If Shivering Songs confirmed anything for us this year it’s that Fredericton has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to homegrown talent, and January is one hell of a month to throw a music festival. The city’s solution for breaking up the winter blues was filled with highlights, and some long sought-after answers.
For years, Shivering Songs had become our Bermuda Triangle of festivals. Our correspondents would go in, but they wouldn’t come back out. Just radio silence.
These were budding photojournalists we were sending in; music lovers and festival veterans each, all eager to cut their teeth. Despite all manner of preparations, from carefully going over line-ups and schedules to mapping out the quickest routes between venues, something about covering this particular festival that was proving to be insurmountable.
Year after year this would happen. We tried to learn from out mistakes whenever we could. We thought it we could just plan better, or somehow prepare more, it might all work out.
It got to the point where we were breaking them up into teams and sending them out separately.
I warned them all, quite candidly, “Look, we all know this is a suicide mission. I fully expect that I may never hear from any of you again after this. Just try to maintain regular communications and send back whatever you can.” Somehow I imagined that by managing everyone’s expectations that it might take some of the pressure off.
Surely, if we just kept throwing more people at it, the odds were that someone would inevitably make it back with something.
They never did.
Occasionally, we’d get lucky and some garbled and unusable bit of footage would come back to us, providing more questions than answers, and sometimes the organizers would tell us our people never even managed to pick up their press passes. Some years were just worse than others.
The mystery of it nagged at me. After five years of attempting to cover this festival, something had to be done. Matters needed to be taken into my own hands. Someone had to get to the bottom of this and find out where and how our correspondents were disappearing to each year. I figured that the chances of misplacing myself seemed slim, and so took it upon myself to cover this year’s festival.
Of course, much of that depended on the weather. The best laid plans of mice and men and so on. I first had to get myself to Fredericton and New Brunswick was experiencing conditions that fluctuated between flooding and freezing. Traffic was at a standstill. Highways were closed across the province. Transport trucks seemed to enjoy jackknifing more than the entire casts of The Outsiders and a West Side Story combined. Media Passes were to be picked up on Tuesday that week. When I finally arrived late on Thursday the scene looked more like a curling rink than a city.
They do call it Shivering Songs for a reason though. And bless them for doing anything at all during the winter months, but this is no summer festival. Shivering Songs is the sparkling light that stands between Christmas and Valentines Day. It is it what stands between us and the monochromatic backdrop of a cold bleak January.
It is, somewhat inevitably though, a desperate time of year in Atlantic Canada. The short days and cold weather do more to flavour the festival than a swarm of mosquitos ever could.
We need this sort of festival to break up the season. A change is as good as a rest, as they say, and given the differences between summer and winter festivals you’d think we’d be much better rested. Every event turns into a surprise party as friends emerge from under their wintery disguises, an ordeal that is necessarily repeated with each show. The atmosphere becomes more intimate as performances take on a singer-songwriter lean. The whole thing becomes something of a core workout as festival attendees try to maintain their balance as they rush from venue to venue across Fredericton’s icy sidewalks.
Shivering Songs, as a rule, sells out each year. The venues are packed. To compensate for this the festival organizers’ response seems to have involve insuring that the festival’s schedule is equally packed. Expect everything to happen all at once, with overlapping shows and terrain best suited for dog sleds. To experience the festival you must either be an intrepid adventurer willing to risk life and limb for the sake of art and culture, or purge yourself of any FOMO misgivings.
I had never set foot inside Wilmot Church before that day. Shivering Song’s organizer have long lauded it as the heart of the festival, but hadn’t sufficiently described it for its ability to steal the show. Much has been said for the building’s historic and architectural significance, but its value as a blank canvas was somewhat understated. Here is where the work of Jonah Haché shone, literally, on every surface.
My first moments trying to take in Shivering Songs were not spent in awe of Jennah Barry’s performance, but marvelling at the sky projected over me. Spread over two levels, with every column and post illuminated and a vaulted ceiling made to look like an otherworldly Hogwarts, Haché’s projections dominated in the festival and transformed it from a concert into an experience.
Even the likes of Blue Rodeo’s Greg Keelor and Fredericton’s own Polaris Prize winner Jeremy Dutcher were dwarfed against a backdrop of their own likenesses, projected so very vast and purple amongst Wilmot’s backdrop of heavenly bodies.
It wasn’t the only venue to house the festival’s shining stars, however. Beverly Glenn Copeland’s performance at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery absolutely filled the room for what seemed positively transcendental. Corridor of Montreal provided one of the festival’s surprise discoveries. Fredericton’s Bleum appeared as a newly minted trio featuring an animated Adam Guidry on synth pads and possibly the most impressive DIY lightshow to ever grace the stage at Wilser’s Room. The less surprising mainstays of excellence were provided by Saint John’s rising stars Jamie Comeau & The Crooked Teeth who had the crowd belting along to all their songs, Erin Costelo and her show-stealing key player Leith Fleming-Smith, not to mention festival headliner Dan Mangan whose performance we need not describe because you can experience it yourself in 360.
Also, let us not forget Jack’s Pizza. Festival or no, they’re always there for us, after all.
The real shining performance of the festival came as a complete surprise. We’ve seen The Hypochondriacs more times than Josh Bravener can wash his hands in a day. What’s more rare, and apparently more remarkable, is the stripped down and beautifully harmonized Hypochondriacs Trio. Lucky for us that we were already in a church, because listening to the triumvirate of Bravener, Waterhouse and Gallant seemed nothing short a religious experience.
Shivering Songs made for a busy week, a mad scramble from one show to the next as we challenged the festival’s busy timetable. Often I’d consider what might have gone wrong. It was no summer festival – there were no lingering rays of a warm summer days or congregations of sun-kissed festival-goers contentedly sprawling in the grass. But the important elements were all still there: the music, the people, the pizza. Nothing about it seemed particularly insurmountable.
Then it hit me like a sack of bricks. Or rather, I hit it. The world turned on me, end over end, the icy sidewalk flying out from under me and coming up to greet my face. As I lay there, looking up into the night sky with my feet stuck firmly in the air, I wondered if this is what had befallen my comrades. Had they even made it this far? Would I find them if I waited around long enough to see the Spring thaw, or had they gone the way of Sam McGee? Did their mothers know where they were?
I still didn’t have the answers I was looking for, but I had the bruises and that in itself seemed like sufficient penance for the danger I’d sent those good people into. At least enough for this year.
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