Recording: Ronley Teper & The Lipliners

Artist: Ronley Teper & The Lipliners

Song: Just Show Up

Recorded at The Tranzac (Southern Cross Lounge), December 30, 2025.

Ronley Teper & The Lipliners - Just Show Up

It had been too long since I had seen The Lipliners in action, and a delight to see the band out in full force — nine deep behind the wonderful and ebullient Ronley Teper leading a night of her joyful chaos music. If one were going to make a movie or comic book about this crew, they might be portrayed as a band of easygoing cut-throat pirates, eager to see what fuss is going to happen next after signing up to sail with a Captain who's intent on leading them into unknown waters. Blasting through some classics and a few new ones, the tunes merged together, somewhere between a suite and an elegant mess, with moments of invention on the fly as everyone pedaled faster to keep the wobbling to a minimum.

Speaking of new tunes, the song in question here hit me right where I live. People conversing with me about my propensity of going to gigs might have heard me say that showing up is the most important thing anyone can do — and this one, still feeling like a newborn calf finding its wobbly stride — has harnessed the same feeling. Whether for our musical community, for friends, love, family or whatever you want to be present to, in a time where screens and streams and feeds give us a easy-but-alienating sense of pseudo-interaction, being out there, just showing up, makes so many things plausible. If I ever get hit by a comet or suffer some similar unfortunate demise, please get Ronley to come and sing this one at the party for me at The Tranzac.

You can check out some more from this set over on youtube:

[Ronley Teper & The Lipliners are back at The Tranzac on Tuesday (January 27th).]

Recording: Ronley Teper & The Lipliners

Artist: Ronley Teper & The Lipliners

Song: Women in Space

Recorded at The Tranzac's Main Hall (Women From Space Festival 2022 – Night 3), April 30, 2022.

Ronley Teper & The Lipliners - Women in Space

For the past three years, the Women From Space Festival has been an excellent encapsulation of its moment. Coming on the cusp of the First Big Lockdown, the 2020 Festival is remembered by many as the last event of the beforetimes, while last year's "hologram edition" was an elegant solution to the flatness of livestreams. And now, this year's Festival had to bear all the relief and angst of "returning to live" at this uncertain mid-point of the pandemic. Presented with joy and community spirit over four nights, the Festival was a chance to run into seldom-seen familiar faces and to hear a dizzying variety of sounds.

Ronley Teper brought a fabulous lineup of Lipliners (Tania Gill, keys; Sarah Shugarman, violin; Carlie Howell, bass; Nicole Rampersaud, trumpet; and Tim Posgate, banjo/guitar) to tackle a couple old faves, some arguments from last year's Everyone Loves A Good Story, and this improvised science fair project in the spirit of the Festival hosting the set.

Recording: Ronley Teper's Lipliners

Artist: Ronley Teper's Lipliners

Song: When Prince Came to The Rex

Recorded at The Tranzac's Southern Cross Lounge (Somewhere There Creative Music Festival – Show 1), February 26, 2016.

Ronley Teper's Lipliners - When Prince Came to The Rex [intro]

Ronley Teper's Lipliners - When Prince Came to The Rex

Once again, the Somewhere There Festival filled up the Tranzac with a weekend jam-packed full of locally-based creative music. After the evening shows in the Main Hall, the action shifted over to the Southern Cross for late-night sets that tend to explore the interplay of improvisation with pop forms. There turned out to be plenty on improvisation in Ronley Teper's set, both as she showed off some of her breast (er, best) songs as well as excursions like this one — "This is a fifty-five second song," Teper says, before leading the band on this extended improvised odyssey, relating the story of the time Prince dropped by The Rex to check out a singer. The audio gives a sense of the craziness here, but you'll just have to imagine Teper freely roaming throughout (and beyond) the room as she drafted audience members to play different characters in her little sketch — all while Willow Rutherford did some fabulous jazz singing while the band riffed behind her.

Recording: Ronley Teper's Lipliners

Artist: Ronley Teper's Lipliners

Song: Love

Recorded at Harbourfront Centre – Lakefront Terrace ("Harbourfront SoundClash" finals), July 11, 2015.

Ronley Teper's Lipliners - Love

Harbourfront's SoundClash contest has always seemed like a bit of an odd beast to me. Stuck with the baggage of a million cruddy Battle of The Bands, the whole thing feels vaguely opaque. (Who's behind this, and why? What's being judged — a band's conceptual "talent", or this particular live performance? How are the winners picked? If the festival brags about the quality of its judges, why does it keep them anonymous? Does the online balloting really matter, or is it populist window-dressing? Should online voting count when almost no-one saw the actual competition? Doesn't that inherently favour the net-savvy, or bands with pre-existing and motivated fanbases, who will click on a vote link spread through social media?) I'd never gotten involved with the whole event before, but given the undoubtable across-the-board quality of the five finalists this year, I decided to check it out.

Another weirdness: given the not-insubstantial sum invested in prize money, one would have thought this would have been set up to garner as much attention as possible instead of being tucked away. Shuffled into the Lakeside Terrace on a busy weekend, the performance environment discouraged passers-by from stopping to check it out, and was more than a little sterile — but at least it was equally so for all of the bands. That said, it also gave everyone a chance to play in a technically-controlled environment, and the three sets I saw all sounded very good. (Note to Harbourfront: this is a really nice room to see a band in — why not host some gigs here on non-super-busy summer weekends?) Rather than a contest to win the affection of the masses, the vibe here was old-fashioned "industry" — a closed-off showcase for artists to impress a secret cabal. It's to the musicians' credit that they still managed to spark some energy and give good performances.

Sometimes a Lipliners show can be a party, with a talented pick-up band learning songs on the fly while the singer vamps (and dashes from the stage to serve drinks!), everything teetering on the edge of falling apart in the most awesome manner possible. For this show, Ronley Teper called in her A-team of backing musicians and kept things fairly steady, playing some of the band's older, well-established material. That solid foundation left a lot of room for Teper to let her radiant personality shine, joking, ad-libbing, talking to members of the audience, and even taking to the floor to encourage a singalong. Singing sometimes like a grumblin' and moanin' Howlin' Wolf, and sometimes like an innocent waif, Teper's material isn't easily pigeonholed. This set (a short thirty minutes for a band that could go for hours if they felt the urge) pulled from both ends of the spectrum, but in this sedate environment, the quieter stuff (like this, and its companion "Faith") really shone, feeling like soundtrack-of-your life moments that you could imagine playing as you walked along the lakefront, slowly pulling back from your own heart's lament into a gigantic crane shot revealing everyone singing along. [This set won Teper second place in the competition.]

Recording: Ronley Teper & The Lipliners

Artist: Ronley Teper & The Lipliners

Song: Both Sides Now^*

Recorded at The Tranzac (Southern Cross Lounge), December 4, 2013.

Ronley Teper & The Lipliners - Both Sides Now

Full review to follow. The Lipliners are the sort of band that is bigger at the end of the night than they were at the start — the sort of band that musicians come to have fun in when they're done with their other gigs. Having an open-ended and flexible lineup works perfectly with Ronley Teper's songs, with the band often learning them as they go. This particular one was so fresh out of the oven that Teper had to duck back into the kitchen to grab a lyric sheet she'd baked up. The ramshackle, impromptu arrangements are the ideal vehicle for lyrical sentiments that might be too outrageous or tender in a more refined setting. The perfect sort of band to see at The Tranzac, and when Teper's not tending bar, you can find her on stage on the first Wednesday of every month. (And also, rumour has it, at January's edition of the Long Winter series, as well!)

^* Thanks to Ronley for passing along the title to this one.

Recording: Ronley Teper's Lipliners

Artist: Ronley Teper's Lipliners

Song: Party!

Recorded at The Tranzac, December 31, 2012.

Ronley Teper's Lipliners - Party!

Full review to follow. Watching Ronley Teper is a reminder that life is an exercise in improvisation. Leading her Lipliners with her genially unhinged style, Teper climbed up on a chair to incite some call-and-response from the crowd on this song about the true meaning of New Years' Eve. And then, as midnight passed, she was singing, "here comes faith / like a river to the soul" to provide some hope for the year ahead. The highlight of the always-fabulous Tranzac NYE celebrations.