Ever the pleasant musical hostess, Sackville's Julie Doiron seemed in particularly good spirits Thursday night, kicking off Canadian Music Week at the Rivoli by hovering over a shiny new Telecaster and giggling the night away.
"Is it okay if we start?" Doiron asked as she finished tuning before a modestly-sized back-room crowd, jumping into her first number of the night while rearranging equipment and moving her microphone stand out of the harsh light.
Backed only by a solitary drummer, Doiron stopped short into an offering from last year's Polaris Prize-nominated Woke Myself Up to tune her guitar and try to snuff out the dialled-up reverb sound it was producing, with little success. "Maybe I can't play the rock show," she quipped, shaking off the technical woes and moving on.
As the reverb soldiered on ("I can't quite get used to this new sound.") and charming banter took shotgun over the songs ("We got in at 6am and haven't slept…but I'm not supposed to say anything 'cause I'm a professional."), it became clear as day why Doiron may have been feeling extra chirpy on this particular night.
"Julie will be signing autographs in the drunk tank later this evening," joked her drummer after Doiron informed the audience that she had been drinking all day after steering clear of the beer since December of last year.
While chitchat took up much of Doiron's one-hour showcase, which she finished by retiring to the drums and letting her accomplice chime in at the mic with a couple of non-Julie numbers, the short set seemed to only solidify Doiron's place as one of this country's most endearing live performers. Proving herself to be quite the comic, Doiron improvised the night away in both speech and song, making good use of one of the most unique voices in music today to capture her audience and entangle them in the enchanting—if somewhat booze-sodden—universe of Julie.
"I screwed up all the songs and I'm sorry," she cried, teasingly writing off the whole night as a calamity. "Normally the shows are killer!"
But after just sixty minutes with a merry Doiron, cracking expressions and gestures as if constantly playing out an inside joke that only she herself was privy to, it was clear to all that this really is Julie's universe. We are just living in it.
- by Bill
Alexander -
