Two amazing rock bands will fill the Sorting Gap Marina with music on Thursday night.
Skye Wallace, who uses ‘she or they’ pronouns, and their band played at La Place Rendez-Vous just last fall but their friends in Goodnight Sunrise are coming to town for the first time ever to perform under the bass championship tent.
Both bands have been touring all over Canada so far this summer.
Wallace’s stop in Fort Frances last fall was on tour promoting their last album Terribly Good. The tour went across Canada and into Europe.
Wallace is coming off a string of dates in BC and a solo tour in Europe this spring.
“I put out that record, and had a Europe and Canada tour in October and November which was great,” Wallace said. “But I think at the end of it I was pretty burnt out. So I took some time and started writing again and it really filled my cup with the writing process and I got very creative.”
Wallace says she really enjoys coming to Fort Frances and has for a while now, drawn in by friend and collaborator Alex Marusyk. They first played at The Grind Up several years ago.
Wallace has known Vanessa Vakharia and David Kochberg of Goodnight Sunrise for a few years now and they have become good friends.
“We first met in Dawson City, Yukon, oddly enough,” Wallace said. “I feel like forging your relationship on the road as bands, is kind of an unparalleled experience because you’re meeting in this wild microcosm where everybody’s excited…It brings you really close together, especially something like the Dawson City Music Festival, where it’s one of those festivals where you go in and you stay for the entire weekend and everyone else does too… So to come back together and to be able to play a show together on the road in the summer feels like a perfect full circle moment, so I’m very excited. They’re out of control energy-wise, they’re really talented people so it’s gonna be a good night.”
Goodnight Sunrise likes to focus on excitement with their shows. When asked to describe their show, the band leaned into the fishing theme of this weekend.
“The feeling you get when you’re fishing and you catch a really big fish, the excitement you feel when that happens is the excitement you feel when watching our band,” Kochberg said.
Vakharia adds that the music might be best described as “anthemic party rock.”
At the end of June, the band released the single “This Is Yours (To Make).” It’s a song that the band ends most of their shows with.
“That was one of the first songs we ever wrote and recorded,” Vakharia said. “It’s on our 2013 album Create/Destroy/Create. For some reason, we’ve closed every single show for the past 400 shows with that song and it’s taken on a life of its own… That song is really what our band is all about. This is your life to make and the many obstacles we face as a band and that people face every day to never give up and to support one another in their dreams.”
Because the song has changed so much in the 10 years since it first came out, they decided to re-record it and build their current tour around it.
The band also released their most recent album Against All Odds in the fall of 2022. The album was largely written over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic and finally released in October of last year and they’re now on their biggest tour since before the pandemic.
“We’re super excited because we haven’t been on a big tour since 2019,” Vakharia said. “This is our first tour of this scale, so we’re really excited. We’re going to be on the road for 35 days, I hope we don’t kill each other.”
The Fort Frances show will be the second show of the tour which will see them cover the rest of Canada as they go west with a string of shows in BC as well.
The band is also stoked to play with Wallace.
“We’re obsessed with Skye Wallace, I would say, all of us in the band,” Vakharia said. “We’re good friends, we’ve played a ton of shows together and we’re really excited. What else can we say, she’s a legend, she’s an icon.”
The band is hoping to get a photo with a big fish while in town during the tournament.
In closing, Vakharia said she hopes the show can bring people together around rock music.
“Music has always brought people together throughout history,” she said. “In a world that sometimes feels so increasingly divided, we hope to create moments and spaces for us to all come together in our collective love for rock n roll, good times, and … confetti.”
Tickets for Skye Wallace and Goodnight Sunrise are available for $20 at Ski’s Variety, the Fort Frances Public Library Technology Centre, Boston Pizza and online at https://tourdefortmusic.eventbrite.ca/. They will be $25 at the door. The show starts at 7:30 p.m. under the big tent tomorrow night.
