The Sheepdogs live at Crocks in Thunder Bay, 10 February 2016

The Sheepdogs made their most recent album in a cabin on Stony Lake, Ontario, with nobody in the producer’s chair but themselves. Their booking at Crocks came four months after its release. The pairing is a small joke of geography: a record made to feel homemade and far from any scene, then carried to a downtown club in northwestern Ontario in the middle of February.

The show was set for Wednesday, 10 February 2016. Doors were at 8 p.m. It was a 19+ event, and photo ID was required. Rock 94 and Loffredo & Associates presented it, and the announcement went up on 9 November 2015, three months ahead of the night.

Tickets in advance

Advance tickets cost $25 plus a $5.00 online service fee. Buyers were told to print the PayPal email receipt and bring it to the venue along with photo ID. No support act was named, and nothing was said about a second price tier, a VIP option or a cap on numbers.

With the fee, a buyer paid $30 in all. Three months is a generous run for an ordinary club date. A sale that opened in early November also caught the holiday season, when a ticket is an easy thing to buy for someone else. That is a reading of the calendar, and nobody at the time said it was the plan.

The album in the bag

Future Nostalgia came out on 2 October 2015 through Warner Music Canada and was the band’s fifth studio album. It peaked at number 11 on the Canadian albums chart. Ewan Currie, the singer and guitarist, produced it. The Sheepdogs recorded at the Stony Lake cabin because they wanted, as they put it, a homemade approach away from any distraction.

The singles included “Downtown”, which appeared in July 2015, and “Bad Lieutenant”. Reviewers placed the record in a line running through The Guess Who and Bachman–Turner Overdrive, a Canadian lineage that a Thunder Bay audience of a certain age would know well. That is a critic’s reading, not the band’s claim.

The album is long by any measure: eighteen songs, close to fifty minutes. A band with that much new material and a club date to fill has an obvious problem of selection. No set list came with the announcement, so what got played, and what got cut, is not something this page can say.

From Saskatoon to a magazine cover

The Sheepdogs formed in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in 2004. Their name travelled well beyond the prairies in the summer of 2011, when they won Rolling Stone’s Choose the Cover contest and appeared on the issue dated 18 August 2011, the first unsigned band to do so. Public voting decided it, an odd origin for a band whose sound is so deliberately old.

Learn & Burn, from 2010, had come before that. A major-label deal and a self-titled album followed, and a later record, Changing Colours, arrived in 2018.

By February 2016 that cover was four and a half years old. It would be easy to call a club show in Thunder Bay a comedown from it. The plainer view is that a working rock band with a national profile kept playing rooms like Crocks on ordinary weeknights, and that was the job they had chosen.

A Wednesday on its own

The material around this show names no other Crocks date in the fortnight either side of 10 February 2016, so the night stood alone in the room’s calendar. The wider run of the room is gathered on the shows page.

Wednesday suited a band crossing Canada in winter, when dates in between larger cities need some slack. That, again, is a reading of the season and not a reason anyone gave. Nothing else is known about the routing.

Ewan Currie has a brother in the band, Shamus, who plays keyboards and trombone. A trombone is not the first instrument anyone expects from a southern-rock act, and it is one more thing the poster left unsaid, and it sits a little apart from the guitar harmonies reviewers praised on the album.