The Writers Behind the Thunder Bay Concert Pages and How They Work

The archive covers nearly a decade of concerts across several rooms, and no single writer’s taste stretches across all of it. So the shows are split by sound. Each show and news page carries one byline, and each byline has a beat: the kind of music its writer knows well enough to place a night in context.

Tessa Lindqvist

Tessa covers punk, metal, hard rock and the heavier end of touring. Her pages tend to start from a detail, such as a ticket tier, a support slot or an album that had just come out, and work outward from it. She prefers a plain verdict to a hedge.

She is the one to read for the Crocks nights built around guitar bands, from the metal packages of the early 2010s to the 2019 run of hard-rock dates at Crocks at NV. Pages carrying her byline lean on band histories, label records and tour listings, and mark the difference between what a source states and what she reads into it.

Owen Bellamy

Owen covers hip-hop, dancehall, DJs and electronic nights. His style is direct and warm, with short sentences where a long one would only pad. Club nights are hard to document, because the paperwork rarely names who played when, and he says so where it applies.

His pages sit around the stage names that brought the biggest crowds to the club scene, and around the promoter’s habit of pairing a touring name with regional support. He compares ticket prices across the archive, since the numbers are one of the few things every listing records.

Naomi Petrakis

Naomi covers indie, folk, roots and Canadian rock. Her writing is curious and measured, and she likes a well-placed date or place name more than an adjective. Many of the acts on her beat played the room more than once, so she tracks how a second or third visit differed from the first.

She also takes the listings and news pages, the posts that announced several shows at once or told the story of a venue. Those pages are written as records of what was announced and when, checked against the shows that followed.

What the pages are not

None of these pages is a review. A review needs someone in the room, and the archive makes no claim about what happened on stage on any given night. Set lists, crowd sizes, the mood of a room and how a band sounded are not covered, because they are not in the details issued at the time and cannot be checked afterwards.

What the pages do give is the night as it was announced and the setting around it. That means the date, the room, the bill, the price and the act’s position when the ticket went on sale, plus how the night sat in that season’s calendar. It is a narrower job than reviewing, and it is one that can be done accurately years later.

Readers who want the sound of a night will find it in the acts’ own recordings, which the pages point to by title and year wherever a release matters to the story.

How a page gets made

Every page starts from the details issued at the time: the date, the room, the doors, the ticket price and who was on the bill. The writer then checks the act against artist, label and press sources, and adds context that can be confirmed, such as where a band came from or which album was current.

Anything that cannot be confirmed stays off the page. A missing support act, an unknown set time or an unrecorded crowd is simply not stated. If a page reasons from the calendar or the map, it says that it is a reading and not a fact.

Corrections are made in place. Dates are the most common fix, because an old ticket page often gave a weekday and a month but no year, so the year has to be worked out and confirmed. The show pages give the date they rest on.