The hands of the clock on the wall are being pulled reluctantly into future with the sound like a knife against a whetstone, signifying that it’s time to drag the fattened night to slaughter and begin another day.  I awake in a nursery, peeling an assortment of Disney princesses off my face as I lifted my head from the pillow.  We’re staying at the home of Dan’s prairies promoter and a weekend sleepover has left his young children’s bunk beds vacant for the road-weary - with two inches of headroom and another two below my feet, I slept like a baby. The clock reads 11:05, the hands taking the shape of a peace-symbol or perhaps a Victory ‘V’, and gathered around the kitchen table a while later, we all acknowledge feeling rejuvenated by the luxurious sleep in.

I had the chance to share the three-hour ride from Edmonton to Calgary with Derpy, Dan’s accommodating promoter, taking the opportunity to shoot some unobstructed roadscapes and allow the band to stretch their legs with one less body in the van.  A life-long Edmontonian, Derpy asked what could possibly be capturing my attention as I photograph edout the window.  I guess the answer is nothing; the absence of stimulus in the Alberta landscape is stimulus in itself.  Just as the mountains and ocean have become overlooked constants on my Vancouver horizon, it’s possible that the flat expanses of open space have burned themselves into Derpy’s daily life to the point where they are too bright to recognize.

I’ve been to Gateway at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology once before, on the road with Said The Whale as they supported Mother Mother last April, and I remember the atmosphere as energetic but tense.  There was something about the higher-capacity room in a hard-drinking town that had the bouncers on edge and the crowd too afraid of being beaten up to sing along.  That tension was wholly absent at SAIT this time around as the seated front rows rocked along to the heavier parts of Aidan’s set, the recent repertoire additions of the political “Spaet” and the love-song-not-monster-song “North East South West”, and matched Dan word-for-word.  To cap relentlessly positive day, a set that began with a preemptive apology for pubescent voice-cracks ended with a 380-person sing-along as the band parted the crowd to perform unplugged beneath the Jack Daniels banners and hockey jerseys.  Calgary, we love you.

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Jonathan Taggart is a documentary photographer and writer based in Vancouver.

www.jonathantaggart.com
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