This weekend was the 39th annual Regina Folk Festival. Like most of the big folk festivals in major Canadian cities, “folk” is a very loose term, as most of the headliners wouldn’t typically be lumped into that genre. Still, it’s a relatively small, very well-organized and well-attended festival that is continually drawing “bigger” acts every year, thanks I’m sure to a brilliant artistic director.
Finances restricted myself, my lady Jenny, her sister and her little boy to one day’s worth of paid attendance. We chose Friday, which saw main stage acts including: Final Fantasy, the Weakerthans, and closer Broken Social Scene.
Final Fantasy’s Owen Pallett is a bit of an anomaly at the best of times and I think live performance reinforces that. It takes a lot of guts to put on the show that he does; a single, small man occupying a large stage with nothing but a violin, two microphones, and a couple of keyboards constructing intricate songs out of numerous (recorded live) loops and live playing and singing. Not easy to pull off, as evidenced by a couple of occasions where his foot-tapping got a bit out of control and accidentally stopped entire songs in the middle of a verse or chorus, only to have them awkwardly re-started again. He’s a consummate professional, though, and aside from those odd missteps the performances were flawless and filled with heart.
The Weakerthans offered little that wasn’t seen a few months ago in their latest touring performance here. Granted, for the constantly-growing crowd that’s all they needed to do. They’ve played the festival numerous times and they seemed to genuinely enjoy their set.
With the protection of the above-pictured sound dampening headphones, Solan was able to watch both Final Fantasy and the Weakerthans, although by the middle of the latter he started to get pretty tired and cranky.
After fetching a few blankets from home (the perks of attending a festival two blocks from your apartment) and standing in an interminably long line at the beer gardens, we settled into a nice spot for Broken Social Scene. While much of their set was spent drinking beer and enjoying each others company without having to worry about the boy (he’d fallen asleep between sets), I was still very impressed with the show the Scenesters put on. Only seven or eight band members made the trip, and perhaps the neatest aspect of their performance was their willingness to open up the stage. Members of local acts and other performers with lower profiles at the festival were brought on to fill in missing components (female vocals, horn section, etc), to a very nice effect. They played an energetic set with a fairly representative mixture of their work, promising to come back soon to do a real show.
My personal highlight, however, came the next day when we didn’t actually have passes to the main stage events. We took Solan to play in the park after breakfast and were in an ideal position to take in a set by Old Man Luedecke. As I mentioned in a previous post, Luedecke is a very lively, spirited songwriter who pens very real, touching, and relatable songs about things like napping and breakfast. He expressed some mild concern at the beginning of the set (when only about five or six people including us were watching) about being relegated to the Children’s Stage, saying he wasn’t sure if that meant he was supposed to play kids songs. Thankfully he stuck to original material, beautiful songs about kissing at the airport and a woeful character named Monsanto Jones whose parents brought the ire of the GMF grain giant just by naming him. Between songs he proved just as entertaining, relating stories and inspiration in a very loose, comical fashion. Ironically, despite his reticence, I’d find it hard to imagine he’d perform anywhere else; banjo music is apparently the perfect soundtrack to the innocent twirling, running, and frog-jumping that mark the dancing of toddlers and infants. By the end of the set, his crowd had grown to probably about 100, each of them grinning and singing along when prompted.
The free performances on three stages throughout the park (centrally located in “lovely” downtown Regina) are a brilliant idea. National bands just gaining renown (Woodpigeon) and local acts doing the same on a smaller scale (Library Voices, Rah Rah) got a showcase that ensured maximum possible attendance, due to their freeness. It’s a great idea that really speaks to the character of the festival itself. All in all, a great couple of days.
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