Dar Williams at Hugh’s Room

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of seeing one of my favourite singer/songwriters live.

I first fell in love with Dar Williams' quirky lyrics and sweet, folksy guitar melodies back in the days when I used to go to summer arts camp. During something called "unit hour", my counsellor would pull out her guitar and sing "The Babysitter's Here", Dar's ode to the coolest babysitter on the block and the childlike wonder of idolizing her. The adorable song is funny and sad and oh-so familiar, like most of Dar's best work. Sung by my camp counsellor- Celeste, a blue-haired theatre artist with a nose ring and a heart of gold- "The Babysitter's Here" made our entire cabin feel like it was our song, and the lyrics were about our counsellor as she played guitar, sang, wrote poetry, danced and tie-dyed our shirts, just like Dar's babysitter did.

As I got older, I fell for one of Williams' other famous works, one that is to-this-day one of my favourite songs ever written: "When I Was a Boy". Strict and largely arbitrary gender lines have baffled me all my life and as a somewhat girly girl totally fine with being a girl, I've often taken offense to the idea that by being such I'm adhering to some sort of rulebook. The notion that my best friend can't admit to his male friends how much he likes The Parent Trap or that my love of baseball is considered somehow incompatible with my love of red lipstick is just bizarre; those are lines the average person doesn't bother to battle, we live with them and just sadly yearn for a time when they didn't matter as much. I've never heard anyone put into words my exact feelings on the topic quite so wonderfully as Dar Williams in "When I Was a Boy". The melancholy ballad tells of a time when a young girl could tell Peter Pan she's a boy and earn the right to fly and fight alongside him; and it tells of now "when leaving a late night with some friends, I hear somebody tell me it's not safe, someone should help me. I need to find a nice man to walk me home". Dar's point isn't that society minimizes its women or that we shouldn't let men walk us home or that we should all macho up. With her final verse she points out that it goes both ways, that the tragedy isn't that girls don't get to play like boys and boys don't get to pick flowers, it's that once upon a time "you were just like me, and I was just like you" and then we grow up and we get arbitrarily separated and told who to be. It's a sad little wakeup song that I consider one of the most truthful ever written.

While the "I don't understand and she tries to explain"s in "The Babysitter's Here" are followed by both "how a spaceship is riding through somebody's brain" and "and all that mascara runs down in her pain" and, however cutesy and inclusive "When I Was a Boy" is, it's still hopelessly melancholy, one of Dar's most famous songs is the upbeat, funny and hopeful "The Christians and the Pagans". I come from a Catholic family and my favourite aunt is Wiccan so "The Christians and the Pagans" is a particularly fun holiday adventure. It's still got Dar's trademark honest edge of depressing realism, such as the fact that the family is somewhat estranged and when the uncle awkwardly puts down his son's request to be a Pagan with "we'll discuss it when they leave", but "The Christians and the Pagans" is an overall celebration of the fact that "Now, when Christians eat with Pagans only pumpkin pies are burning".

So, you know those creepy facebook ads that use stockpiled information about your likes, dislikes, location, age, race, body type and past internet behaviour to target you? I actually don't mind them, because I honestly don't mind corporations knowing that information so long as I have the power to ignore their campaigns and because if the ads are targeted to my interests, every once in awhile they will show something I'm actually interested in. So when Facebook informed me that Dar Williams would be playing in Toronto at Hugh's Room on Dundas West, I was less creeped out by the stalkery ad and mostly thrilled that I'd get to finally see Dar perform live.

She didn't disappoint. The unpretentious singer has welcoming stage presence, a superb self-effacing sense of humour and enough fun anecdotes to fill a concert twice as long as her painfully short set at Hugh's. Dar chatted amicably as she tuned her guitar, telling great stories about her first record label promising to get her on the cover of "High Times" only to have her be rejected because she didn't smoke weed and dispensing sarcastic career advice about the fact that "being inspired by your dreams" is actually what she does for a living. A tale about the quest for a replacement A string at an all-female folk festival brought down the house; her tongue-in-cheek retelling of how the staff over-expressed their feelings and said things like "I felt very judged just now" was the perfect counterpoint to her general insistence that "I'm totally down with the sisterhood", the unspoken caveat being "so long as they're not crazy". The beautiful singer performed all her best songs and plenty of new material, the only one missing being "Iowa", which I missed less than I thought I would as I discovered new favourites "Cool as I Am" and "The Easy Way".

In the big but intimate room at Hugh's, the Dar Williams concert was simply great and I cannot wait for her to come back again. In the meantime, she's got about 18 albums I need to catch up on.

At the Global Cabaret

by Kelly Bedard

The last weekend in October was one of the coolest weekends I've ever spent in my beloved Toronto.  Downtown, in the heart of the ever-gorgeous Distillery District, sits the city's most valuable performance space: The Young Centre for the Performing Arts. The beautifully designed venue sports a spacious lobby with a bar that serves everything from local beers and good wines to delicious espresso drinks, chai hot chocolate, gourmet sandwiches, soups and salads and the best fresh-baked cookies this side of my mother's kitchen. It's also home to no fewer than four diverse and convertible theatre spaces. Once a year, this perfect little slice of the city is filled with 3 days worth of Toronto's greatest musical talent at The Global Cabaret Festival.

The 4th annual showcase featured more than 150 musicians in 44 performances from Oct 28-30 and was composed of 3 types of cabarets: The Featured Artist Series showcased, well, featured artists, including some of Canada's most legendary talent (Jackie Richardson to Sharron Matthews to Daniel Taylor) performing their signature material. The Album Series was a set of tributes to the great artists and songwriters of the world (The Beatles, Paul Simon, Carole King, and more) music directed by the festival's resident artists and each featuring a plethora of guest stars. Finally there was the Theatrical Cabaret Series, which consisted of re)Birth: E.E. Cummings in Song, a Soulpepper original re-mounted from its earlier run, and The National Theatre of the World: The Carnegie Hall Show, a completely improvised musical event that was different at each performance.

I kicked my weekend off early Saturday afternoon at Albert Schultz's kids cabaret Young At Heart. Schultz, the Young Centre/Soulpepper poobah and festival mastermind, has quickly become a favourite of mine in my first year reviewing Soulpepper. In Young at Heart he shows off exactly what it is that makes him so incredibly good at the coolest job in the world. He has an affable charm that makes him a superb figurehead (he can be seen wandering the halls of any Young Centre event, schmoozing and taking in shows) but he's also in possession of an incredibly unique blend of passion, seriousness and fun. Everything he does is executed seemingly effortlessly (the mark of a lot of effort) and Schultz consistently has audiences eating out of the palm of his hand. His cabaret (which he's performed for over a decade and recorded for the CBC) is a loving tribute to comedian/singers like Danny Kaye and a celebration of youthful wonder (he does a "cat medley" that includes "Everybody Wants to be a Cat", "Tigger" and "If I Were King of the Forrest", which he delivers in endearing goofy voices); it also features priceless contributions from the great Don Francks and Jackie Richardson. Housed in the Michael Young Theatre, beautifully transformed with cabaret tables and twinkling candles, Young at Heart was my favourite cabaret of the whole wonderful weekend.

Next, I was lucky enough to catch Jackie Richardson's own cabaret, a delightful hour of jazz and blues as delivered by one of Canada's most awesome performers. Richardson's show dragged only a little as she got lost in some of her more wandering anecdotes (most of which were simply hilarious) but the power of her voice and her engaging stage presence proved impossible to ignore.

Things slowed down from there when I wandered cluelessly into The Stan Rogers Songbook. Headed up by endearing performers like Miranda Mulholland  and the endlessly charming Brendan Wall, I'm sure this particular cabaret was wildly entertaining to fans of Stan Rogers' downhome melancholy, but I found it a little less than rousing (through absolutely no fault of the performers). The reason I went was to see one of the featured guests, Mike Ross, who delivered a couple strong vocals and livened up the proceedings with some cute banter, an anecdote about his expected baby (6 days overdue by then) and some fake rivalry fun (he accidentally knocked over Wall's guitar). Standing in line for a later show I overheard the audience members behind me discussing the E.E. Cummings piece that Ross was a major contributor to: "That Mike Ross is a genius" is not an uncommon sentence to hear at The Young Centre but that doesn't make it any less true. I thought he was great as a conflicted sociopath in White Biting Dog, then amazing in Acting Up Stage's Leonard Cohen/Joni Mitchell tribute, but the boyishly charming multi-hyphenate seems to whip out another mastered skill every time I see him and impress me even more. I'm just sad that at The Global Cabaret Festival I only got to see him sing Stan Rogers.

Next up was Sharron Matthews, of whom I've heard much but seen very little. The exuberant singer lived up to expectations with one of the most fun cabarets of the whole festival. With more of a focus on storytelling than the rest, Matthews gave the outright funniest performance I saw, complete with her divalicious takes on popular songs and a vicious demand for the monstrous Rob Ford to "get out of office and we'll feel alright" (sung to the tune of Bob Marley's usually peaceful "One Love"). Matthews' exuberance comes with a certain degree of self-righteousness, earned from a bullied childhood and years as an industry underdog, but that can be forgiven when she makes the glasses tremble with her powerful belt.

After that, I made the mistake of trying to get into The Beatles's Abbey Road from the Album Series at 8:15, missing my last chance to see the E.E. Cummings show I'd missed earlier this year at Soulpepper. When The Beatles turned out to be too popular (duh!), I called it a night.

I spent my Sunday with a musician friend of mine who was working at the festival instead of scouting out the rest of the Featured Artist Series (I figured between Schultz, Richardson and Matthews I'd gotten my money's worth). After dinner, my media pass got me in to see the final few minutes of Prince's Purple Rain, which I was glad to have mostly missed after musical director Suba Sankaran's gratingly forced enthusiasm proved too much for me to handle.

At 9:15 I capped off my excellent weekend at Toronto's coolest yearly event with the most popular show of the festival: Abbey Road. It was alright, not as memorable as I would have liked. After some of the brilliant cabarets earlier that weekend and the example set by Reza Jacobs' innovative takes on the Mitchell/Cohen songbooks, I'd come to expect a little re-interpretation when dealing with songs as famous as a Beatles track. But with the exception of a little extra drumming, the famous tunes remained largely untouched, delivered prettily but with a somewhat disappointing sense of adulation.

But a few underwhelming shows aside, the Global Cabaret Festival was freaking cool. I don't think there's anywhere else in the world where so many brilliant musicians could come together for such a unique and diverse event, it felt very Torontonian somehow (and not just because the musicians weren't all New York imports, they were ours). Sitting in the back of the Michael Young as a packed house tapped their toe alongside Jackie Richardson, I couldn't help but grin because this is where I live.

My Music Recommends: The Elastocitizens

I've never had more fun at a concert than I have whenever I see The Elastocitizens. In my opinion, the off-beat funk band creates the most memorable live music experience available in Toronto.

Frontman Steven McCarthy leads the audience down the rabbit hole of insane and joyous dance tunes in full Freddy Mercury-esque splendour as his alter ego, Grand Poohbah Groove. (The whole band enjoys names of the like- though none quite as spectacular as the G&S-referencing, still-cool-somehow GPG).

Inevitably, an Elastocitizens concert is an inhibition-bashing good time wherein a massive crowd of strangers forgets that they're strangers and that 20 minutes ago they were worried that their hair would get frizzy if the dance floor got too hot. From the first drumbeat to the flingy enthusiasm of the dancers pulled up onstage in the final song, an Elastocitizens show is good for the soul.

But as much fun as the crowd has, my favourite thing about the Elastocitizens concert is the revelry of the musicians themselves. If someone seems like they could possibly be happy being an accountant instead, I have a hard time enjoying their musicianship. But as McCarthy lovingly gazes at the crowd and mutters "God, it's such a fucking pleasure" in a way not necessarily meant for us to hear, you know that the citizens love nothing more than that moment they're in. And that is, afterall, the point of the whole thing.

Check out the Elastocitizens for yourself at their free outdoor concert this Friday at 8pm in Toronto's Dundas Square. 

Chris Tsujiuchi and the Christerical Cabaret Crew

A couple times a year, one of young Toronto's more engaging performers steps out from behind the piano where he spends most of his time accompanying other acts (like Sharron Matthews) or playing at Statlers Piano Bar (every Tuesday night) and assembles a crazy cast of characters to accompany him to the cabaret stage (usually at Buddies in Bad Times). Now, I go to a lot of theatre, a fair number of concerts, the occasional comedy club- but nothing is ever quite as entertaining as a Christerical Cabaret.

How the Cool Kids Do It

Dave Grohl, the Foo Fighters frontman who won hearts in his endearing SNL appearance this year, won minds on Tuesday when he kicked a fan out of his concert for fighting. Pissed off, he stopped in the middle of a song, laid down a few choice words like the soon-to-be classic "You don't come to my show and fight, you come to my show and dance, you asshole!", and carried on with his tune as though nothing had happened.

Read more HERE

In "Guilty Pleasure" News

Long lost Backstreet Boy Kevin Richardson re-joined his ageing comrades on Friday in the middle of their performance of erstwhile Burger King jingle "I Want it That Way" at their joint concert with New Kids on the Block (as "supergroup" NKOTBSB).

I will warn patrons of this site right now, I adore the Backstreet Boys, always have, all 18 years they've been dishing out over-processed pop and convincing girls to fall in love with them. I just love them, I don't want any guff about it. That said, I'll try and limit my unsophisticated gushings to a single rarely-published category called "Guilty Pleasures", to be avoided by the snobbier... I mean, "more culturally evolved".... among you. (Warning, I also love Taylor Swift- same rules apply).

With that out of the way, let's talk Kevin! Well, actually, Kevin having always been the second-least interesting band member (after Howie, obviously), the only interesting thing about his return was gauging whether the other guys were happy to see the deserter. If they weren't (which I wouldn't have been, if I were them, left one guy down to convince a cynical music market that we weren't done yet), they faked it pretty well and welcomed him back with hugs. It was nice to see the boys back the way they were at the height of their career.

Actually, you know what, in the years Kevin's been gone, Howie's really grown on me and my love of the band hasn't actually gone down at all. The old guy just doesn't fit in anymore. Get rid of him, the boys are better without him.

Live from Toronto, it's the Queen of Soul

On Friday, a legend infiltrated David Pecaut Square outside Metro Hall to kick off the Toronto Jazz Festival with a free outdoor concert. From only a few meters away it was hard not to notice how much the 69-year-old cancer survivor has slowed down in recent years, her clear booming voice not quite as clear or booming as it once was. Nevertheless, it was a thrill to see the one and only Aretha Franklin live.

Decked out in a sparkling white gown, Ms. Franklin was every bit the commanding presence you might imagine, if only because of the deference of her awe-struck audience. As she crooned iconic melodies like "Think", "I Say A Little Prayer", "Bride Over Troubled Water" and, perhaps most famously, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman", Franklin had the entire audience under her spell, that of being in the presence of a living legend.

To the astonishment of the crowd, who waited long after her curtain call for the possibility of a surprise second encore, she never sang "RESPECT", the song that she's best remembered for and that no one will ever sing quite as well. But somehow that didn't actually matter all that much. Because when, only a few months after major surgery, Aretha Franklin sat down at a piano and jammed, wailing riff after riff into the air, the massive crowd of Torontonians could do nothing but scream her name.