Great Lake Swimmers: Uncertain Country Tour
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- Event DateMay 24, 2024
- Time7:00 pm - 10:00 pm
- TypeIn-Person
- LocationMarble Arts Centre, Bridgewater Road, Tweed, ON
About Great Lake Swimmers: Uncertain Country Tour
Featuring a blend of acoustic instruments, rural soundscapes, and wistful vocals, Great Lake Swimmers are a critically acclaimed indie-folk group led by songwriter/vocalist Tony Dekker with a revolving backing band. Based in Toronto, Ontario, the group emerged with a succession of heavily atmospheric albums recorded in old silos and rural country churches. The music has developed that pastoral warmth over subsequent albums through a continued vision to record and perform in acoustically unique and historical locales. They are renowned for their homespun folk and lush, intimate Americana in their live shows.
Great Lake Swimmers celebrate their 20th anniversary in 2023 with “Uncertain Country,” an album where doubts are followed by discovery, demos end up as finished tracks, and themes of new beginnings, rear-view reflections, and ruminations on the fluidity of time form the basis of the eleven new songs.
It follows a prolonged period of collective anxiety. Recorded in different locales—and with a variety of musicians—a theme of questioning runs throughout. Even before the world turned upside down, Dekker felt mired in uncertainty: from the climate crisis to the ever-changing political landscape. The “uncertain country” chosen as the album’s theme is not a specific place. Rather, it’s a territory we, as humans, inhabit in the 21st century — a world that, more often than not, is confusing, unfamiliar and unsettling.
“Moonlight, Stay Above” epitomizes what Great Lake Swimmers represents. A 10-voice strong women’s choir lifts the lonely-sounding and wistful song up. As with that addition, the band on each album is fluid and always evolving.
Great Lake Swimmers were shortlisted for the prestigious Polaris Music Prize and nominated twice for Canada’s Juno Awards, with the CBC calling them “a national treasure.”
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