031120 Angela Hewitt, Ottawa, ON

This is the last concert I saw. Covid was just ramping up when I attended this wonderful show featuring Angela Hewitt playing the music of Bach, and while I enjoyed it immensely I sure am looking forward to seeing another concert sometime soon. Not since I started going to concerts at the age of fourteen have I gone a year without sharing a live musical performance with thousands of strangers, and I’m dying to do it again.

030709 Phish, Hampton, VA

March 7th, 2009 was the middle night of Phish’s triumphant comeback run at the Hampton Coliseum in Virginia, a super-fun sold out string of shows that marked the end of the band’s second hiatus. In addition to spending the weekend attending a trio of great concerts I spent a whole lot of time socializing and meeting m’lady’s US concert buddies for the first time…

030417 Red Bull Crashed Ice, Ottawa, ON

As part of Canada’s 150th birthday celebrations Red Bull sent their crew to Ottawa for the first time. They spent a month setting up a downhill ice-skating track on top of the Rideau Canal locks next to the Château Laurier hotel that was nothing short of an engineering wonder. Complete with jumps, bumps, twists, and turns, it looked like a frozen Coney Island roller coaster but instead of two metal rails running it’s length the iced track was painted into four positively suicidal skating lanes…

022189 The Spoons, Moncton, NB

Once I started going to see live music there was basically no stopping me aside from the fact that I lived in a geographical area (Moncton) that was largely ignored by musicians big and small (especially big). With such a dearth of options I ended up jumping at even the barest inkling of live music…

021220 Five O’Clock Bells, Ottawa, ON

On one of my final laps around the internet before leaving St. John’s I discovered an interesting tidbit of a musical happening coming up at the tiny Gladstone Theatre: a one-man play that delved into the life and career of one of my favourite guitar players of all time, the inimitable and quite incredible Lenny Breau…