When John Wort Hannam hits the Townshend Theatre stage on Thursday night as part of this year’s Tour de Fort season, it won’t be his first time in Fort Frances.
“I’ve been to Fort Frances once before,” the singer-songwriter said.
“I played a beautiful little house concert down by the water somewhere at some point many, many years ago.”
The final performer of this year’s regular Tour de Fort season, Hannam writes most of his own songs and brings a wealth of original material to his shows, with a variety of topics.
“First of all it’s lyrically-driven, narrative roots music,” he said.
“It’s a bit of a cliche answer but there’s some sad songs, there’s some funny songs, so it’s actually true. I’ve just recorded a brand new record called Brave the Hive. So I’ll be playing a lot of new songs so if somebody in the region does know my catalogue, they’re going to hear a bunch of stuff they don’t know.”
Hannam’s last two records have been crowdfunded, which has allowed him to record as an independent artist.
“I actually enjoy it,” he said.
“It’s a lot of work. I tell other artists who come to me for help, I just let them know it’s almost like your full time job for 30 days, or however long you want to do your crowdfunding, because it you gotta hammer it home. But I think what I enjoy about it is I take it very lightly. I’ve seen some other artists approach where they almost seem like they’re begging for money or saying, you know, if you guys can’t do this, I’m gonna have to go get a job or something like that. I always think that’s not the way to do.There’s a lot of sort of self-deprecating humour that I use and just sort of funny memes and stuff like that.”
In the end crowdfunding is more or less like taking pre-orders on the album which enables the artist to afford the recording process of the album.
“I remember having a conversation with somebody, with an artist that said, ‘it just doesn’t feel right. It feels like it’s begging.’ And I said to them, ‘if you already had the record made, you wouldn’t think twice about sending it out and getting the money. So this is really them, just they’re sending you the money beforehand, and you send them the record when it’s made.”
Hannam tours in multiple different formats with different bandmates, but is coming to Fort Frances with two other musicians to make up a trio.
“So it’s myself on guitar, and then I have a side guy who plays fiddle and mandolin and I have another side guy who plays upright bass,” Hannam said.
“It’s two and three part harmonies so it’s folky rootsy music.”
When traveling as a trio the band does something different from a lot of bands in that they only sing into one microphone.
“We just gather around the one [microphone]. I’m sure you’ve seen some of those bluegrass guys sort of do that thing where they sort of move in and out of the microphone, you know, just sort of creating the dynamic and volume by being, you know, closer or further away from the microphone,” Hannam said.
“There’s almost like this little dance that happens. We’re not quite there because we still plug in our instruments. So we’re still plugging in the fiddles and the guitars in the bass. But we’ve just noticed that we sing a little differently, and we listen a little differently when we’re singing around one microphone.”
One of the funnier songs in Hannam’s repertoire is called Meat Draw, which Hannam says was inspired by a gig at a Calgary Legion.
“There’s a festival in Calgary, that uses venues all over the city and one of the venues was the #1 Legion in Calgary, we were sitting in the green room, side stage, and the person who was emceeing came and said to me, ‘I suppose you don’t have a Legion song, do you?’ And I said, ‘No, actually, I don’t.’” Hannam recounted.
“It was about an hour to show time, and we were sitting there. There was a little photocopy on the wall, and it said, ‘Friday night meet draw, 6:00’ or something like that. There’s the song right there. The lyrics came very quickly, I actually sang it that night. I scribbled down lyrics, and I taped them onto the mic stand and sang it.
“There’s an example of when I say there’s some funny songs and some sad songs. That’s about as funny as I get. I think it’s important for songwriters to have. I don’t enjoy going to see songwriters, and all of the songs are really lonesome, you know. I think it’s great to have those songs, but I think it’s also good to have some light hearted songs as well.”
Hannam has recently been spending time touring his home province of Alberta as an artist in residence.
“The Alberta government appointed me as Alberta’s artist in residence based on a project that I proposed, which is a travelling songwriting workshop,” he said.
“What I basically said to the government was that we’re living in times here in Alberta that are quite divisive. And I’ve often thought after shows, after performances, people tend to come up and want to say ‘hi’ to you and things like that night and kind of tell you their stories sometimes. I thought to myself, ‘man, if we listened, if we listened a bit more to other people’s stories and they shared their own stories, chances are we’re going to find some common ground here.’ So that was what I proposed. So the project is actually called, Everyone has a Story.
“I suppose with the goal of saying, ‘hey, if we just sit down and sort of write parts of our story in song form and share them, whether we sing them or just recite them, that we can kind of learn about our neighbours, and maybe if we learn about our neighbours, we can find that we actually have more in common that we don’t have in common.’”
The John Wort Hannam Trio plays the Townshend Theatre Thursday, April 17. A limited number of tickets are available at tourdefort.com.
This is the final show in Tour De Fort’s 2025-26 season and next year’s passport season will be announced at the show with 2026-27 passport sales beginning after the announcement.
