Calvin Love and Night Beats at The Rickshaw
By Taina Boehm
On the last sunny Friday evening of March, something special happened upon the Rickshaw Theatre in Vancouver BC. Calvin Love, in support of Seattle-based rock group Night Beats and featuring Edmonton-local Altameda as his backing band, rocked and wooed the pants off a wealth of old and soon-to-be new fans.
This evening would mark Calvin’s second-to-last show after a successful two-month tour of his latest release Highway Dancer, in Europe, USA and Canada. The album, released in October of 2018, is a beautifully seasoned culmination of ten-plus-years of Calvin doing what he does painfully well—writing and recording songs that don’t sound like anything else out there.
If you’ve never heard Calvin Love before, you might try to imagine what it looks and sounds like when seven decades of musical artistry are channelled through a man with his finger on the world. His music rich with hazy psychedelic undertones, peppered with Western twangs and glimmering with a dark, new-wavey/shoe-gazey guitar-driven essence, begs you to dance, drive, love, and cry.
He writes music inspired by strangers. His songs are contained within a passing comment on the street, or “a flash in somebody’s eyes”. A couple of hours before the show I caught Calvin for a quick chat in the alley behind the Rickshaw, and while rolling a smoke he divulged to me that his inspiration can come from mere speculation about a passer-by. “It’s something I might get into (making up stories about people). Or maybe not makeup stories about them, ‘cause you’re just speculating where they’re coming from, but maybe they can inspire you to write about a character -you know- that could be relevant in making you feel something. So I dunno, it’s about trying to tap into, I think, a universal emotion - or emotions that we all feel.”
Calvin began his set with “Highway Dancer”, the title track off the new LP, a forlorn little number with a synth-laden rock ‘n’ roll breakdown at the bridge, which immediately stirred up a buzz in the crowd.
Without wasting a drop of the energy in the room, he launched into “You Got Me Runnin’”, a fast-paced number driven by bass and drums & somehow incredibly danceable but oh so sad, with lyrics like “but if only you could talk to me/maybe then we could still be free/from my mind”. This song fills one with the need to dance fervently and freely as if to ward away all the emotions it encapsulates.
Calvin afforded his audience some precious stillness later on, as he stood alone and delivered “A Thousand Years” on 12 string guitar. It’s a haunting love song, and eerily reminiscent of Chris Isaac’s “Wicked Game”, with all its potent vocals and mesmerizing melody.
The show ended with “When You’re Not Looking”, a fun and fiery number from his 2017 EP Ecdysis, and the resounding glow in the Rickshaw was palpable. Calvin put magic in our hearts — if only we could have him in Vancouver more often; it truly was a pleasure.
Check out his newest work Highway Dancer on whatever platform suits your fancy. It’s a brilliant and emotionally electrifying testament to letting the world in, and making something beautiful with it.