Photos from Sloan’s tiny gig in Ottawa

[Sloan has played much, much bigger venues than this–which is why it was so cool to see them at this venue outside of Ottawa. Ross MacDonald reports. – AC]

Sloan was the only band to play last night, so all the photos are of them. Chris Murphy is the most outgoing and did most of the interaction with the audience, so most of the photos are of him. It was interesting to see him play with Anyway Gang and Sloan a week apart.

This past week Neat Coffee Shop has started up its summer Shed Sessions for another year. During the pandemic, the bistro, half an hour west of Ottawa, hosted small outdoor concerts on its lawn to safely accommodate medium-sized shows. This model was so popular that they are continuing it and have a summer schedule fully booked.

The Shed Sessions started Sloan https://sloanmusic.com/ for a two-night stint (no, not all bands have to start with the letter S). The Juno award-winning alt-rock band Sloan is a unique group where all four members share lead vocal duties and all add harmonies. Additionally, the band rotated instruments for a few songs where Chris would move over to drums, Andrew would pick up his guitar, and Jay took over the bass. Chris also took a turn on keyboards while Gregory grabbed his bass.

Sloan has a huge repertoire of music with many alt-rock singles, and they played for over two hours. They even played a song on request, ‘I Can Feel It’, which Chris said is “our most beautiful song in our catalogue.” The crowd loved the intimate setting. Sloan played two sets, with a beer break in between, and for the second set they invited the audience to come forward toward the shed; it was like a general admission where everyone was 3-5 metres from the band. At times Chris was even dancing with audience members.

The sell-out crowd were all huge Sloan fans and didn’t need Chris to ‘Coax’ them into singing along with several songs. Fortunately, the weather held out and everyone was all smiles all night long.