Folkus FeaturesLocal Lights in February

Folkus FeaturesLocal Lights in February - theHumm January 2024

By Sandy Irvin

Although the January Folkus show featuring Tom Wilson and our March show featuring The Once have sold out, tickets are still available for our remaining shows!

On February 24, Nathan Sloniowski will be joined by musical friends for the release of his latest album, thE lost LOve letteR to a smAll town.

Nathan tells us he first entered a music studio at the age of 16, guitar in hand, for a punk project inspired by an obscure Irish poet. His mission? To create and perform original music. Many bands, festivals, stages, and several decades later, he’s still doing it. His latest project explores stories of the hippies, artists, eccentrics, sinners and saviours he credits with inspiring a life-long creative quest.

Nathan is a musical activist and pot-stirrer, ever-busy around town, known recently for sparking up the Almonte Song Circle as well as his work with The Ragged Flowers1, but he is also a co-founder of PorchFest de Mississippi Mills and is one of the original founders of Folkus2. Recently, Nathan organized a series of sold-out John Prine tribute evenings at Ottawa Valley Coffee Almonte, sharing the stage with Vicki Brittle, Tyler Craig and Jess Winskell.

With Nathan’s honey-bourbon voice, acoustic guitars and well-honed story-songs front and centre, thE lost LOve letteR to a smAll town is a musical carousel that makes stops at cafés, dance halls, tree-lined fields and limestone quarries. It offers lyrical nods to many of his singer-songwriter heroes including John Prine, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot, Blaze Foley, Townes Van Zandt, The Eagles and Gram Parsons.

Nathan’s first solo album, No Wicked for the Rest, débuted in 2004. The Ottawa Citizen’s Patrick Langston praised it as “a smart blend of folk, bluegrass and country that segues nicely from tracks about power and greed to more intimate tunes about love and its struggle to survive in a cock-eyed world.” He played it in 2005 at Folkus, opening for the Rick Fines Trio.

In 2013, one year before Russia’s invasion of the Crimean Peninsula that was the first offensive in a wider Russo-Ukrainian war, he released a single called Orange Ribbon, recorded in Lviv with members of Sample Rate, a Ukrainian alt-rock band. The song is dedicated to the courage of Ukrainian journalist ??????? ??????? (Nataliya Dmytruk) and is a testament to Nathan’s Ukrainian heritage.

For his latest album, he enlisted long-time collaborator and record producer Ken Friesen, plus his own son Gabriel on engineering and mixing (youngest son Aaron created cover art for the project). They holed up together for three days and nights in the spring of 2022 at The Tragically Hip’s legendary Kingston-area studio, The Bathouse. With Ken’s connections and a lax post-pandemic concert scene, they were able to recruit band members from Blue Rodeo (Jimmy Bowskill, guitars), Blackie and Rodeo Kings (John Dymond, bass), The Jim Cuddy Band (Steve O’Connor, keyboards) and Red Rider (Davide Di Renzo, drums). The recording session was, in Nathan’s words, “this songwriter’s trip of a lifetime. I learned so much from these fabulous musicians and we had So. Much. Fun.” Throughout 2023 they added backup vocals with Gabe in Toronto and more of Bowskill’s stringed spices to the mix with Ken in Almonte.

The result is a nine-song tribute to what Nathan calls “the collage of open-hearted dreamers who grew me up in the 1970s artistic lair of Elora, Ontario, and the many more I’ve met in other small towns along the way.” Those communities include Almonte, Wakefield, Calabogie and, as of 2023, Carleton Place, where he now resides with his wife Glenna Watts.

With his studio band spread out across North America on various tours, Nathan’s rehearsing his Folkus performance with homegrown hand-picked Ottawa Valley players including Vicki Brittle on vocals, Barry Buse on bass, Bill Searson on drums and Blair Hogan on guitar. He’s also hinting that a couple of more musical friends may pop up on stage too, saying “the opportunity to headline at Folkus is too good not to share, including with my opening act Kentucky, a ‘new kid in town’ as the Eagles like to say, who I met at Ken’s studio one night and believe is a singer-songwriter force of nature who’s got to be heard.”

Kentucky, a newly local and newly solo singer-songwriter, has developed a dedicated and growing following from a year-long residency at Ottawa Valley Coffee Almonte. We are excited to have him take a bigger stage with us at Folkus.

Our shows are still held at in the Ron Caron Auditorium in the Almonte Old Town Hall. There’s an accessible elevator you can reach from the side entrance. Doors open at 7pm this year, and showtime is at 7:30. There will be t-shirts and music at the merch table, with beverages and snacks at the bar. We have a Square for payment, but cash is never a bad idea.

Single tickets are now available through our ticketing partner, Tickets Please (TicketsPlease.ca, 485–6434), and this year we’re not tacking on extra fees.

Please check folkusalmonte.com for any last-minute updates! We look forward to seeing you at our shows.

1 A fabulous folklectic local outfit with a new EP on the way, featuring George Birchall, Ian Douglas, Steve Reside and Rob Riendeau. The Ragged Flowers helped launch Folkus into a string of sold-out shows in 2017.

2 This means that we feel comfortable asking him to move chairs.

Linda Standing — Canada’s Emerging Folk Artist - theHumm January 2024

By Sally Hansen

Art… and Soul

Linda Standing is truly outstanding in her field. She is a folk artist in the truest sense of the word. Her website says it best: “I am a traditional, self-taught folk artist. I paint everyday life of pioneer ancestors and country folk.” She paints straight from the heart, as she has done since she was a child living in tough circumstances, finding solace in imagining and portraying “the serenity and beauty of the countryside, with people......

Folkus FeaturesLocal Lights in February - theHumm January 2024