Fresh off a spot on this year's Polaris Music Prize shortlist for The Party, Andy Shauf brought his sad pop songs from Saskatchewan to the people of Guelph with a dinner time show on Friday (July 23) — though he showed plenty of love for the locals too, taking part in a "519" workshop prior to his own set.
The songsmith looked diminutive walking out onto the huge stage, but easily filled the evening air with his lush, folk-tinged tunes that somehow manage to sound bubbly and morose at the same time. Shauf backed up his own unmistakable melancholic drawl with an acoustic guitar, and was joined by a three-piece band who helped deliver more sparsely arranged renditions of tracks from his aforementioned latest record. Despite the lack of strings, the straightforward, stripped down arrangements suited the laid-back festival atmosphere rather nicely.
Opening with a run of "Alexander All Alone," "The Worst in You" and "Early to the Party," he picked up the pep a bit on "Quite Like You" — though he had onlookers back on the edge of party-induced anxiety when he followed it up with "Twist Your Ankle," blending deceivingly cheerful "do-doot-do-dos" with lines like: "Everybody's laughing at me, I wish I'd just stayed home."
Shauf's ode to the slow, suicidal nature of cigarette smoking, "Hometown Hero," was a bit wasted on a jam session at the earlier workshop but he did pull out a couple cuts from The Bearer of Bad News for the main stage audience. These included "Jerry Was a Clerk" and a particularly poignant version of "Wendell Walker" that heard Shauf start off solo — his crystalline falsetto breezing over the crowd and into the sweltering setting sun, before his bandmates eventually chimed in to fill it out.
They closed out the delightful, if a bit reserved, set with The Party highlight "The Magician," sending Hillsiders off into their own night of revelry.
The songsmith looked diminutive walking out onto the huge stage, but easily filled the evening air with his lush, folk-tinged tunes that somehow manage to sound bubbly and morose at the same time. Shauf backed up his own unmistakable melancholic drawl with an acoustic guitar, and was joined by a three-piece band who helped deliver more sparsely arranged renditions of tracks from his aforementioned latest record. Despite the lack of strings, the straightforward, stripped down arrangements suited the laid-back festival atmosphere rather nicely.
Opening with a run of "Alexander All Alone," "The Worst in You" and "Early to the Party," he picked up the pep a bit on "Quite Like You" — though he had onlookers back on the edge of party-induced anxiety when he followed it up with "Twist Your Ankle," blending deceivingly cheerful "do-doot-do-dos" with lines like: "Everybody's laughing at me, I wish I'd just stayed home."
Shauf's ode to the slow, suicidal nature of cigarette smoking, "Hometown Hero," was a bit wasted on a jam session at the earlier workshop but he did pull out a couple cuts from The Bearer of Bad News for the main stage audience. These included "Jerry Was a Clerk" and a particularly poignant version of "Wendell Walker" that heard Shauf start off solo — his crystalline falsetto breezing over the crowd and into the sweltering setting sun, before his bandmates eventually chimed in to fill it out.
They closed out the delightful, if a bit reserved, set with The Party highlight "The Magician," sending Hillsiders off into their own night of revelry.
