Recording: Stranger Still

Artist: Stranger Still

Song: Days End [based on a poem by Alden Nowlan]

Recorded at The Sun Room, 918 Bathurst, April 13, 2025.

Stranger Still - Days End

With a new set of Alden Nowlan poems set to music ready to be taken into the studio, Pete Johnston and company worked through the arrangements over a couple sets in the properly-sunny Sun Room, evoking East Coast feelings of bone-weary dread, gossip about the neighbours, the weight of the Great War, and various sentiments encountered while walking down various roads.

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

Recording: Stranger Still

Artist: Stranger Still

Song: Five Days in Hospital

Recorded at Wenona Lodge (Track Could Bend #72), October 4, 2022.

Stranger Still - Five Days in Hospital

Pete Johnston's project of setting Alden Nowlan's poems to music is heading towards its second album, meaning the bulk of this set was given over to new material. As with the pieces surveyed on their first album, the poems are sung by Mim Adams and Randi Helmers and situated musically by Johnston's guitar and Rob Clutton's double bass. One new wrinkle the group has adopted for live performance is to read the selections as poems before presenting them musically, which works well to get the nuances of the pathos, dark humour and occasional redemptive glimpses in the works.

You can check out some video documentation of this set of on TCB's youtube playlist:

[Track Could Bend will be back at Wenona on Tuesday, November 1st with a night of music presented by Splendid Industries.]

Recording: Stranger Still

Artist: Stranger Still

Songs: The Drunken Poet + Looking For Nancy [based on poems by Alden Nowlan]

Recorded at The Tranzac's Southern Cross Lounge (All-Set! Editions Double Release Celebration), April 27, 2019.

Stranger Still - The Drunken Poet

Stranger Still - Looking For Nancy

This dual release celebration ran with the double-up concept, putting both bands on stage simultaneously, each taking a couple songs at a time before flipping things over. This project from Pete Johnston saw him exploring the work of Alden Nowlan — a poet who, like Johnston, emerged from Hants County, Nova Scotia. The poems are constructed from ingredients close at hand (cold Canadian weather, gossip about the neighbours, another drunken night out) and were largely set to be sung by Mim Adams and Randi Helmers, backed by Rob Clutton's bass and Johnston's guitar. (The exception was the delightful "Looking For Nancy", transformed into a slightly quavery country tune and sung by Johnston himself.)