Brooklyn: Live! Tonight! Sold Out!

The First American Show in ~13 years

I grew up in Toronto, a big childhood fan of unknown local boys the Barenaked Ladies, a band who in 1992 were banned from playing my middle school because of their name. (I also got sent home from school for wearing a “Bart Simpson: Underachiever and Proud of It” button. People thought techno music was dangerous. It was a different time.)

BNL put out a couple pretty cool, zany albums with some wicked anthems; “Brian Wilson”, “Jane”, “What a Good Boy” the epic cover of Bruce Cockburn’s “Lovers in a Dangerous Time” etc. They even got a little alt-rock after a while and played on an episode of Beverly Hills, 90210. They were dragging their toes in the American pool and we were all proud of them for it.

Then, I went to college at a large school in Canada’s capital. The new BNL single dropped. We all listened to it at first, laughed, learned the silly rap part, enjoyed it. But soon, a hollow feeling started to creep over the experience, like that feeling you have about 90 minutes after you eat a Big Mac. We all stopped listening to it pretty quickly. This was 1998, an incredibly dark time for music, since the beautiful fire of early grunge music was morphing into Theory Of A Decreedleback, AKA Butt Rock¹, and Britney Spears was pretending to be a slutty high schooler in order to take over the world in a way that surely would have no bad consequences for her, her fans or anyone else really. Asshole Corporate America (ACA) suddenly had its fingerprints on everything again. The party was over.

Young Canadian musicians learn the BNL lesson over and over again in different ways: success in America is absolutely brutal, since the local music scenes are hypercompetitive, under-funded and under-attended, and the rest is a mad scramble for ACA attention that warps the art and turns

The girl works at the store, sweet Jane St.Clair
Was dazzled by her smile while I shopped there

Into a white Canadian guy managing to both become a clownish parody of himself and rip off Busta Rhymes, rapping:

Chickety China, the Chinese Chicken
You have a drumstick and your brain starts tickin’

The irony is thick here, because 90s hip hop was undergoing its own problematic corporate transition; pioneering geniuses like Q-Tip and Busta Rhymes were being left behind as the record labels discovered that young white teens would spend endless cash on the more hyper-violent, misogynistic strains of hip-hop. The dude from BNL ‘appropriating’ a Busta Rhymes line in the most corporate-friendly white bread sellout song ever written is just… yeah.

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And so we return to the Dreadnoughts, a Canadian band who for years have been desperate to play the US but who have never once had a legit tour ‘hookup’ offer from another band (despite hosting quite a few at our own shows up north) and who have never really had someone to represent them down in America. Oh and the fucking work Visa costs $2.5k while US musicians can play in Canada for free. Occasional show offers have come through but the money has been insulting; like, people have asked us to play for 1/3rd of what it would cost us to tour there. Agents say things like “you guys are unproven down here” and “you have no show history, we can’t take the risk”.

But tonight, in Brooklyn NY, we are mysteriously playing a sold out show, and the guys in the New Yorknoughts are as hyped as I’ve ever seen any musicians. How is this miracle possible? The answer has two parts.

I’ll just come right out and say the very egotistical first thing: since 2010 we’ve put out some varied, interesting material, and a lot of promoters don’t understand how that sets us apart. Some of it hasn’t been the best. But we’ve got good original songs that cover Polka, Punk, Klezmer, Sea Shanties, historical stuff, etc., and this means that a much wider variety of people will want to come to shows. We aren’t just pulling Mark with the Mohawk like the other bands you’re booking, we’re pulling Sue the 70 year-old polka fan and Ed, the Guy Who Pretends He’s a Pirate on Youtube.²

In combination with this, the internet and streaming music have been very good to us.³ A lot of promoters are still stuck in 2009. But in the last 28 days alone, more than 7,000 people have listened to us on Spotify in Chicago. Also in Seattle, and Minneapolis and Denver and Dallas and New York. When you play an area show these days, your Spotify followers get an email. This is a total gamechanger, since our follower curve since 2015 looks like this:

So the winds are changing. We are in conversation with an excellent US promoter who can get us into some rooms with some extremely cool bands. We are going to branch out into the East Coast and beyond as soon as possible.

But most importantly, tonight, I’m unbelievably excited to introduce the world to Jungle Jim (mandolin), King Louie (fiddle), Pauly Shoreman (accordion), “Let’s Go” Brandon (bass) and Vibes, the Drummer. These guys are absolutely amazing and they play the songs like they’re on fire. So look the fuck out, America, because this circus is coming to your town, and, well,

it's so dangerous, you'll have to sign a waiver.

1. I do not care how cool or countercultural or edgy you think it is to say that you think this music is actually good. It is not.

2. So many snarky substack posts have been written about Ed and then deleted. So many.

3. Yes, we know that this is also Asshole Corporate America. The world is a funny place.