12 Days of 2023: Love it Live pt 2
Day 10, best live shows in the old year dying
End-of-year contest: This newsletter needs a new name. Suggestions welcome. Ideally one that hints to some combination of Gen X, non-mainstream eclecticism, Canadiana/Toronto and/or live music, but whatever works.
Winner receives a free paid subscription. Please save me from calling it “Dads Can Dance.”
Hearts on Fire readers: I mentioned Buck 65’s Super Dope earlier this week, an album I only found out about because I ran into the artist on the porch of a mutual friend during a record sale, and he pressed a cassette into my hand. Not exactly a big publicity campaign. The only other review I’ve seen of it is from… Robert Christgau.
Nice to see Lankum top the Guardian’s top 50 list. It’s a weird zeitgeist choice in the year of SZA, but a more than worthy record. Really hope they finally come to Toronto in the new year.
This week’s live listings are here.
My lists so far: top 10 albums of 2023 are here. More favourite albums are here, here, here and here. A mixtape of 2023 tracks not from those albums is here. Local faves are here and here.
As this exhaustive exercise draws near an end, this post focuses on my 10 favourite live shows from the second half of 2023. I saw more than 90 live shows this year, and probably twice as many artists. It was a very good year (for that, anyway). And yet I can’t hold a candle to
, who is almost twice my age, and who went to see 154 shows in 2023 and lived to tell about it, in a newsletter to which you should really subscribe:
The rest of this post is for paid subscribers only. An unpaywalled master list of all this shit, sans blurbs will appear shortly. But psst:
July 9 Feist / Rufus Wainwright / Judy Collins / Jeremy Dutcher at Mariposa Folk Festival, Orillia
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