Troubadours

This week's Wednesday Go Pop night at Supermarket in Kensington market featured a trio of solo singers. With only your voice and musical instrument, you have to work to engage an audience. First up was Alyssa Pridham, a singer and actress. Perhaps she was stressed from taking care of a 3-year-old while being 7 months pregnant as she confessed, but she was a bit rusty. She made several mistakes on the piano including a slightly audible expletive when she repeated a passage by mistake. Her songs had simple heartfelt lyrics that referenced light and sun metaphors, although sometimes there was an inclusion of an incongruous word (e.g., "over-analyzed") which was jarring. Her strongest numbers were Wisdom (co-written with Ron Sexsmith) and a song inspired by her Yoga background that used a mantra as its refrain.

It turns out Morgan Cameron Ross also collaborated with Ron Sexsmith when he opened his set with We've All Had Broken Hearts. Another strong romantic song is It's You written with Carleton Stone, which was mentioned and also performed by the latter a few weeks ago. I wonder if they will both record it. Melancholic confessional songs were his strength. When he went back in his repertoire, including songs from his old band Bird of Wales, they were more up-tempo and catchier but lacked originality. He ended his set getting two volunteers and the audience to sing along to Let It Go.

Ben Caplan had only 1 casual smoker with him: local bassist Michael Luongo. It didn't matter. He won over the stand-offish Toronto crowd with his funny stream-of-consciousness banter and songs such as Beautiful, Drift Apart, and a darker Que Sera Sera called Stranger. There is a Eastern European sensibility to his music due to the numerous ululating wordless refrains as well as his folkloric lyrics. Whether or not he's Jewish with interjections of "boychik" and "l'chaim", he debuted a new song that re-imagines Abraham proceeding with the slaughter of Isaac despite the intervention of the angel as a metaphor for the current state of the world. For his encore, to an off-handed request for a Disney song, he did his own take on Scar's Be Prepared and ended the night with his rocking Bang To Break The Drum.