step dance routine. The remarkable effort would lead to her very first standing ovation.
A devoted mother of two talented young girls, Lucy finds time to enjoy life’s simple pleasures, from sharing recipes with her mom, and getting car care advice from her dad, chatting with old friends or dancing to the infectious latin rhythms in her ZUMBA class. Lucy MacNeil looks forward to discovering where music and her extraordinary life will lead her next.
Ages: 19+