The drums did beat and the fife did play

Live music adventures with "Remembered in Exile" at the Tranzac, and Lucy Dacus (+ Kevin Drew) at Massey Hall

Between two gutting deaths and one near-miss, I didn’t have a chance earlier to talk about the excellent run of music I got to witness in Toronto last week.

Getting transatlantic at the Tranzac

There was a special event last Friday, the Toronto launch of Remembered in Exile: Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia, the new album on Drag City by Alasdair Roberts and Màiri Morrison. Roberts (not to be confused with the Canadian public policy analyst) is a Glasgow musician who first drew notice with his group Appendix Out in the late nineties, whose twisted take on trad Scottish music was similar to what Will Oldham (Palace Music/Bonnie Prince Billy) brought to Southern and Appalachian sounds. They approached Oldham and ended up working with him as well as with the late Jason Molina (Songs: Ohia, Magnolia Electric Company). However, Roberts’ trad roots run deeper—his father was a guitarist who played with the renowned Scottish folk singer Dougie MacLean. So after he began his prolific solo career, he started alternating between records of his spiky, spooky originals (I particularly love 2009’s Spoils) and albums of interpretations of spiky, spooky songs centuries old.

He and Morrison, a native Gaelic speaker from the furthest west reaches of Scotland who is best known as an actor, first collaborated on an album called Urstan in 2012. But what brought them back together for this project was a Canadian initiative: Bassist and composer Pete Johnston, a Toronto transplant originally from Windsor, Nova Scotia, got in touch and suggested Roberts come to the Maritimes to record some songs collected there by the legendary folklorist Helen Creighton, many of them deriving from the Scottish repertoire. (My school had books of Creighton’s in our library, making her the first folklorist I ever heard about.) To Johnston’s pleasant surprise, Roberts agreed and said he’d bring Morrison along.

With the help of a Canada Council grant, Remembered in Exile was recorded at Joel Plaskett’s Fang Recording Studio in Dartmouth, NS, with an ensemble of Canadians drawn mainly from Johnston’s circle of regulars at the Tranzac in Toronto. They recorded 10 songs, including a couple in Gaelic and a couple macaronic (mixing both languages)—tales of feuds, violence, infidelity, land, and love, that in some cases can run to dozens of verses that end with bodies everywhere. The music video (by Toronto’s Colin Medley) for one of the oldest, the 18th-century ballad “The Bonnie House of Airlie” is a mini-documentary of their recording experience in June, 2023, including a couple of gigs they played in the area. (One story Johnston told on stage was that at some point Jimmy Rankin was also using the studio, and recorded one of the same traditional songs—asked to compare, the engineer said hesitantly, “Well, yours is, um, different.”)

It’s a fabulous record.

Unfortunately Roberts and Morrison couldn’t be present at the show at the Tranzac, but Johnston did bring Mike Smith (bass & misc), Jake Oelrichs (drums), and Andrew Killawee (organ), all of whom played on the record—as well as Elise Boeur filling in beautifully on fiddle, and crucially, the under-appreciated Toronto singer-songwriter Isla Craig carrying the bulk of the vocals. Johnston is no Alisdair Roberts as a singer, but he acquitted himself decently and served as a charming host in front of a packed house of Maritimers, folkies, and eclectic Tranzac types. I took some video when the group was performing the lengthy album highlight, “Katharine Jaffray.”

As a footnote, I found out today that Craig is joining guitarist Kurt Newman in a new bluegrass project, Isla and the Sorry Brothers, who premiere May 8 at, of course, the Tranzac. It’s in the spirit of a tribute to Craig’s parents, who actually met auditioning for a band at the Tranzac in the 1970s (cutest), and promises to feature “Jesus-y tunes, Carter Family songs, some repurposed left-wing British Isles ballads, and bluegrass classics.”

Also that night, I stuck around for the Ryan Driver Quintet’s regular monthly stint, with the keyboardist, vocalist, and at one point, kazooist, joined by Martin Arnold on guitar, Brodie West on clarinet and sax, Rob Clutton on bass, and Nick Fraser on drums. Their melange of mellow sweetness and skronky noise would be a find anywhere, but at the Tranzac it’s just another Friday. You can catch Driver there again May 23 as part of the homecoming from the Eric Chenaux Trio, the return of one of our most prodigal, who remembers us in errant exile from his adopted home in France. Another “Crritic!” fave, Cici Arthur, opens.

Lucy Dacus’s Massey Hall Q & A

The following night, at Massey Hall, I was fortunate to witness Lucy Dacus on her Forever is a Feeling tour. Because the album is roughly narrative, I wondered whether she’d play it beginning to end, but was glad in the end she didn’t. Instead, the show followed a kind of intuitive internal logic, as the six-piece band proceeded through a shuffle of the album’s songs with tracks from VHS and Historian, and even “I Don’t Wanna Be Funny Anymore,” a decade-old song she said she’s played every time she’s been in Toronto, back to her first gig here at the Dance Cave (!).

Dacus is an bookish introvert, not a showbiz creature (unlike her Boygenius bandmate Phoebe Bridgers, e.g., as she acknowledges in the FiaF track “Modigliani”). But she found a way to build the show around her stillness with some gorgeously illuminated “windows” that provided song-by-song visual backdrops—a thoughtful use of that major-label moolah for a person averse to spectacle. The sudden appearance of a lushly upholstered Victorian fainting couch in the middle of the show was a lovely touch, at once comic and actually luxuriant. And when the moment called for it, she could rock out, too, but just for a bit before returning to her tea.

A few of the many lewks of Lucy Dacus's stage at Massey Hall, Apr. 26, '25.

It was my first time seeing any of the Boygenius triumvirate live, and I worried from what I’d seen online that it would be a deluge of cameras and scream-singing. But down in the “pit” (were the main-floor seats of Massey Hall removable before the recent renovations?) her young fans seemed incredibly sweet and kind. It was a poignant reminder of what it’s like to get to see one of your favourites for the first time in your life—when a show could be the most exciting event of your year.

At one point Dacus’s in-ear monitors crapped out, and while an extremely effective-looking tour manager was scuttling around addressing the problem, she seemed momentarily at a loss for how to fill the time. Again, introvert—she didn’t have a story or joke or rant she felt like delivering. (She confined politics to a pre-show prerecorded announcement about causes the concert was supporting, for trans youth and the L.A. fires.)

After an awkward silence, she said, “Uhhh … Q-and-A?”

What followed was an adorable interlude of kids asking her what her favourite song she’d written was (maybe “Triple Dog Dare,” she said), what music she was listening to (Nina Simone and Labi Siffre, huzzah), what song the band most enjoyed playing (each player had different answers), and whether “Kissing Lessons” was a true story (every word). Then it was back to the appointed schedule—when someone in the balcony shouted out between songs later, “What’s your favourite movie?!” Dacus admonished, a gentle-but-stern teacher, “Now is not the time.”

The opening set by Katie Gavin (also of the lesbian-cult-favourite band MUNA) was a charmfest too, including a lowkey virtuosity flex as she moved fluidly from guitar to keyboard to violin. And she played “Inconsolable,” one of my favourite country songs of last year.

Speaking of great country songs, I think Dacus’s “Bullseye” could have been her breakthrough in that zone if she’d recorded it with, say, Zach Bryan instead of Hozier (though he’s also great on it). On the tour, it seems she’s recruiting a local guest for the duet at every stop. In Toronto, it was Kevin Drew of Broken Social Scene, the band that first made her feel she had to become a musician, at a September 2010 show in her native Virginia, as she told him Saturday night. “I’m going to embarrass you,” she warned beforehand, as if Kevin Drew were a person one could embarrass.

Maybe it helped that it was the second night, but he nailed it. I captured most of it for Toronto-music-history posterity—though my video is flipped left-to-right, don’t ask me why, so some mystery, as any Scottish bard would have it, remains.