Sam Roberts Band long awaited Canadian tour announced today! The band’s tour, in support of their latest album, Lo-Fantasy includes nine major Canadian cities, with more being added soon. Dates so far are:
*Kelowna – Nov 13
Edmonton Nov 15
Calgary Nov 16
Saskatoon Nov 18
Winnipeg Nov 19
Peterborough Nov 24
Hamilton Nov 27
London Nov 28
Kingston Nov 29
This is gonna be one of the highlights of the Fall – don’t miss out!
Sam Roberts was living in a hobbit hole on a mountain in Spain, watching the sun set on the hills of Andalucia when the lyrics of “Golden Hour” came to him. If that were the only unusual thing about the making of ‘Lo-Fantasy,’ his fifth studio album, it would still be remarkably strange, but this is no ordinary Sam Roberts Band record.
The songs were calling on a broad spectrum of influences, from the Clash to Fela Kuti, from electronic-gurus Underworld to Etienne De Crecy, from Gordon Lightfoot to Ray Davies. What the music needed was a producer and a visionary who could help sculpt these different directions into a focused, living whole. The band took a shot in the dark and sent rough demos across the pond… Who they got was Youth.
Youth (a.k.a. Martin Glover) boasted an incredible resume, with production credits ranging from The Verve’s ‘Urban Hymns’ to Crowded House, as well as stints performing with Paul McCartney, ambient-techno kings The Orb, and post-punk outfit Killing Joke.
“Youth would be very encouraging and constructive, and then sometimes he’d be ruthless,” Sam explains. “You’d be sweating over a guitar part or a vocal take and you’d hear Youth say, ‘Lame!’ in the headphones. Devastatingly direct… It became this real psychological trip. He’s there to create an atmosphere in which a record is going to be made, to shake you right out of your boots as a musician and hold your feet to the fire. And after a while you adapt to being in that frame of mind where you have to think on your feet and be ready to try everything completely differently. If you got Youth up on his feet dancing, you knew you were on the right track.”
It’s only fitting, then, that ‘Lo-Fantasy’ opens with the slithery groove of “Shapeshifters,” an ode to fluid identity and flexible self-image. “That song is a gateway to a lot of what happens on the rest of the record,” Roberts says. “It was one of the first I wrote for the album, an all-out dance track, and I felt that with a song like this under my belt, I wasn’t going to be pigeonholed into making any one specific kind of record.”
From the anthemic call for solidarity of “We’re All In This Together” to the electro-thump of “Chasing The Light,” ‘Lo-Fantasy’ is indeed the most wide-ranging collection Roberts has ever written, infusing his particularly rousing brand of rock and roll with elements of funk, house, electronic, and African music. Throughout it all, his lyrics grapple with greater questions of identity and self-discovery in the modern age. “That’s the test of a rock and roll song or a pop song to me,” Roberts says. “It’s to confront those issues in three or four minutes, to get to a place where the music itself helps bring you towards some enlightenment, or at least some resolution to those big questions.”
Supporting SRB will be Besnard Lakes, with the exception of the Kelowna Coummunity Theatre show which sees Vancouver locals Pigeon Park jumping in.
Fans who signed up to the band’s email list last week, get first crack at pre-sale tickets Tomorrow 10am local time! Tickets to the public go on sale Friday 10am local time via Ticketmaster HERE
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