Stewart Legere
“I was almost someone else tonight,” Stewart Legere said at the beginning of his show, Stewart Legere & Friends, last Thursday night at The Carleton in Halifax. He mentioned that he had an outfit all picked out, one that represented a certain version of a person that he felt that he could dress up and be for the evening. In the end, however, at the last minute, he changed into the clothes he wears all the time: black skinny jeans and a black hoodie, and he came out onstage as himself.
There is something very brave about this idea- the shedding of the persona, the costume, the attempt to be cooler, or more interesting, more something, and instead showing up as we are. This seemed apt for Legere, to show up as himself, because he shows up as himself so much in his music: open hearted and poetic, yes, but still with an unmistakable rawness that feels very genuine and organic.
Legere’s debut album Quiet the Station was released in 2017 and To the Bone: Songs from Splinters, the film by Thom Fitzgerald, was released in 2020. Legere began his show on Thursday with “To the Bone,” which shows off his gorgeous voice especially well. Both albums are the sort that make me wish I had a library with a record player and a leather wingback chair, surrounded by walls of bookshelves, and I could sit in there and listen to Legere’s music with a glass of Scotch, allowing the wistful melodies to waft over me. At their core Legere’s songs are poems, and in this way there is a lot of space for the listener to wonder what he means by certain lyrics: “Brother say something new/you’ll fit right in/you’ll fit right in.” It is up to us to interpret what he means by fitting right in in this context.
This is even more evident in “Wrong Machine,” a single that came out in 2020, where the lyrics keep repeating, “Wrong machine/Been working on a wrong machine/It needs to break/It needs to break.” For me, I immediately had a mental image of a 20th Century sweatshop factory, dozens and dozens and dozens of impoverished women at sewing machines, wishing for the end of Capitalism.
“Where We Are Going,” also from the soundtrack to Splinters, is the song that, for me, seems the most rooted in Halifax, perhaps just because of the line, “we’re two warm bodies by the oceanside/sparks and hearts wide open,” but I also think there is something in the allusion to time and the act of going that evokes a familiar East Coast experience to me of coming and leaving, and staying, and going, and the way the time passes when we are away.
I really love “Two Old Songs” from Quiet the Station, which is a beautifully constructed ballad where someone is singing about the physical remnants they’re holding onto in the aftermath of a broken relationship: “You can’t have no more time/locked away behind this heart of mine/where you claim you’re just passing through/cuz that’s a lie/but I’m alright/and I could stand to be a lonely night/cuz I got two/ I got two old songs.” Just perfect.
Legere also sang a few new songs that he’s working on as part of his residency at The Theatre Centre in Toronto, and I find his newer songs are lyrically very tight, especially with the ways they rhyme. Legere’s newest single, released earlier this year, is a cowrite with Waants, who was one of his special guests, so they were able to perform “You Won’t Be Punished For the Lie” together. I listened to this song on repeat for weeks when it was released in the summer. Waants’ sonic influence is strong in this song; it’s much more of an electric/pop song, something I can imagine dancing to at Buddies during Pride. However, like “Wrong Machine,” also released as a pop song, at its core it still sounds like a distinctively Stewart Legere song. I don’t get the sense that he’s wearing the metaphoric coveralls pretending to be someone else; it’s still Stewart in his hoodie, crooning out “why bother” in his dreamy voice.
One of Legere’s special guests was Leanne Hoffman. “Why do things feels so big when they’re empty?” she asks in “King Sized Bed” from her new album The Text Collector. This song is thematically similar to Legere’s “Two Old Songs,” as it is a meditation on how it feels to be left with all that remains of a relationship afterwards. Waants performed his indie pop song “Hopeless” from his 2021 album Love U Forever, which is absolutely infectious. The disparity between the upbeat melody that encourages the listener to dance along, and the lyrics: self critical and expressing a feeling of “hopelessness,” as the title suggests, mirrors the society that we’re currently living in, one where we are constantly drawn into catchy TikTok reels and escapist culture, while inside most of us are a mess of anxieties about our lives and the world around us.
Gianna Lauren performed “Take it Slow” from her third album Moving Parts (2017), a song where the content dictates the form. It reminds me a bit of Hey Rosetta!’s “The First Snow” from their EP A Cup of Kindness Yet. I wasn’t familiar with any of these local artists before Legere’s show, so now I have a lot of new music to explore.
The show was bookended by Mi’kmaw poet Shannon Webb-Campbell, who read poems from her book I Am a Body of Land, which was published in 2019, and was a finalist for the Quebec Writers’ Federation A.M. Klein Prize for poetry. I am looking forward to reading these poems myself and having the time to properly sit and think about them.
I frequently see Stewart Legere onstage as an actor, often in his role as Associate Artistic Director of Zuppa Theatre, so I really enjoyed the opportunity to spend an evening at The Carleton immersed not just in his original music, but also in the community that he has forged in the local music community.
You can find his music on BandCamp, or wherever you buy or stream your music, and you can follow him on Instagram.
