Gig: Great Lake Swimmers

Great Lake Swimmers (Sharon Van Etten)

Trinity-St. Paul's Church. Saturday, February 6, 2010.

Of all the bands that I've come to love through seeing them in live performance, Great Lake Swimmers stands out a bit. Maybe because although I've seen them in two or three clubs, by and large the most memorable shows have been in less-standard environments: Toronto Reference Library, say, or The Church of the Redeemer. So it felt utterly natural that they'd be joining a pretty select list of bands that I've seen perform in more than one church.¹ It helps that Trinity-St. Paul's is a pretty nice place to see a show — big enough to feel expansive but still with a folded-in sense of togetherness in the big u-shaped round.

But there are still better and worse spots inside, and the venue's unreserved seating generally leads to a calculus of how long one would want to wait outside versus how close one wants to be to the stage, a calculation that gained an extra dimension on a bone-chillingly frigid evening. I actually made better time heading down than I was expecting and was much closer to the door than I'd been counting on. By the time K. — also a veteran of many GLS gigs and well-able to join in on hair-splitting show comparisons — joined me, we were busily plotting where we should make a beeline for when the doors opened. We were close enough that we could have snagged decent floor seats, but we reckoned instead to be front and centre in the balcony, with no-one in front of us and in what should be the acoustic sweet spot. Which we executed when the doors opened — and it was so cold out, people further back in line were actually cheering as the front of the line was moving in. And then some time to hang out as the church filled in.

Singer/songwriter Sharon Van Etten was tapped as the opener for this one, and emerged looking small and alone on the big stage. With a lovely voice, she played a solo set of quietly yearning material. She had an engagingly upbeat-yet-bashful presence, befitting her self-depreciating lyrics ("I sigh and then I frown / I write this moment down / 'Cause I cannot paint pictures with my tongue.") and connected well with her banter: "There's nothing like applause in a church — it sounds so huge. It's the only way I want to hear clapping from now on."² With her songs about simple, relatable things³, Van Etten had the vibe of someone you'd like to hang out with over a cup of coffee, and that presence plus her voice made the set a success, even though a couple of her compositions had my attention drifting a bit. Best of the bunch was a spare and gorgeous cover (the lyrics "see me again / she wants to see me again" wouldn't normally sound that spine-meltingly melancholy) that turned out to be "Oooh Love" by Blaze Foley.⁴ An intriguing introduction.

A decently quick break before Great Lake Swimmers took the stage. Showing how far they've come from merely providing perfunctory backdrops to Tony Dekker's lyrics, the band started by unleashing their inner Wilco, with an extended version of "Everything Is Moving So Fast" that stretched out into the instrumental break, building into a wall of echoing noise — well, restrained, mostly polite noise — generated by guitarist Erik Arnesen, bending over his pedals. Darcy Yates switched from double bass to his electric four-string mid-song, before the whole thing segued seamlessly into "Bodies and Minds". Julie Fader then joined the band on keybs and backing vox, and would in fact be on stage for the bulk of the set. A couple more Lost Channels cuts were followed by "Moving Pictures, Silent Films" and early highlight "I Could Be Nothing" (from 2005's Bodies and Minds and a bit of a catalogue dig.)

Then the band departed for a few songs, leaving just Dekker on stage, accompanied by Julie Fader's flute and vox for "New Light". And that whole thing where undifferentiated album cuts somehow take flight live? This would be an example of exactly that. After a couple more stripped-down numbers, everyone returned to the stage, and the second half was an opportunity to stretch out and wander a bit through the band's four albums — meaning that as extended as the previous night's in-store appearance was, now we got a chance to dig deeper and hear older favourites like "Changing Colours"⁵. Sharon Van Etten came out to add one more voice to the main set's final pair of songs, wrapping up with now-standard set-closer "I Am Part of a Large Family".

All well and good, and that all added up to a solidly enjoyable show. But then, unexpectedly, somehow the encore managed to lift the whole thing up to another realm entirely. Re-emerging after a couple minutes of applause, the band launched into a true rarity with a jaunty run through "See You On The Moon!", the cut that they provided to — and which gave the name to — the compilation of children's songs put out by Paper Bag Records in '05. It was filled with so much goofy exuberance that the song — which I hadn't really thought about for a couple years — had me grinning for days afterwards, muttering to myself, "Thank you, farmer!"⁶

And then, in a turnaround that shouldn't have worked, the band then switched effortlessly to "Various Stages", one of Dekker's darkest meditations ("I have seen you in various stages of undress / I have seen you through various states of madness") and it was equally thrilling. The band closed things out with "Concrete Heart" and departed the stage, leaving Dekker on his own to unplug and step out in front of the mic to sing the old Carter Family tune "Storms Are on the Ocean" — his voice carrying perfectly over the rapt crowd and the words ("I'm going away to leave you love / I'm going away for a while / But I'll return to see you sometime / If I go ten thousand miles") a perfect sendoff. From good to magical.

Thanks to K. for the proper looking photo at the top of the article.

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¹ Unique experiences notwithstanding, the real reason that the shows in all of these non-standard venues have created such an indelible stamp on me is probably that they are far better vehicles for Tony Dekker's voice than your standard bar. Wanting to get into the right physical space to hear Dekker sing is a sort of thing that veers into hard-to-speak-of areas of analysis, but Dekker's voice breaks a standard that is widely known but usually talked around: that women sing beautifully and men sing with character. It's a general rule of thumb that anyone who breaks this mold — think of the reaction to any female singer who sings with grain or mannered imperfections instead of light prettiness — is looked at with a bit of suspicion. Most probably because the very types who spend the most time putting thought into these kinds of things are men who feel uncomfortable — y'know — with the idea of finding a man's voice beautiful, twisting themselves into rhetorical knots to show how it's not — y'know — like, erotic. Guys are generally cultured to be uptight about this stuff, but I guess I'll dare to out myself as one who finds Tony Dekker's voice to be lovely.

² Although she gave the impression that she wasn't totally used to resounding waves of applause, commenting later, "it's a relief when it's not quiet after a song".

³ "This next song is about moving into your parents' house when you're twenty and your trying to be all right with it," was offered as one introduction. General laughter, and the woman beside me woo-hooed sympathetically, to which a guy sitting a row behind commented, "try it at thirty."

⁴ This is actually so good that I insist that you watch this youtube video of Van Etten performing it.

⁵ Which may be the very song with which GLS "clicked" for me — I remember hanging out in the library system in November '06 and Dekker singing the then-unreleased track, the notes rising up among the tiers of the city's concrete literary heart.

⁶ "That song never stopped being fun to play", smiled Dekker at the end.