Matt, I love your love for the band I love.
The Weakerthans - Live at the Burton Cummings Theatre
I love The Weakerthans more than I love a lot of things, and I was very happy to discover that they recently released a live album. I’m not always a huge fan of live albums, but for the few bands/artists I’m genuinely and unashamedly obsessed with (it’s a short list), I get excited about live bootlegs. This is not a live bootleg—it’s even better. Live albums, I guess, when they’re recorded well and the band puts on a decent show, can be good things indeed.
The songs themselves aren’t radically different from their studio versions—a more prominent xylophone here, a slightly faster tempo there, some subtle and welcome strings throughout (goddamn, violin and steel guitar sound so good together that they should get married and have babies)—but I adore every single song on this album (and lament a couple of omissions; “My Favourite Chords” is conspicuously absent).
This music, for whatever reason, has seen me through good times and bad and everything in-between. I’ve only seen the band live once, and while the show was good, it wasn’t mind-blowing or revelatory or life-altering or anything. It was just satisfying. Maybe that had to do with my own life and circumstances at the time, maybe not (there was quite a bit going on at the time, at least personally, I recall, and times were more or less good there, for a while).
These songs, like those of several other artists/bands with which I have maybe unhealthy (but probably harmless) obsessions, have become so entrenched in my memory that I’m now embarrassed to even admit how much I love them. I can get giddy and saccharine and weirdly earnest whenever someone mentions the band or I hear “Plea from a Cat Named Virtute” or “Aside” or “One Great City!” or (dear god) “My Favourite Chords” that I almost forget to be cripplingly self-conscious about gushing enthusiastically about something as silly and banal as some Canadian band that plays catchy songs about (or from the perspective of), e.g., Arctic explorers hallucinating a meeting with Michel Foucault, or sad-sack alcoholic curlers, or lovelorn bus drivers, or medical experiment subjects, or skinny anarchist pamphleteers, or the guy that saw Bigfoot.
