Two generations of musical warrior will draw swords together on local ground.
Carole Pope is by now Canadian music royalty, kicking down the doors of gender in her band Rough Trade using all the subtly of a bulldozer. In the 1980s, the single High School Confidential was a catchy, risque ode to teenage lust but for the first time ever on Top 40 radio it was unabashedly lesbian in perspective. More like that followed - her pen and tongue equally sharp.
Rae Spoon, more than any other musician in Canada, changed the public's perspective of what gender even meant, singing and writing about the transformations of the outer body to match the inner reality, and how irrelevant that is to sexuality or, really, anything. Spoon's transformations stood as a living symbol of the evolution in society's thinking in the early 2000s.
Last year, ArtsWells deliberately placed these two icons of their genderation on the same stage. They performed their solo work together, they supported one another, and they made a musical moment.
This year, with the addition of rock duo The Pack A.D., Pope and Spoon will be reunited for another ArtsWells collaboration.
One of the songs that emanated most from last year's edition of the ArtsWells festival was Pope and Spoon dueting on a Spoon tune that has especially weighty meaning this year. With the Cariboo-Chilcotin totally disrupted by wildfire, fans are anticipating an especially spirited version of Come On Forest Fire, Burn The Disco Down.
I think I wrote that when I saw a fire on that highway on the way down from ArtsWells one year, so it might have been foreshadowing," said Spoon, then added, "no, but it's something the government should pay attention to, at some point," in the sense of assigning more standard resources to something climate change has made into a new normal in the forested north and southern interior.
Pope and Spoon also performed together at the WISE Hall in Vancouver this past spring, and they are getting together in Spoon's current hometown (Spoon is originally from Alberta and moved to B.C. many years ago) of Victoria for some songwriting after ArtsWells.
"Before I met her, Julie hooked us up last year," Spoon said. "We are similar in a way I couldn't have predicted. She never really stuck to one genre or one way of writing things and I think it's cool to see her just continue with that."
Those are traits shared by Spoon. They have each written books, been involved in theatre and film projects, their respective lives have inspired the art of others, and it's impossible to attach a single genre label to either of them.
Spoon had three different music packages on the go last year alone. The main album was called Armour, but Spoon also produced an EP of B-side songs that didn't make the Armour list but still had merit, and with European electronica artist Plastik also released a collaboration EP called They (a reference to the only pronoun to which Spoon feels any self-identification).
Always busy with advancing social politics as attentively as promoting art, Spoon keeps an intensely busy schedule. Spoon was the grand marshal of the Calgary Pride Parade this past year and will be in Edmonton's Klondike Days pride events in the days leading up to the trip here.
What Spoon found exciting about this year's event in Calgary - a city that also dubiously boasts an annual white supremacy march - was seeing only one anti-equality protester.
"That's really a change for Calgary. There was a time when spitting wasn't uncommon in the '90s, it's a real turnaround in Alberta," Spoon said. "But there is that strong fascist-leaning side, which is scary and I saw it more in Europe but it's getting more common in Canada to have organized fascists instead of just random people in trucks. It's a very different flavour of danger for people."
Spoon said in Europe, many events have to factor into organization plans the possibility of organized prejudice groups showing up to disrupt the cultural activities. Now Canada is seeing a rise in white or colonial extremist groups, with organization, uniforms, and violent possibilities.
"It's scary that people are targeting people with violence and it's not just LGBTQ people," Spoon said. "But there are more of us than them, I keep saying. There are more numbers of folks who just want to live their lives and be kind than there are right-wing extremists. But sometimes you can forget that when you're being targeted. There have been these sentiments forever, in Canada, it's just boiling up in an organized way."
If there's a place least likely to see such behaviour, it is ArtsWells. Spoon is hoping with all the forest fire disruptions in the region, as many people as possible will attend the festival to make it a success in the face of challenge.
"I think in a lot of ways it'll be a really special year. I've been to a lot of them since the beginning and I have a feeling that the people who go will be really gung-ho, a year of strong connections."
Spoon will perform Saturday in Prince George at Omineca Arts Centre, then in Wells on Aug. 3.
