West Coast Tour

And deep dive into the creative process for the Humanhood show.

After a really tough and painful Canadian election, I'm breathing a temporary sigh of relief and turning - for the moment - back to the thing I actually do. We're going on tour again, starting May 8th in Los Angeles, heading up the coast to San Francisco, Portland, Vancouver, Victoria, and Seattle. All shows with the excellent Anna Tivel, whose thoughtful, interesting lyrics friends have been recommending to me since her album Outsiders came out.

After this run we're doing three beautiful shows closer to home - Montreal at the Beanfield Theatre, Ottawa at the NAC, and Toronto at the newly opened Concert Hall.

Tickets are here.

These shows will likely mark the end of this specific Humanhood show, so I wanted to take a minute to talk about the show itself, which has been the culmination of many many months of hard work and thought.

My creative process on this show started, honestly, long before the record even existed. I had the conviction that I wanted to do something different with the show, something that shifted away from the normal rhythms of song, chat, tune, song. And I wanted to make the show visual, somehow. But the last thing I wanted to do was to have a big square LED screen at the back of the stage, which all too often can make shows feel like watching TV. I started learning a bit about projection, and thinking about projecting onto three dimensional or moving pieces of fabric, or patchwork. This led me to the idea of projections onstage with the band, human sized, as though they were part of the band, on our level, not hanging up high or distant, but feeling like a part of the scene. Fabric proved difficult to get right (fireproofing is tricky and also it wrinkles in transit) and when Estelle Frenette-Vallieres, who was a part of the initial creative process, suggested tyvek, it worked well both logistically but also in terms of how it can look and feel like stone, which was reminiscent to me instantly of the huge limestone blocks visible on the album cover. There is this dichotomy between hard and soft in the cover; fabric and stone, and when I saw the tyvek pieces for the first time, that's what they evoked. (As well as the standing stone reference which UK audiences pointed out)

Starting last summer, I started turning to Anne Bourne, for wisdom and advice on the show. Anne started her music career in the 80's, most notably touring for years with Jane Siberry, who was an innovative Toronto songwriter who pushed boundaries of all kinds. She also is a disciple of Pauline Oliveros and brings to bear Oliveros's Deep Listening techniques in her work. Anne was helpful throughout the process in ways I can only really describe as spiritual. But one of the other things she did was put me in touch with Philippe Leonard. Philippe does projections and video work for a lot of bands, including Godspeed You Black Emperor and Elisapie, and he also has his own practice of video art which you can see more of here.

Philippe was the perfect collaborator, with an eye to the natural world and an aesthetic sensibility that resonated with mine. Philippe created a series of videos for each song, using all natural imagery; bullrushes from the window of a train, fireworks shot in in timelapse, city lights, water from below, sparks from a fire. The footage is real, but it can feel surreal too, recontextualized. Philippe also did a masterful job of finding video that matched with the music in terms of movement, no easy feat in our case. Most bands who feature video are performing on a click, using tracks, performing the songs identically night to night, so the video lines up perfectly in terms of rhythm with the music. But I had absolutely no interest in doing that. Our show is different night to night - there's some improvising, we're playing off of each other, letting things change. Philippe, unlike any other video people in the live music world, understood and supported that, and figured out ways to make the video move with the music and catch moments in songs like verses or choruses through different clips that are subtly cued through the show.

Finally, I found in Matt Lawler a touring collaborator who could master the insanely complicated technical challenge of this show. Because we travel by van, not bus, we have to set up the whole show - video, lights, sound - in just three or four hours. Every night, Matt runs three projectors to front of house, projection maps them, sets up lights, configures a house lighting rig he's never seen, and improvises lighting looks for each show depending on what lighting is present at the venue. Then through the show, he's watching us intently, trying to catch the nuances of the show, the pieces that change in length, the moments that are up to chance, matching both video and lights to the musical nuances.

The second part of the show which was really important to me was the arc. As Humanhood came together, I started to realize that it had an arc, that it traced a journey from dark back towards light. Ignorance has a similar arc, actually, and the two albums are really interconnected lyrically. Looking to the show, I wanted to trace that same journey musically, in terms of light and colour, in terms of the setlist, and in terms of my own emotional expression. So the show has three parts - it starts with the songs that deal with disconnection and confusion and heaviness. Then it moves to the songs about breaking out - breaking through. Then finally the last part of the show is about reconnection, vulnerability. Sometimes it felt confrontational, but I really wanted to commit to stepping out onto stage and start first with the dark, with the disconnected, with the songs that carry the heaviness of this moment. I actually do still have a lot of stage fright - I can still find it hard to get comfortable - and there has been something interesting about allowing the beginning of the show to mirror that awkwardness and distance, and then use the music and evening to propel me forward into connection. By the end, we're open, we're laughing, we feel human. In some way, that's how all shows feel; at the start of the night, people are shy or caught up in themselves, and by the end, if we do it right, there's a warmth in the room. That journey to connection is in a sense what all shows are for, and making that legible and overt has been really beautiful night to night.

This journey from dissociation back to connection feels resonant to me in this moment in the world. Politically, obviously, many are caught up in false or dark stories. This is something too that has happened to me in my life, in different personal ways - and when you're caught in any sort of false story it can cut you off from what's around you, from your own integrity, from connection. The process, though, of tearing down a false reality is painful - you have to go through a sharp phase of feeling all the things you were cut off from, all the things the story kept out of view. And then to reconnect, actually, to the world around you means vulnerability, softness, things that are difficult to get to at first. In terms of politics, in terms of climate - this same disconnection from what is real is there - and in both forms there is the same need to tear down false stories in order to touch, again, what is real or embodied or honest in this difficult, painful moment.

Thanks to everyone who came out to the show so far, and I'm looking forward to the next run. For this run, we'll have Ben Boye back on keys, whose playing really shaped Humanhood. As well as superstar Karen Ng on sax, flute, and synth, Ben Whiteley on basses both electric and synthetic, and Dom on drums and electronic drums. Arranging the music for the show and performing it each night has been it's own challenge - with everyone doing new things musically and covering so much ground. For one thing, I'm playing lead guitar, improbably, but with the help of Jim Elkington (who taught me some of his riffs from the record) and Jasper Smith (who helped me overhaul my tone) I've been managing to pull it off and it's been somewhat exciting night to night. This band is incredible; even without all the visual stuff, I'd still feel like this is the best yet live iteration of the Weather Station. But there's more shows to come - I'm sure we can push it further.

-Tam

Postscript - wrote some Canadian election wrap-up thoughts on the gram here.

I'm grateful we evaded the worst outcome, but like many I feel really saddened by the losses for the NDP. However I feel like that loss has almost nothing to do with the NDP and everything to do with the fact that Canadians looked at the Poilievre Conservatives, recognized what they were, and voted Liberal to keep out the Cons. As often happens. I hope the Liberals can recognize that their support this time came from NDP, Green, and Bloc voters who want progressive change, and move left, not centre, in recognition of who gave them their mandate. And I hope we finally move toward Proportional Representation, so we can have strong progressive and diverse parties we can vote for every election, not just when the Conservatives are not so great a threat.

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