Alberta, It Turns Out, Does Have At Least One Advantage
Kicking off Stampede with one of Canada's great bands
There is a parking lot downtown that my wife, Tricia, cuts through every time she works downtown to shorten the trip from the bus stop to her office. But she can’t for a few weeks every year, because the lot is filled with a gigantic tent. The Wildhorse Saloon is born. From the first Thursday in July (as long as that’s not Canada Day) until the Saturday night ten days later, the tent becomes a teeming mass of humanity and bars. It’s the third biggest of the four big mega tents that pop up every summer downtown as the Stampede rages and many Calgarians dress as cowboys, or as cowgirls who are having a rough ranching year so they have had to cut back dramatically on their fabric budget. And every night each of the four tents hosts a band, or whatever it is that the kids call the electronic stuff that I have honestly never even tried to understand. Wildhorse, luckily, targets people who are pretty much nostalgic for the same things as me, so I find myself there several times each summer watching bands I love to watch.
For a long time the tent was exactly the same each year - as if it, and the characters who run it, were folded up each July and stored away until they were unpacked late the next June. But they have upped their game recently. The outdoor space that is half the parking lot is an oasis of bars and games. The stage is bigger and positioned much better. There’s a big video screen right above the stage for those who aren’t lucky enough, like me, to be able to see pretty much any stage. It’s pretty good. The only things that stop it from being truly great is that too many people aren’t there for the show - they got tickets from their company or a client or whatever, and are there for the beer - so they talk loudly through the music, and the fact that this year the vocals when the musicians are talking were so low that no one had any idea what they were saying. At one point in the encore, Nils, the lead singer we’ll meet soon, was very passionately using his platform for something he was really feeling. But I have absolutely no idea what it was - and I was 20 feet from him. So it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty freaking great that the Calgary Stampede has evolved, almost by accident, into a world class music festival.
Like not that many good things in my life, my love of The Rural Alberta Advantage is directly due to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Or at least the staffer who was working very hard to make the PM seem hip. (I am qualified to intimate that he isn’t necessarily naturally hip because, when he was Prime Minister, I oddly had a few strangers tell me I reminded them very much of him - including one couple at a restaurant in Penticton who were weirdly convinced I was him. The similarity, even if I don’t see it, is probably a big reason why I have had a beard for the last 15 years.) A list of ‘the songs the PM was listening to’ that showed up online in 2009 included this new band from Toronto, and their song about Edmonton. It was great. And I was hooked. Not long after that I randomly saw them play a couple of songs on the street outside of the downtown Bay (R.I.P.) for some reason I can’t explain. And I can always pinpoint exactly when I saw them in concert for the first time because Tricia and my friend Tim and I watched the opening ceremony of the Vancouver Olympics on the TV in the bar as we waiting for the music to start.
The band emerged from an open-mic night in Toronto that all three members were regulars at. Nils Edenloff, the lead singer, grew up in various parts of Alberta, and obviously has never quite gotten over it. Though the other two members have no personal ties to this twisted little province of ours, the band has more songs about Alberta than pretty much any out there. They have tunes about Edmonton, Fort McMurray, Lethbridge, Vulcan, Pine Lake, Frank Slide, and more. So attending their shows means getting history and geography lessons on top of their utterly unique sound.
Nils is the lead singer, and he plays acoustic guitar for all but the couple of songs when he plays a keyboard. He had two guitars on stage last night, but if he used the second one I missed it. He always wear a plain t-shirt and jeans. Nothing fancy. And I am not sure I’ve seen him smile in the dozen or so times I have seen him play over the years. But man is he a force on that stage. His voice is gravelly, and he does a speak-singing kind of thing a lot of the time. He sounds like exactly himself, and no one other. And you can feel just how deeply he is feeling what he sings about - he doesn’t write light songs about light things.
Paul Banwatt, the drummer, is the most fascinating guy in Canadian music. He is frantic and incredibly fast on the sticks, and you get to see what he’s doing very well because he is always positioned sideways at the front of the stage facing Nils. He’s just a whirlwind, and you can see the sweat pouring off of him as a result of the effort. I see a lot of drummers, and I have never seen one quite like him. But Paul is also a partner at a major law firm in Toronto. And he writes a blog about music law, so you can be sure that his band has the best contracts in the industry. I can’t imagine a scenario in which I would need a corporate or commercial lawyer, but if I did you’d be sure I’d hire the one who is also one of the best drummers in the country.
Amy Cole is the third member, and she’s just as interesting as the other two. She primarily plays keys and sings backup vocals. But she also has a big drum she beats when the songs call for it, she has a variety of things to shake - few bands use maracas as passionately as this one, she leads Paul in intricate stationary dance routines when there is no drumming to do, and she shows the crowd complex clap-along patterns they need to do when that’s required. And, while doing all that, she makes sure that everything is working as it should on stage. It’s impressive. And her off stage life is fascinating, too. She writes and produces TV shows for kids when she isn’t rocking away.
One of the many things that makes this band so fun to watch is the interplay between Paul and Amy on stage. Nils seems very intense and focused at all times in the middle of the stage. But Paul and Amy always wear big smiles when they aren’t deeply focused on what they are doing. And they communicate across the stage in the most charming of ways. At one point last night Amy grabbed a maraca for a song, but Paul noticed it was the wrong one - the correct one was larger, which is surely a big deal in the world of maracas. They fixed the problem, and had fun doing it. They had a whole lot of fun last night, It was infectious, and it’s impressive when a band is still doing that after most of 20 years in the trenches.
As I was watching the really killer set last night (one advantage of seeing bands in a setting like this is that they typically play a pretty greatest hits-heavy set because the crowd isn’t there for discovery), I was struck by why it is that I love live music so much. RAA is very much one of ‘my’ bands. And it is that possessiveness that makes me enjoy seeing them every chance I can get. It’s a weird, hopefully not creepy, para-social relationship. When I first saw them they were younger, and just figuring things out. Over the time I’ve watched them all three have gotten married - Nils so close to a show they played in Calgary a few years ago that it was very clear that his wife knew exactly what she was signing up for in marrying a musician. When Amy left the band in 2018 I felt real sadness. Her replacement, the wildly talented Robin Hatch, was very good both times I saw her live, but it just wasn’t the same. And when Amy cam back in 2019 I felt real joy. Not because I have some creepy obsession, but because ‘my’ band was back as they should be. Each time I see them, it’s like I get to disappear into a specific place - one full of all the memories and joy that is attached to this band. There is nothing else in my life that lets me feel that kind of attachment or contentment (aside from my family, of course - I’m not a monster). It sounds impossibly pretentious, but the best live music is a like a meditation - the best way I know to be entirely present and focused on only one thing with all its depths and folds. There are few things better. Very few.
The details: The Rural Alberta Advantage, Wildhorse Saloon, Calgary, Thursday, July 3, 2025, 10 pm.
Up next: The Wildhorse Saloon was very kind to me this year, so this is the first of four shows I’ll be seeing there this week. On Sunday it’s the Violent Femmes that are on tap. Can’t wait.