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| All photos by Agatha Donkar |
asking for flowers
is like asking you to be nice
When an artist you love starts a show with your favorite song, it can go two ways: uphill, like the song was a sign that the set would be perfect, or downhill, with the song as the highest point. Last night at Haw River Ballroom, Kathleen Edwards opened with “Asking For Flowers”, my all-time favorite song of hers, and the set just went uphill from there — a mix of new tracks from Voyageur, which grows more and more excellent the more I listen to it, and older tracks, from all three of her previous albums. She laughed a lot, and Gord Tough and Jim Bryson, her backing band, were fantastic. Haw River Ballroom is a big space, and it was full of fans, but it felt like a small, intimate evening, which is a testament to how Kathleen delivers her songs. She was wonderful last night.
Local favorites Mandolin Orange opened with a set, mixed like Kathleen, of old favorites and some new, unreleased tracks, which sound as fantastic as you would expect. Adding Josh Oliver as a guitarist has really pulled Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz’s sound into full bloom, and that’s wonderful, too.
See more photos below, and the full set on Flickr here.
