So good they're doing it again; Mariposa in the Fall!

By Will McGuirk

What a marvellous time was had at Mariposa 2022. It was a soulful gathering of friends and colleagues surrounded by trees, water, and such wonderful music, from Mavis Staples to Kathleen Edwards, from workshops to hikes, and lazy Sunday morning coming-downs. So good.

So good in fact they’re doing it again.

Mariposa Folk Foundation President Pam Carter said in a press release, “To further celebrate the return of live music to our area and provide another reason to visit Simcoe County, we have partnered with the county to present a unique outdoor afternoon festival.”  Hear hear!!

An Autumn Mariposa will take place at Bayview Memorial Park, 9th Concession Road, Township of Oro-Medonte on Saturday, October 1, from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. and will feature performances by four artists/groups: Aleksi Campagne, The Weather Station, Union Duke and Irish Mythen.

Later that evening Julian Taylor will perform at the Orillia Opera House. Also on the bill, singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Aysanabee.

Ticket info here ->

Outliers and outlaws; Mavis Staples, Kathleen Edwards, Tami Neilson, The Weather Station at Mariposa

By Will McGuirk

For two years festivals have been cancelled. And now they are back. On one level its a return to normal. There’s the normalcy of geography. Mariposa for example, the Grand Old Dame of Festivals, will take place July 8, 9 and 10 at Tudhope Park again, as it has for many years. There will be a familiarity to the infrastructure, but if you look closely you will see a difference. Things are not the same. It is subtle but it is there, just as it is in your own life. There’s change, a change you can’t quite put your finger on but you sense intuitively. 

And if I may suggest if there was one place you want to go to to pause and consider and contemplate the passings of time, the passings of these pandemic times, it is without a doubt Mariposa. This folk fest in particular, is as entertaining as visiting an elder but also as enlightening. Mariposa has seen more than you have, it has been around longer, it has experience and wisdom and perspective and will be, no doubt about it, a balm for the past two years.

I have been fortunate to attend Mariposa for many years and this pop-up community of like-minded folkies, have always given me respite from my personal storms. And this year with 60-odd years of experience of providing respite Mariposa as a salve against all that all having been enduring for over two years will be invaluable, its impact incalculable, yet nevertheless felt. Mariposa is comfort food for the soul and right now the soul really really really needs some soul food. 

And thus on stage the personification of soul salvation Mavis Staples. No-one should dismiss any one person’s suffering but it make take a civil rights activist born in 1939 to add some perspective to the hurt. She is a witness.

The hurt perspective runs through the output of Kathleen Edwards, one of the great artists but another unsung CDN singer/songwriter. Professional and personal hurt got her to the point where Edwards threw in the proverbial towel and took up the tea towel, opening her own coffee shop, poignantly called Quitters. But here we are, praise be whatever forces forced her out of retirement with a tour and an album ‘Total Freedom’. It would seem the restaurant rest did its job and time has tempered the fuck it but fortunately for us listeners not the fuck u attitude.

There’s a lot Kathleen Edwards independent streak also to Tami Neilson, plus a whole lotta of Mavis Staples, some Shirley Bassey, some Wanda Jackson  and then again none of it. Neilson, a Canadian in the land of the Kiwi, combines all the edginess of roots music, with a take no prisoners voice as voluminous as her beehive. She is startling, subtle, traditional and wholly original - listen to Neilson duet with Nelson, the Willie is the ground to her electrifying vox.

The Weather Station has electrified her voice moving from the acoustic croon of her early recordings to an easy intensity on her self-titled, an intensity and self-determination that led to a determined take on the disasters looming just beyond the horizon on the next release. The world is changing, we are changing it, its not going to turn out well, but this dread gave up ‘Ignorance’, a sinewy dance on the doom and gloom, and perhaps we can weave our way out with art as material.

Kathleen Edwards, The Weather Station, and Tami Neilson, as artists are on different paths. I imagine however those paths will converge, should demands permit, right around the time Mavis Staples steps on the Main Stage.  ’Respect Yourself’ 

Slowcity.ca Open Mic: Ghost, Weather Station, Jordan Klassen, Miloe, Pup, Anyway Gang, Alex Izenberg, and Jacob Henley

By Will McGuirk

“I wanted the video to capture the feeling of surrender the song has; a feeling of surrendering to emotion at the expense of everything else, within a world that is not necessarily conducive to that softness. I wanted the video to be overtly emotional and sensual, and so I turned to the stereotypical signifiers of these things; beaches, sunsets, the colour red, a sort of operatic performance of emotion. I think the video is an evocation of the feeling of being in love; obsessed with someone or something regardless of your surroundings, where you are, what is happening. Reaching towards softness and touch, even from within aloneness.” - The Weather Station

“Ash Wednesday” is really “a song about redemption and hope, and I love how Wayne contrasted that with a horroresque video,” - Jordan Klassen

“I’m getting closer to making the unconscious conscious with this song and the others. It is difficult to just write when you are constantly bombarded with what is right or wrong, I’ve started looking within more so than before.” - Alex Izenberg

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Mariposa returns Jul 8, 9 and 10, initial line-up includes Lennon Stella, Kathleen Edwards, and Mavis Staples

By Will McGuirk

The Great Dame of Folk Festivals will be stepping out this year after sitting out the past two. The festival was first held in 1961 thus last year would have been the 60th anniversary. Those celebrations will carry over of course, and as the initial line-up announced reveals, its going to be some celebration.

Lennon Stella leads the line-up but its Mariposa so there’s no headliners as such, and not when you have such others in the line-up as the iconic Mavis Staples as well as Kathleen Edwards, The Weather Station, Serena Ryder, Allison Russell, Lido Pimienta and Tami Neilson., plus Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, plus JP Saxe. And there are more TBA!

Food and Artisan opportunities are available until Feb 7 here
Food Vendor information and applications available here
Artisan Vendor information and applications available here

Volunteer Registration Open Now!
More info and registration link available here

and Tickets are available here.

Slowcity.ca Open Mic: Jerry Leger, The Weather Station, Donovan Woods, Valerie June, Mamas Gun, Pierre Kwenders, Denzel Curry, Franz Ferdinand, and I Am Snow Angel,

By Will McGuirk

"The opening line (‘break in the new world but let me keep my job’) is hopeful, it's actually quite a hopeful song. I like to think that real happiness involves being respectful, appreciative and considerate. The words have these deeper layers and questions but Angie Hilts singing with me really lifts it up to a nice place. It's just fun and fortunate to play rock 'n' roll with my friends and we've all needed some fun these days." - Jerry Leger

“The song was written long before the pandemic, but when we recorded it, on March 11, 2020, it began to feel eerily prescient. The day it was recorded truly was the end of an endless time, and as ever, I don’t know how the song knew. Somehow, the music captures that instability; it is ungrounded and diaphanous, it floats and drifts.” - The Weather Station

“I write about them again and again, just hoping people will still be interested. So the title is poking fun of myself, that I’m theoretically this big sad guy who keeps getting dumped and writing fucking songs about it,” - Donovan Woods

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2021 Polaris Music Prize Shortlist announced

By Will McGuirk

The short list for the 2021 critic voted music prize is out with some of our faves making it through to this next round. Its a very diverse list and it speaks to the breadth of what comprises Canadian music. We have been fans of the Weather Station for quite sometime and her latest record, ‘Ignorance’ has been garnering praise from most of the music press. There are others on this list we have featured here at Slowcity.ca; Zoon and the OBGMs are two of the bat but its exciting to see Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s album on here, mostly because I know some of the fine folk involved so congrats folks on what is a very strong contender for the win. List below the break and an interview we did with the OBGMs here.

Here’s the competition, the prize winner will be announced Sept 27, 2021. With uncertainty still around public gatherings the in-person gala has been cancelled.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Theory of Ice
Cadence Weapon – Parallel World
DijahSB – Head Above The Waters
Dominique Fils-Aimé – Three Little Words
Mustafa – When Smoke Rises
The OBGMs – The Ends
Klô Pelgag – Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Douleurs
TOBi – Elements Vol. 1
The Weather Station – Ignorance
Zoon – Bleached Wavves

In this 'Parking Lot' the Weather Station emerges as the artist we need every here and now

By Will McGuirk

“‘Everywhere we go there is an outside, over all of these ceilings hangs a sky // And it kills me when I - you know it just kills me when I see some bird fly // It just kills me, and I don’t know why.”

I don’t know if, in all of my time I’ve been doing this, have I heard an artist who sums up the now so succinctly as The Weather Station has in this song, and in a way which captures something so global, so immersive, so common to all, so human, in a manner which expresses that human experience so readily, and, and, and. . . with such a propulsive hopefulness. When one hears other ones speak of music as an universal language this song is what they mean. There have been those who create an understanding of the recent past, the distant past, maybe even what the future was going to be and understood when that future has come to past but to be here, to be now, right here in all of this and give us this which so concisely sums up what I believe we are all feeling and I know I am feeling and with all of the artistry around it, all of the newness and exploration and abandonment and honesty of just being in this here and in this now and in the this of this is it and its so all of all of it, so . . . I have compared and others have, since The Weather Station’s first airings, compared Tamara Lindeman to Joni Mitchell and one can say with this one song Tamara Lindeman has both lived up to that comparison and stepped out of that comparison for ever more.

The Weather Station’s latest album ‘Ignorance’ comes out Feb 5 via Next Door Records - get it.

Slowcity.ca Open Mic with The Weather Station, Scott MacKay, TV Priest, Kandle & Kendel, Rhye, POSTDATA, Virgil Abloh, Devan, Triptides, The Neighbourhood Watch, and The Barettas

By Will McGuirk

I wonder how they do it, hang on until years from now another discovers the work, lying there in a bin, or back of a library or in a box in a storage locker, or perhaps on an old hard drive in the back of a drawer, and then Eureka! Shared gleefully at the discovery - Christopher Columbus like one would imagine… Its a marvellous place I am in where I get the gems, they sail across my stream, they are intimate to me, but one can only do what one can and I can only urge you to listen and marvel. The Weather Station, there with Sarah Harmer and Kathleen Edwards in my canon. . . if you need some door propped open. Open, you will not be disappointed, there has never been any disappointment from the Weather Station, there has only been song after song, soul after soul edifying moment, album after album of change-ups and growth and journey and a hand held out to journey along and no disappointments only soul after soul edifying moments evermore.

“Trying to capture something of the slipping feeling I think we all feel, the feeling of dread, even in beautiful moments, even when you’re a little drunk on a sea cliff watching the sun go down while seabirds fly around you; that slipping feeling is still there, that feeling of dread, of knowing that everything you see is in peril,” says Lindeman. “I feel like I spend half my life working on trying to stay positive. My whole generation does.”

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Once upon a time there was a man named Handsome Ned who stepped onto the stage of the Cameron House and I wasn’t there. However records had been invented. I imagine Ned would have been happy to have Scott MacKay open for him or even open for. Or perhaps one could hear in Scott MacKay Orville Peck if he didn’t go for Baroque.

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“Press Gang” is about the shifting role in the dissemination of information and ideas, and how the prevailing narrative that the “Death of Print Media” has contributed to a “post-truth” world.

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“We wanted to be somewhere else for a spell and it was granted by whiskey, reverb and 6 beautiful, dark tunes from the early 70s. We boarded his silver spaceship looking for respite from the pandemic…”

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Artist, architect, engineer, creative director, artistic director, industrial designer, fashion designer, musician, DJ, and philanthropist, Virgil Abloh, can very much be described as a multi-hyphenate man. For Abloh, who is also the Chief Creative Director and founder of Off-White™️ and Men’s Artistic Director at Louis Vuitton, music has always run deep.

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“Writing songs for me is a way to uncover my underlying feelings about something –putting elusive emotions into tangible sentences, and coming to terms with them. My only guideline for writing these songs was to try to be as honest with myself as possible, and follow my instincts without all the self-inflicted barriers that I usually let get in the way.” – Devan

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