Colter Wall live at The Coulson in Sudbury, 9 July 2019

Colter Wall turned 24 on 27 June 2019, twelve days before he played The Coulson. Born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, he had released an EP and two albums by then, all built on a deep baritone and songs that sounded older than he was. The date was Tuesday 9 July, in Sudbury, Ontario, and it was not a Thunder Bay show at all.

The Thunder Bay promoter Loffredo & Associates presented it with H.I.T Management. The Coulson stood at 52 Larch Street in downtown Sudbury. Doors were at 7:30 p.m., the show was 19+ with photo ID required, and tickets were $25 in advance plus a service fee, sold through TicketScene.

Two Northern Ontario nights

This date was the first half of a pair. Two nights later, on Thursday 11 July, Wall played Crocks at NV in Thunder Bay, at the same $25 price and the same door time. The pairing suggests a Northern Ontario run planned as one piece of routing.

The promoter’s calendar was not limited to one city. Eleven days before Sudbury, Monster Truck had played Soo Blaster in Sault Ste. Marie. A Sudbury date fits the same habit of taking a touring act through Northern Ontario room by room.

The records behind the date

Wall put out an EP, Imaginary Appalachia, in June 2015. His self-titled album followed in May 2017 on Young Mary’s Record Company. Songs of the Plains arrived in October 2018 on the same label. So a July 2019 date came nine months after his most recent album. The next one, Western Swing & Waltzes and Other Punchy Songs, did not appear until August 2020.

Sleeping on the Blacktop, from the 2017 record, is the song most listeners meet first. It was later certified double platinum and turned up in the film Hell or High Water. Rolling Stone had put him on its 2016 list of ten new country artists to know, three years before the Sudbury date.

His models were the plain-spoken ones: Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie and Townes Van Zandt. He is also the son of Brad Wall, who was premier of Saskatchewan until early 2018.

The week around it

The Canadian leg had a rough start. Wall was due at RBC Bluesfest in Ottawa on Friday 5 July, and the festival announced he would miss it because of unforeseen travel complications. He was on the bill at the Mariposa Folk Festival on Sunday 7 July, two days before Sudbury, and the Northern Ontario dates followed, with London and Winnipeg also on the Canadian run.

A festival stage on a Sunday and a nightclub on a Tuesday are different jobs, and both were in one week.

A Sudbury news site had promoted the show on 28 June, describing a Swift Current artist bringing his blend of young and old-school country sounds to the nightclub. The pitch to local readers was the one Wall’s records make: a young artist with an old-school sound.

The room and the weekday

Sudbury is a nickel-mining city on the Canadian Shield, and a country baritone from the prairies playing a downtown nightclub there was a contrast of landscapes as much as of music.

Tuesday is an unusual night for a nightclub show. Midweek dates suit acts on long routings, where a night off the highway is a night lost. That is a reading of the calendar, not something the event notice states. What the notice does give is precise: door time, age rule, price, address, and the names of the presenters.

Set beside the Thunder Bay date

The two ticket prices were identical, and so were the doors. What changed was the room, the weekday and the city. Across the fourteen priced shows of 2019, prices at the promoter ran from C$10 to C$45, and the Wall tickets sat just under the midpoint of that spread.

The Thunder Bay night has its own page, and the stage that hosted it went on to Half Moon Run the very next evening, a change of sound from country to indie rock.