Green eager to play in intimate settings
What: An Evening with City and Colour — Solo When: Monday, 8 p.m. Where: Royal Theatre Tickets: Sold out Note: City and Colour also performs on Saturday at the Sid Williams Theatre in Courtenay, on Sunday at the Tidemark Theatre in Campbell River and on Tuesday at the Cowichan Theatre in Duncan City and Colour’s upcoming tour of Canada will showcase a different side of frontman and leader Dallas Green — a side that has been dormant, to a degree, for almost 15 years.
Green will revisit his roots often on his upcoming trek, billed as a solo tour for City and Colour. He tours regularly with a full band under the City and Colour moniker, but the length of the six-week, 28-date solo tour will give Green time to relive the days when it was just him and a guitar.
“It makes it a lot easier to do this kind of touring. I can scale down the operation,” Green, 36, said. “It’s fun to do a big rock show in an arena, but it’s also fun to sit in a smaller theatre and make it a bit more intimate. It’s nice to be able to go back to how I started this whole thing. Every song I write originates with me and a guitar.”
During the Napster era, Green’s songs were traded feverishly among fans. Sweetly sung acoustic odes from Green were a novelty at the time, mainly because of his membership in hardcore act Alexisonfire, the group from St. Catharines, Ont., that pioneered a new brand of punk-metal. Few expected a project with singer-songwriter tendencies to come from anyone associated with such a ferocious group.
Another reason the rough-cut demo versions of early Green songs (one of which was Sleeping Sickness, recorded years later as a duet with Gord Downie of the Tragically Hip) were an especially rare commodity: City and Colour was years away from being an official entity.
Early on, Green resisted the demand for his solo material, choosing instead to focus on Alexisonfire (he’s still a member of the group). He would play acoustic shows occasionally under his own name, but nothing was made permanent until 2005’s Sometimes, his debut as City and Colour. He wrote and played nearly every note of music on the album — shades of his doeverything approach to his upcoming tour.
Green will be joined by Matt Kelly, one of his cohorts in the full-band version of City and Colour, for a portion of each set on the tour. Otherwise, it will be an extended version of Green fans have not seen, or heard, for some time.
That could be challenging, depending on which songs he includes in his set.
“If I decide to pick some older ones that I haven’t played in a while, I’m going to ask the crowd to sing it with me,” Green said with a laugh. “As much as I like to think I remember everything, there’s been some moments where I look at the microphone in front of me and think: ‘I have no idea what to sing next.’ ”
The tour starts in Courtenay on Saturday, the first of four sold-out dates on Vancouver Island. Green has played Victoria often, with both Alexisonfire and City and Colour, but hitting new markets, such as Campbell River and Duncan, is a big part of the purpose of the tour.
“There’s so many cities and towns and places in Canada that I’ve never been, and they probably don’t get a lot of stuff. I said to the people I work with: ‘If there’s a theatre in town, let’s go see if I can play it.’ If there’s people there willing to listen, why not go and play for them?”
The two-time Juno Award winner (from six nominations as City and Colour, and four nominations with Alexisonfire) is among the most popular artists in Canada, so tours with both of his high-profile projects are rarely small. He is looking forward to the freedom that this between-albums tour presents.
“Usually, if I’m going on tour it’s because I’ve made a new record. But now, I have so many songs, I can do all this stuff. Because of that, I feel like I should take advantage of that. Play a song from 10 years ago, or play a song from a year ago.”
His most recent City and Colour release, 2015’s If I Should Go Before You, is sure to feature heavily. The album debuted at No. 1 on the sales charts in Canada, his third consecutive album to do so.
Everything is clicking for Green, from a successful tour with Alexisonfire through Australia and New Zealand in January to his sold-out solo run. Green has begun writing new songs for a future City and Colour release.
The singer-guitarist, who lives in Nashville, has kept a similar schedule during 15 years of constant activity, though he avoided doing anything musical during the last few months of 2016.
“If I ever took two months off, it was to work. But this last couple of months, I just lived.”