Great Lake Swimmers live at Crocks in Thunder Bay, 27 September 2018

Tony Dekker made the newest Great Lake Swimmers album without an acoustic guitar, which for this band was a real departure. The Waves, the Wake was recorded in a 145-year-old church in London, Ontario, and it came out on 17 August 2018 on Nettwerk. Six weeks later the band was playing a club on Cumberland Street in Thunder Bay.

The show was on Thursday, 27 September 2018 at Crocks, 16 Cumberland Street South. The ticket was listed at C$25. No opener, doors time or age line was published.

Instruments the church suggested

Dekker left the acoustic guitar off the record and used marimba, flute, pipe organ, harp, congas, vibraphone and lute instead. The recording took place in the Bishop Cronyn Memorial Church, with Chris Stringer as co-producer, and the room’s acoustics are audible on the record. It was the band’s seventh studio album, twelve tracks, all credited to Dekker.

An EP called Side Effects had come out ahead of it, and the album carried songs such as “The Talking Wind” and “The Open Sea”. Critics were mixed to positive: AllMusic gave it 3.5 out of 5 and Exclaim! 8 out of 10. In November 2019 the band issued a stripped-down acoustic version of the whole thing.

What a club would get

One reviewer noted that the previous album, A Forest of Arms, carried a more muscular beat, and that the new record went back to a more ethereal mood. Fans who had come for the driving songs and those who wanted the hush might therefore hope for different things from one evening.

A band whose latest work leans on an organ and a vibraphone has to decide what to bring on the road. The stage at Crocks is not a church, and no set list was published, so the answer is not something this page can supply.

Three years after the cave album

Great Lake Swimmers had played Crocks before, on Saturday, 23 May 2015, a month after A Forest of Arms came out on 21 April. That night was billed as an early show, with doors at 8 p.m., a 19+ rule and The Weather Station as special guests, and advance tickets were $20. Its full entry lists the shops that sold them.

Both visits, then, fell a month or six weeks after a new record. A Forest of Arms was recorded in several places, among them the Tyendinaga Caves in Ontario’s Hastings County, and Dekker has a habit of choosing a room for the sound it makes: caves in one case, a church in the next.

The price moved five dollars in three years, from $20 to C$25. The first visit was a Saturday and the second a Thursday, and the first ran early where the second gave no time at all. On paper the 2018 night was the plainer of the two, though the band had more records behind it.

Where the band came from

Great Lake Swimmers began in 2003, with roots in Wainfleet, Ontario, and later settled in Toronto. Dekker leads the group and sings. Its first two albums were released on the independent Weewerk label, and it signed to Nettwerk in 2007. Lost Channels, from 2009, earned a Juno nomination and a place on the Polaris Music Prize shortlist.

The comparisons critics reach for are Nick Drake, Iron & Wine and Neil Young, and Dekker’s own influences include Gordon Lightfoot, Gram Parsons and Hank Williams. That is a folk line running through northern and southern songwriters, and a Canadian one at the northern end.

A crowded stretch

September was full at Crocks. Elliott Brood had played seven days earlier, and Dear Rouge followed two days after this night, both at the same C$25. The next date on record after that is the McNasty Brass Band, on 12 and 13 October.

That is a folk night, then an alt-rock night, then a brass band, all inside three weeks. The band had a name that pointed at the Great Lakes, and Thunder Bay sits on the largest of them, so a Thursday in late September on that shore suited it well enough.