Geordie Gordon with Bird City

Geordie Gordon with Bird City
May 22nd
Doors 7:30
Bird City 8:00
Geordie Gordon 9:00
$20 at the door

A night to celebrate the release of Geordie Gordon's new record, River Round, with a special full band performance with horn section!

Geordie Gordon’s third solo album River Round is a collection of love songs as intimate anthems of resilience. Friendship and romance stand off with life’s losses as Gordon weaves into his home-recorded folk music the irrepressible joys of pop—memorable verses and soulful, hard-hitting hooks—honed in his career as sideman and collaborator in acts including Islands, US Girls, Andy Shauf, and The Weather Station. The album’s first single “Endless Line” closes the distance between two lovers that are apart, and this theme is repeated—the closing of distances—as one of music’s healing and super powers. “River House” brings back to life the old, crumbling rooms of a home Gordon moved into at 18, where so many musicians would be roommates and gather to imagine and build the artist’s hometown punk and folk scene in Guelph, Ontario. That community mourns through “Richard’s Song,” an ode to the late musician and indomitable “front man” Richard Laviolette (1982–2023), whose Sunday band practices Gordon recalls with radical tenderness. He sings to Richard, “We can’t rehearse for what life brings / You know you can tell me anything,” and the lines resound as a call to nurture, through song, friendship and queer life at every beginning, end, and transition. This nurturing might be what Gordon calls “the good hurt in the music.” The album’s title River Round cites the “round” as a form of singing in unison, a blending of voices, hinting at how this solo project is in fact a revival, a revelry of coming together. Even in the apocalyptic “All the Fires,” a song that looks frankly at the world, Gordon’s lyrics insist there’s a way through, and that way is by coming together: “I just need to see you safe by morning. Because there’s no morning without you.”

About Bird City:For nearly three decades, singer/songwriter Jenny Mitchell has been regarded as one of the most original voices within the Canadian indie music scene, and her latest project, Bird City, is her most personal yet.As a beloved fixture of the music community in and around Guelph, Ontario, Mitchell has been a member of the Barmitzvah Brothers, the Burning Hell, Richard Laviolette and the Oil Spills, as well as performing under her solo alter ego Jenny Omnichord. Bird City is in many ways an evolution of the last concept, with Mitchell trading her Omnichord for the banjo and tenor guitar. Focusing on these instruments finally allowed Mitchell’s songwriting talents to fully blossom, and the exposed and poetic songs of paranoia, heartbreak and self-examination debuted on her album Winnowing. For the past 6 years she's been working on a new record, that gets closer by the day.

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