Brandon Collier at The Frolic
Join us Sunday night for an evening of sing along songs.
Brandon is an up & coming talent, with a wealth of songs.
Kitchen open till 8PM, bar 12AM
Cheers!
Steve Poltz Shine On… Canada!
Throughout over three decades in music, Steve Poltz did it all and more—often shared by way of his rockin’ countrified folk slices of sardonic Americana (hatched in Halifax). Of course, he co-wrote Jewel’s multiplatinum Hot 100-topping megahit “You Were Meant For Me,” but he also went on a whale watch with her and a few federales that turned into a drug bust. The two still share the story at every festival they play together. He made his bones as the frontman for underground legends The Rugburns, who burned rubber crisscrossing the continent on marathon tours and still pop up once in a while for the rare and quickly sold out reunion gig.
In 20 years since his full-length solo debut, One Left Shoe, he blessed the world’s ears with twelve solo records, spanning the acclaimed 2010 Dreamhouse and most recently Folk Singer in 2015. NPR summed it up best, “Critics and fans alike now regard Poltz as a talented and prolific songwriter.” By 2016, he survived a stroke, endured anything the music industry could throw at him, and still performed like “280 days a year.”
However, he still never lived in Nashville, which represents a turning point in the story and the genesis of his 2018 Red House Records debut, Shine On…
“My girlfriend Sharon sold the condo we were living in, and I was ready to live in a van, which seemed like a good idea for one night—then I decided I wanted a kitchen and a closet,” he admits. “Sharon wanted to move to Nashville, because she thought it would be good for me. It caused a huge fight. I’d been in San Diego since 1980, and that’s where I cut my musical teeth. I thought I’d never leave. In fact, at the height of our fight, I said, ‘I’m not leaving San Diego. I am San Diego!’ This makes me laugh now. As soon as I got to Nashville, I immediately knew I wanted to make a record in ‘Music City’.”
So, the man who once protested “I am San Diego” made Shine On in his new home of Nashville with one of its elder statesman behind the board, Will Kimbrough [Emmylou Harris, Rodney Crowell]. Holing up in the studio at Kimbrough’s house, nothing would be off limits. Together, they unlocked the kind of creative chemistry you only hear about in band bios—but for real.
“I respect Will so much, and I’d always wanted to work with him,” says Steve. “Like two mad scientists, we just took our time and had fun. We didn’t overthink things. Everything felt organic. We ate soul food and drank lots of really good coffee. We tried out weird sounds, and the songs always started with voice and guitar—no click track, just how I’d play them. I road tested many of them, and they were ripe for the picking when recording time came around.”
Evoking themes of “hope, love, contemplation, celebration of Wednesday, pharmacists, and the fact that windows are not inanimate objects and they sometimes have conversations with each other,” the record represents Steve at his most inspired and insightful. The opener and title track “Shine On” pairs a delicate vocal with lithely plucked acoustic strings as he urges, “Shine on, shine on.”
“The song was a gift,” he recalls. “I woke up really early in Encinitas, California at Sharon’s sister’s house. The sun was just coming up. I was all alone in perfect solitude. My guitar was there. The sky was gorgeous. I wrote it as a poem. Everyone always told me, ‘Never start a record with a really slow song.’ So, seeing that I have O.D.D. (Oppositional Defiance Disorder), I started my record with one. I love the mood it sets. It’s almost like my mission statement, trying to find some semblance of positivity and light in a sometimes ruthless world.”
On “Pharmacist,” rustling guitar and harmonica propel a tale of “this dude having a crush on his pharmacist.” It also serves as an extension of his friendship with neighbor Scot Sax—with whom he shares the podcast “One Hit Neighbors” (since they’ve both had one hit song). Meanwhile, he joined forces with Molly Tuttle on “4th of July,” which, of course, came to life on the 3rd of July. “Ballin On Wednesday” drew its title and chorus from a diner checkout girl (with a super cool gold tooth) who Steve paid with a $100 bill and she replied, “Oooh, ballin’ on a Wednsday.” The finale “All Things Shine” skips along on sparse instrumentation as Steve sends a message.
“‘All Things Shine’ came about after one of the many mass shootings on this planet,” he sighs. “I was feeling overwhelmed. So, I wanted to put my feelings into words and melody. I was thinking that even if we’re feeling hopeless that there is still beauty. All things shine in their own way.”
Who could contend that?
In the end, for everything you can call him “searcher, smartass, movie freak, lover of technology, news junkie, baseball fan to nth degree, lapsed catholic who still believes in god even though all his friends are atheists and think he’s an idiot, and maker of fun,” you might just call Steve that little light in the dark we all need in this day and age.
Or Nashville’s Canadian Jiminy Cricket…
“I hope Shine On makes listeners smile and feel welcome, and they want to share it with their friends,” he leaves off. “Music means energy to me. All things. It connects us, makes us move, helps us relax, and inspires us to change things up.”
Steve Poltz Shine On… Canada!
Throughout over three decades in music, Steve Poltz did it all and more—often shared by way of his rockin’ countrified folk slices of sardonic Americana (hatched in Halifax). Of course, he co-wrote Jewel’s multiplatinum Hot 100-topping megahit “You Were Meant For Me,” but he also went on a whale watch with her and a few federales that turned into a drug bust. The two still share the story at every festival they play together. He made his bones as the frontman for underground legends The Rugburns, who burned rubber crisscrossing the continent on marathon tours and still pop up once in a while for the rare and quickly sold out reunion gig.
In 20 years since his full-length solo debut, One Left Shoe, he blessed the world’s ears with twelve solo records, spanning the acclaimed 2010 Dreamhouse and most recently Folk Singer in 2015. NPR summed it up best, “Critics and fans alike now regard Poltz as a talented and prolific songwriter.” By 2016, he survived a stroke, endured anything the music industry could throw at him, and still performed like “280 days a year.”
However, he still never lived in Nashville, which represents a turning point in the story and the genesis of his 2018 Red House Records debut, Shine On…
“My girlfriend Sharon sold the condo we were living in, and I was ready to live in a van, which seemed like a good idea for one night—then I decided I wanted a kitchen and a closet,” he admits. “Sharon wanted to move to Nashville, because she thought it would be good for me. It caused a huge fight. I’d been in San Diego since 1980, and that’s where I cut my musical teeth. I thought I’d never leave. In fact, at the height of our fight, I said, ‘I’m not leaving San Diego. I am San Diego!’ This makes me laugh now. As soon as I got to Nashville, I immediately knew I wanted to make a record in ‘Music City’.”
So, the man who once protested “I am San Diego” made Shine On in his new home of Nashville with one of its elder statesman behind the board, Will Kimbrough [Emmylou Harris, Rodney Crowell]. Holing up in the studio at Kimbrough’s house, nothing would be off limits. Together, they unlocked the kind of creative chemistry you only hear about in band bios—but for real.
“I respect Will so much, and I’d always wanted to work with him,” says Steve. “Like two mad scientists, we just took our time and had fun. We didn’t overthink things. Everything felt organic. We ate soul food and drank lots of really good coffee. We tried out weird sounds, and the songs always started with voice and guitar—no click track, just how I’d play them. I road tested many of them, and they were ripe for the picking when recording time came around.”
Evoking themes of “hope, love, contemplation, celebration of Wednesday, pharmacists, and the fact that windows are not inanimate objects and they sometimes have conversations with each other,” the record represents Steve at his most inspired and insightful. The opener and title track “Shine On” pairs a delicate vocal with lithely plucked acoustic strings as he urges, “Shine on, shine on.”
“The song was a gift,” he recalls. “I woke up really early in Encinitas, California at Sharon’s sister’s house. The sun was just coming up. I was all alone in perfect solitude. My guitar was there. The sky was gorgeous. I wrote it as a poem. Everyone always told me, ‘Never start a record with a really slow song.’ So, seeing that I have O.D.D. (Oppositional Defiance Disorder), I started my record with one. I love the mood it sets. It’s almost like my mission statement, trying to find some semblance of positivity and light in a sometimes ruthless world.”
On “Pharmacist,” rustling guitar and harmonica propel a tale of “this dude having a crush on his pharmacist.” It also serves as an extension of his friendship with neighbor Scot Sax—with whom he shares the podcast “One Hit Neighbors” (since they’ve both had one hit song). Meanwhile, he joined forces with Molly Tuttle on “4th of July,” which, of course, came to life on the 3rd of July. “Ballin On Wednesday” drew its title and chorus from a diner checkout girl (with a super cool gold tooth) who Steve paid with a $100 bill and she replied, “Oooh, ballin’ on a Wednsday.” The finale “All Things Shine” skips along on sparse instrumentation as Steve sends a message.
“‘All Things Shine’ came about after one of the many mass shootings on this planet,” he sighs. “I was feeling overwhelmed. So, I wanted to put my feelings into words and melody. I was thinking that even if we’re feeling hopeless that there is still beauty. All things shine in their own way.”
Who could contend that?
In the end, for everything you can call him “searcher, smartass, movie freak, lover of technology, news junkie, baseball fan to nth degree, lapsed catholic who still believes in god even though all his friends are atheists and think he’s an idiot, and maker of fun,” you might just call Steve that little light in the dark we all need in this day and age.
Or Nashville’s Canadian Jiminy Cricket…
“I hope Shine On makes listeners smile and feel welcome, and they want to share it with their friends,” he leaves off. “Music means energy to me. All things. It connects us, makes us move, helps us relax, and inspires us to change things up.”
Joel Plaskett 2
Canada has produced some of the world’s most enduring songwriters and Joel Plaskett is being hailed as one of the best.
Since spending his teenaged years recording and touring with Halifax indie upstarts Thrush Hermit, Plaskett has been writing his own story. After releasing two critically acclaimed albums – In Need of Medical Attention (1999) and Down at the Khyber (2001) – independently, Joel signed to Maple Music Recordings for the release of 2003’s Truthfully Truthfully, a rock tour de force with his band, The Emergency. That record scored with critics and fans alike and truly put Plaskett on the national radar once and for all. Truthfully Truthfully was nominated for a Juno Award for Alternative Album of the Year and won an East Coast Music Award for Rock Recording of the Year.
During a summer break from touring in 2004, Joel responded to a longtime fan’s offer of recording time at a home studio in Mesa, Arizona. The results of that journey are on Plaskett’s MapleMusic effort, a solo album called La De Da. The album is “solo” in the sense that Joel plays all the instruments but it’s by no means a simple acoustic project. It also isn’t a permanent move away from his work with The Emergency. Rather, it’s the mark of an artist at home with his instincts and his creative muse and one that’s willing to follow fearlessly where those imperatives lead. La De Da attracted attention at regional and national media and the hit single “Happen Now” topped the Canadian campus music chart for months running.
Joel has toured extensively both solo and with The Emergency, to sold-out clubs, theatres and headlining festivals throughout Canada, the United States and Australia, on the heels of great Canadian success with his Make A Little Noise DVD & EP (2006) and Ashtray Rock (2007). Make A Little Noise spawned an infectiously catchy hit single, “Nowhere With You,” that landed Plaskett on the Top 10 at Hott Adult Contemporary (AC) radio. He also garnered three 2007 East Coast Music Awards wins for “Nowhere With You,” DVD for Make A Little Noise, and Songwriter of the Year. Ashtray Rock was nominated for the high profile Polaris Music Prize award, and earned Plaskett and his band all six of the 2008 “of the year” ECMAs for which he, and they, were nominated: Recording, Group Recording, Single (for “Fashionable People,” another hit song), Video (also for “Fashionable People”), Rock Recording, and Songwriter. Topping that off was Joel’s Juno Award nomination for Songwriter of the Year and his placement as First Place Winner in the 2008 Great American Song Contest and the Billboard World Song Contest for his single “Fashionable People” (in the Pop category).
Joel’s triple layered album, Three (released March 2009) features a stellar line up of guest musicians including his father Bill Plaskett, Rose Cousins, Ana Eggie and his band, The Emergency (Chris Pennell and Dave Marsh). Three received overwhelming response from media and radio programmers across the country and was nominated for the prestigious 2009 Polaris Music Award, which recognizes the best Canadian recordings in the last year. Without a doubt, another personal career highlight for Joel and his band was sharing the stage opening for the legendary Paul McCartney (in Halifax, Nova Scotia) performing to an audience of over 50,000 people.??
As a special treat to his fans, in 2011, Plaskett took on yet another project: a collection of demos, outtakes, rarities and B-sides from over a decade of music-making, deliciously titled EMERGENCYs, false alarms, shipwrecks, castaways, fragile creatures, special features, demons and demonstrations. Boasting twenty tracks culled from dozens of unreleased or rare recordings, EMERGENCYs is a fascinating slice of Plaskett’s history, from his earliest days with the Emergency (three songs from 2001’s Down at the Khyber are featured in demo form) to his latest trips into the studio post Three.
The year 2012 started in high gear for Plaskett, and anybody who’s been following along already knows the reason why. Out of the doldrums of another long Canadian winter, Joel and The Emergency worked around the clock, sending weekly volleys to fight off the seasonal blues: a brand new song – recorded, mixed, mastered, and released – every single week for ten weeks, accompanied by snippets of video documenting the process in-studio. It was an epic undertaking, which came together in the physical release of Scrappy Happiness on CD and vinyl. The album is garnering outstanding reviews from the media, is long listed for the Polaris Music Prize, and Joel Plaskett Emergency kicked off their Scrappy Happiness Canadian tour with a live performance on CBC’s George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight.
There are a handful of gorgeous tunes that call to mind the folk inflections of Three, while hewing to the lean, stripped-down production that mark this distinctive record as a whole (the breezy lilt of “Harbour Boys” and the standout “I’m Yours”). But Plaskett’s winking references to his beloved Cactus and Husker Du albums suggest that his riffing chops are as strong as ever. The Emergency provide the muscle for gritty guitar numbers like “Lightning Bolt” and “Time Flies” and they evidently haven’t lost an ounce of love for the kind of melodic rock that inspires tunes like “Somewhere Else” and “Tough Love,” tracks that echo back to their earlier records, Down at the Khyber and Truthfully, Truthfully.
Scrappy Happiness is an eclectic display of Plaskett’s continued songwriting prowess and playful lyricism. While many of the songs tap bittersweet emotions hidden in the fuzzy details of the past, it is the present where this record resides. Time’s flying, so let’s fly with it. Music – the sheer jubilant redemptive promise of music: on the radio, in the car, in the kitchen or from the stage – occupies a prominent place in these songs and one can hear the joy the group took in their creation. But none of this would matter if it weren’t also, in the end, another compelling record from one of Canada’s leading musical voices.
Frolic’n Funny
The Frolic’n Folk Pub & Grill brings you an evening of pro comedy, with some of Canada’s best stand-ups.
Featuring:
Nick Martinello (Vice, CBC Comedy, Halifax Comedy Festival)
Jordan Foisy (This Hour has 22 Minutes. Just for Laughs)
Dan Hendricken (Halifax Comedy Festival, Halifax Pop Explosion)
Full kicthen and bar service as well.
Tickets can be found at the link https://frolicnfunny.brownpapertickets.com or purchase at the door.
A Gunning & Cormier Christmas Show
Two of Canada’s greatest roots singer-songwriters have finally done what everybody’s wanted — heck, what they’ve wanted — for years. Dave Gunning and J.P. Cormier are releasing their first album together, called Two. Great friends, frequent collaborators, co-writers and touring partners, the pair has been talking about this album since pretty much the day they met. Now it’s here, and it’s everything fans hoped and dreamed it would be.
The album is called Two because that’s what it is, just the two of them.
“We wanted to keep it simple and honest so we essentially made a 4-track recording, just two guitars and two vocals. Limiting ourselves this way actually helped inspire the arrangements and the performances. It forced us to dig a little deeper.”, says Gunning.
“A lot of artists like us feel compelled to put these massive productions together, and we said we’re not going to do that,” adds Cormier. “We’re going to make this record be that large with only two instruments and two voices. And we did that.”
Two is made up of everything the duo excels at. There are new collaborations between the two writers (Brothers, Home To Mary), new arrangements of antique folk numbers (Johnny Armstrong, Katie o’ the Gowrie), and some tasty, surprising covers (Never Picked Cotton, Stompin’ Tom’s Songbird Valley).
Every song had to meet their very high, combined standards. “We didn’t take it lightly,” confirms Gunning. “We really put our heart into it.”
Gunning & Cormier go back 23 years when Dave had a fiddle player drop out of a show at the last minute. “He hired me for a gig when I was just back from Nashville, nobody knew me here,” says Cormier.
“We were totally blown away by J.P.’s playing,” recalls Gunning. “I remember him saying if you ever do a CD, I want to play on it.” That happened, and much more. They played together and wrote together whenever they could, coming up with songs that graced both their projects, over the years showered with awards and nominations on the East Coast and nationally.
“Dave is such a part of my life,” says Cormier. “Dave is like my family, he’s like a blood relative to me, and he’s always been that way. ” Gunning feels the same way. “Absolutely, we just became fast friends, and we’ve been working together ever since.”
Since they’ve been two of the busiest solo musicians in the country these past two decades, it’s been impossible to schedule time to make a full album and properly tour it. But that all changed three years ago when Cormier moved just down the road from Gunning in Nova Scotia’s Pictou County, and the pair were able to meet often at Gunning’s home studio.
First, they picked some great songs. Then they figured out their guitar parts, and when ready recorded the guitars ‘live-off-the-floor’ simultaneously. Then they recorded their vocals together. This recording technique gave them what they’d hoped for, something unlike their solo albums: The power of Two.
“It actually creates a sympathetic overtone like a third instrument sometimes,” marvels Cormier. “You go, wait a minute, why does it sound like there’s another guitar? You sometimes can’t tell us apart, or sometimes even our vocals you can’t tell apart, which is really weird because our voices are nothing alike, but when we sing together, we have a sibling harmony, we blend like brothers.”
Gunning & Cormier have been playing some select gigs over the past few months, in anticipation of the album’s release. “It seems to be a different kind of response from the audience that I’m not too sure that either of us have experienced be-fore,” says Gunning. “We love singing together, we love playing guitar together, it just works.”
Two is as real as it gets. Two songwriters, interpreters, guitar players, and singers at their peak. It’s the power of the song, the highest quality from the past to the now. It’s two friends, brothers, uncompromising performers, making the album of their lives. There couldn’t be a better time to discover Gunning & Cormier, and the power of Two.
Joel Plaskett
Canada has produced some of the world’s most enduring songwriters and Joel Plaskett is being hailed as one of the best.
Since spending his teenaged years recording and touring with Halifax indie upstarts Thrush Hermit, Plaskett has been writing his own story. After releasing two critically acclaimed albums – In Need of Medical Attention (1999) and Down at the Khyber (2001) – independently, Joel signed to Maple Music Recordings for the release of 2003’s Truthfully Truthfully, a rock tour de force with his band, The Emergency. That record scored with critics and fans alike and truly put Plaskett on the national radar once and for all. Truthfully Truthfully was nominated for a Juno Award for Alternative Album of the Year and won an East Coast Music Award for Rock Recording of the Year.
During a summer break from touring in 2004, Joel responded to a longtime fan’s offer of recording time at a home studio in Mesa, Arizona. The results of that journey are on Plaskett’s MapleMusic effort, a solo album called La De Da. The album is “solo” in the sense that Joel plays all the instruments but it’s by no means a simple acoustic project. It also isn’t a permanent move away from his work with The Emergency. Rather, it’s the mark of an artist at home with his instincts and his creative muse and one that’s willing to follow fearlessly where those imperatives lead. La De Da attracted attention at regional and national media and the hit single “Happen Now” topped the Canadian campus music chart for months running.
Joel has toured extensively both solo and with The Emergency, to sold-out clubs, theatres and headlining festivals throughout Canada, the United States and Australia, on the heels of great Canadian success with his Make A Little Noise DVD & EP (2006) and Ashtray Rock (2007). Make A Little Noise spawned an infectiously catchy hit single, “Nowhere With You,” that landed Plaskett on the Top 10 at Hott Adult Contemporary (AC) radio. He also garnered three 2007 East Coast Music Awards wins for “Nowhere With You,” DVD for Make A Little Noise, and Songwriter of the Year. Ashtray Rock was nominated for the high profile Polaris Music Prize award, and earned Plaskett and his band all six of the 2008 “of the year” ECMAs for which he, and they, were nominated: Recording, Group Recording, Single (for “Fashionable People,” another hit song), Video (also for “Fashionable People”), Rock Recording, and Songwriter. Topping that off was Joel’s Juno Award nomination for Songwriter of the Year and his placement as First Place Winner in the 2008 Great American Song Contest and the Billboard World Song Contest for his single “Fashionable People” (in the Pop category).
Joel’s triple layered album, Three (released March 2009) features a stellar line up of guest musicians including his father Bill Plaskett, Rose Cousins, Ana Eggie and his band, The Emergency (Chris Pennell and Dave Marsh). Three received overwhelming response from media and radio programmers across the country and was nominated for the prestigious 2009 Polaris Music Award, which recognizes the best Canadian recordings in the last year. Without a doubt, another personal career highlight for Joel and his band was sharing the stage opening for the legendary Paul McCartney (in Halifax, Nova Scotia) performing to an audience of over 50,000 people.??
As a special treat to his fans, in 2011, Plaskett took on yet another project: a collection of demos, outtakes, rarities and B-sides from over a decade of music-making, deliciously titled EMERGENCYs, false alarms, shipwrecks, castaways, fragile creatures, special features, demons and demonstrations. Boasting twenty tracks culled from dozens of unreleased or rare recordings, EMERGENCYs is a fascinating slice of Plaskett’s history, from his earliest days with the Emergency (three songs from 2001’s Down at the Khyber are featured in demo form) to his latest trips into the studio post Three.
The year 2012 started in high gear for Plaskett, and anybody who’s been following along already knows the reason why. Out of the doldrums of another long Canadian winter, Joel and The Emergency worked around the clock, sending weekly volleys to fight off the seasonal blues: a brand new song – recorded, mixed, mastered, and released – every single week for ten weeks, accompanied by snippets of video documenting the process in-studio. It was an epic undertaking, which came together in the physical release of Scrappy Happiness on CD and vinyl. The album is garnering outstanding reviews from the media, is long listed for the Polaris Music Prize, and Joel Plaskett Emergency kicked off their Scrappy Happiness Canadian tour with a live performance on CBC’s George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight.
There are a handful of gorgeous tunes that call to mind the folk inflections of Three, while hewing to the lean, stripped-down production that mark this distinctive record as a whole (the breezy lilt of “Harbour Boys” and the standout “I’m Yours”). But Plaskett’s winking references to his beloved Cactus and Husker Du albums suggest that his riffing chops are as strong as ever. The Emergency provide the muscle for gritty guitar numbers like “Lightning Bolt” and “Time Flies” and they evidently haven’t lost an ounce of love for the kind of melodic rock that inspires tunes like “Somewhere Else” and “Tough Love,” tracks that echo back to their earlier records, Down at the Khyber and Truthfully, Truthfully.
Scrappy Happiness is an eclectic display of Plaskett’s continued songwriting prowess and playful lyricism. While many of the songs tap bittersweet emotions hidden in the fuzzy details of the past, it is the present where this record resides. Time’s flying, so let’s fly with it. Music – the sheer jubilant redemptive promise of music: on the radio, in the car, in the kitchen or from the stage – occupies a prominent place in these songs and one can hear the joy the group took in their creation. But none of this would matter if it weren’t also, in the end, another compelling record from one of Canada’s leading musical voices.
Frolic’n Friday
Wayne Bedecki
Catch some live music at the pub each Friday this summer.
Kitchen open till 9PM, bar open till 2AM
No cover charge.
Frolic’n Friday
Chris Campbell
Catch some live music at the pub each Friday this summer.
Kitchen open till 9PM, bar open till 2AM
No cover charge.
Frolic’n Friday
Joseph Gillis
Catch some live music at the pub each Friday this summer.
Kitchen open till 9PM, bar open till 2AM
No cover charge.