It was a typical late-summer's evening; leaves were just beginning to lose their green, and the sun still burned brightly well beyond dinner time. However, for a group of about 25 people or so, this was anything but a commonplace Monday night in Calgary.
The evening’s proceedings had been slapped together just two days prior when Aaron Meyer, carrying a ukulele and a small backpack full of clothing, arrived in Calgary at the suggestion of The Consonant C during their tour stop in Meyer's hometown of Los Angeles. He had written a couple songs on his journey and asked another ukulele-toting minstrel, The Consonant C's Laura Leif, if there might be anywhere in town he could play some of his new songs for people. Leif asked friend and fellow songwriter Neal Moignard (who has played only a handful of shows in his short existence as Knots) for help setting something up, and the show was born.
The idea was this: meet at Sunnyside LRT station at 7p.m., at which point a little adventure would ensue. Most of the people that showed up knew one another or the artists performing. A few heard about the show on the radio, and at least one person stumbled across one of the event’s cut-and-paste promotional handbills quickly littered about the city. Regardless of how they heard about the proceedings, the audience became best friends for the evening, united with one single objective — to hear some amazing music.
The musicians led the crowd up onto a bluff overlooking downtown. There they laid out picnic blankets, passed around some tea and got settled in front of a city skyline at sunset. The quiet background buzz of traffic was the only sound to be heard while Meyer (under his Honeybear moniker), Leif and Knots each told stories of ghosts they had once loved, and of capturing sunbeams in glass bottles. The performance was personal, sincere and, most of all, beautiful; it couldn’t have been more perfect.
“There was something very special about that night,” says Meyer. “Rather than feeling like we were playing at people, it felt like the crowd was actively participating by listening and enjoying so intently. It was a truly beautiful evening.”
The show served as Meyer’s introduction to the city, and it seems to have made a deep impression. While his sentiments regarding Calgary are extremely positive, the same couldn’t always be said for the city’s own Leif.
“There was definitely a point in time when I felt like I couldn’t live here anymore,” she states. “It’s a lot harder to be the kind of person I want to be here than, say, in Montreal. But I’ve come to appreciate the battle I have here to create something awesome; you can’t just sit back and let things wash by, because if you don’t do it, then no one else will.”
“I’ve met a few people who say ‘you’re from Calgary – I’m so sorry,’” adds Moignard, who was also hell-bent on leaving town at one point. “Now my reply to them is ‘no man, it’s actually pretty great, you just have to dive into it.’ Having this city that’s often really abrasive poking you in the back each morning forces you to push harder and make what you create even better.”
So, armed with acoustic guitars, ukuleles and banjos, these young musicians are currently making a beautiful footprint on the local scene. Their lyrics build fairy tales around the world they live in. The songs are simple and rely on only the most basic of instrumentation to connect with listeners, but might not be correct to pin them as folk artists simply because they fit the image of the traditional singer-songwriter.
“I don't think there can ever be true folk music anymore,” remarks Kris Ellestad, a young musician whose songwriting capabilities are among the most promising to ever emerge in Calgary, yet go fairly unknown and under-appreciated within the city. “Folk music was a form of storytelling in which everyone knew the tales and passed them on by playing music together. I think today most songwriters write music which is much too personal to be a voice passed on by anyone but the writer of the song.”
“I also don’t believe the esthetic of the instrumentation is as important as how it’s being expressed,” states Moignard. “You’re not putting on a show for people; you’re trying to connect with them. It’s like having a conversation. You wouldn’t want to be talking to someone about things that are important to you if you didn’t feel like the other person was listening or caring about what you were saying. So, in that way, I might consider the performances folk just because they are as intimate as possible, but I don’t think the music I create fits into a neatly organized genre.”
The fact that this new breed of folkies prefers to refrain from the categorization of their music has seen these artists flourish outside the realm of the traditional songwriter much more than within the usual crowd whose definition of folk music begins and ends with traditional songs written decades ago. For example, “Knots” is beginning to draw a regular crowd within the indie all-ages scene in Calgary, and Ellestad’s performances have won over crowds who came to see such disparate acts as the crazed, angular mess of The Incandescence and the indie rock bombast of Vailhalen.
“It hasn’t been any sort of planned effort to play with different sounding music,” says Ellestad. “People, mostly friends, have just asked me to play with them, and so I end up playing shows. I’ve never really thought about who I play with or why.”
These performances outside the established folk streams are somewhat of a necessity in Calgary’s small music scene, but that hasn’t been a bad thing for developing the fan base of Knots, Honeybear, Leif and Ellestad. If anything, it has allowed them to reach listeners who might not have found their music in larger cultural centres with more developed (and often more segregated) scenes.
“I don’t see very much competition between (musicians) who are working on similar things,” says Leif of Calgary’s independent music community. “Maybe it is because there is such a void in Calgary that we all have to be so supportive of each other’s efforts. It’s part of what I love about Calgary; it’s a giant city, but the community is so small, tight knit and involved.”
“This city definitely has the talent and desire to become something truly amazing,” Moignard follows. “All you really need is the people dedicated to the cause, and they are all definitely here. If we didn’t have such great people in Calgary, we wouldn’t have anything close to what’s happening.”
It looks as though these same fans and musicians have made quite the mark on Meyer. Since his show on the hillside he has returned to Los Angeles with a plan of returning to Calgary permanently in the new year.
“I’ve lived and travelled through quite a few cities in the states, and never have I seen the kind of energy I feel in Calgary,” he says. “There’s such great things going on here, and I can’t wait to be back and totally immerse myself in it.”
