Future Islands live at Crocks in Thunder Bay, 31 August 2018

A few minutes on late-night television is the reason a synth-pop band from Baltimore could sell tickets in Thunder Bay four years later. On 3 March 2014 Future Islands played “Seasons (Waiting on You)” on the Late Show with David Letterman, and the clip circulated online for months. The song was later named the best of 2014 by Pitchfork and by NME.

The date at Crocks was Friday, 31 August 2018, and the ticket was listed at C$31. Doors were at 8 p.m. The shop entries for three September shows at the room carry the same posting date of 12 August, so the late summer went up in one sitting. Crocks stood at 16 Cumberland Street South.

A Friday at the end of summer

The Monday after this show was Labour Day, 3 September, so the night sat at the front of a long weekend. A Friday like that is easy to fill with people who have nowhere to be in the morning. It could as easily have drawn them out of town, and nothing published says which way it went.

The price was one dollar above the C$30 charged for the Sloan show in April. Among the 12 Crocks shows on record for 2018, listed prices ran from C$13 to C$40, so this one sat in the upper half. No opening act was named.

What the band had behind it

Future Islands formed in Greenville, North Carolina, in 2006, and has been based in Baltimore. The trio is Samuel T. Herring, who sings, Gerrit Welmers on keyboards and William Cashion on bass and guitars. Herring’s physical, unguarded stage manner is what the Letterman clip made famous.

Singles, the album that carried that song, came out on 24 March 2014 through 4AD, the London independent label, three weeks after the Letterman spot. The Far Field followed on 7 April 2017 on the same label, and it was the record the band was still working through in 2018, more than a year after release, which is a normal length for a touring cycle.

Two nights earlier, in a barn

That year’s world tour ran between June and the end of September, and its North American leg began on 26 August in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. On 28 August the band played Newport Music Hall in Columbus, Ohio. On 29 August it played Codfish Hollow Barnstormers, in Maquoketa, Iowa. Thunder Bay came two nights after that.

The contrast in rooms is the useful part. Codfish Hollow is a barn venue, and Crocks was a downtown club with a bar. A band with a Letterman clip behind it was working small rooms that week, by choice or by routing, and the schedule does not reveal which.

How the tour reached the lakehead

Thunder Bay is not an obvious stop for a touring band whose main market lies in the American northeast and along the coasts. It sits on Lake Superior with roughly 108,000 people, far from the larger Canadian cities, and a touring party has to choose to come. That is a reading of the booking, since no reason was ever stated.

The lakehead is a place where a large draw depends on the right week, and this one had a long weekend attached. Nobody published a crowd figure, and none is offered here. What the calendar does show is a Friday, an 8 p.m. door and a band that had played Iowa on the Wednesday.

The rest of that September

Twenty days later, on 20 September, Crocks put on Elliott Brood, an Ontario band with a banjo and a C$25 ticket. That show has its own page, under the Eliott Brood entry, and the two nights make an odd pair: an American synth trio, then a Canadian roots band. Great Lake Swimmers and Dear Rouge followed on the 27th and the 29th.

That made four ticketed nights in one month, all priced between C$25 and C$31. September 2018 at Crocks was, on the evidence of the shop, a run of touring bands with records out. The first of them was the one with the keyboard.