Geordie Gordon with José Contreras

Join us for a special full band show celebrating the release of Geordie Gordon's new album, With horn section! Geordie Gordon’s third solo album River Round is a collection of love songs as intimate anthems of resilience. Friendship and romance stand off with life’s losses as Gordon weaves into his home-recorded folk music the irrepressible joys of pop—memorable verses and soulful, hard-hitting hooks—honed in his career as sideman and collaborator in acts including Islands, US Girls, Andy Shauf, and The Weather Station. The album’s first single “Endless Line” closes the distance between two lovers that are apart, and this theme is repeated—the closing of distances—as one of music’s healing and super powers. “River House” brings back to life the old, crumbling rooms of a home Gordon moved into at 18, where so many musicians would be roommates and gather to imagine and build the artist’s hometown punk and folk scene in Guelph, Ontario. That community mourns through “Richard’s Song,” an ode to the late musician and indomitable “front man” Richard Laviolette (1982–2023), whose Sunday band practices Gordon recalls with radical tenderness. He sings to Richard, “We can’t rehearse for what life brings / You know you can tell me anything,” and the lines resound as a call to nurture, through song, friendship and queer life at every beginning, end, and transition. This nurturing might be what Gordon calls “the good hurt in the music.” The album’s title River Round cites the “round” as a form of singing in unison, a blending of voices, hinting at how this solo project is in fact a revival, a revelry of coming together. Even in the apocalyptic “All the Fires,” a song that looks frankly at the world, Gordon’s lyrics insist there’s a way through, and that way is by coming together: “I just need to see you safe by morning. Because there’s no morning without you.” Opening the night will be a solo set from José Contreras, the force behind the legendary band By Divine Right.