summer songs, volume two: sam roberts.

If you run in circles like mine--that is, circles who skew more toward hippie than hipster, who prefer outdoor picnics to thumping bass lines and value a jump in a lake over pretty much all else--Sam Roberts is one of those guys that you just end up seeing live a lot. I can't remember the first time I saw him, but it doesn't matter. Anyway, this isn't a story about first or last times. It's a story about times in between.

I went to a Sam Roberts concert in August of 2005. It was the end of my first summer in Vancouver, the end of my first year on the other side of the country. I was a little world-weary and unbelievably ambivalent about my return visit to Ontario, which had been planned months earlier, before a phone call from Toronto broke my heart. The man I'd planned on spending the rest of my life with had suddenly decided that he couldn't bear the burden of our temporary bi-coastal arrangement, and called to tell me so on a Monday evening just a few days before I was coming home to see him. Suddenly we sat on opposite sides of the fault line that runs through the Lower Mainland, suddenly there was a seismic shift. For the first time in five years, I was on my own. Instead of running home into the strong arms I'd counted on for the better part of my grown-up life, I skulked eastward wearing my bruised heart on my sleeve. My parents picked me up from the Toronto airport when I arrived on the ass-end of a red-eye flight. As we drove back to Hamilton I felt his absence heavy in the car. Sitting in the back seat of their car I felt like I was a kid again. I kept looking over at the seat next to mine, wondering why the fuck it was empty, why the fuck he'd forsaken the chance to sit next to me, why the fuck he couldn't even say it to my face. It was, by all accounts, a low point.

If you run in circles like mine, you will be fortunate enough to have people around you to keep you steady, lift you up when you cannot lift yourself. If you run in circles like mine, you will rest easy in the knowledge that someone is going to help you pull your heart out of the gutter and give you a ride to the cottage and spend three days telling you everything is going to be okay. That's what happened that summer. I fell, hard, and let everyone around me just carry the weight. They carried me from Hamilton to Ottawa and then on to Muskoka, where I cried and kicked and pounded back booze-soaked berries and let everyone console me.

And then we got ready to go out.

Here is a really excellent way to mend a broken heart (or, at the very least, spend one glorious night deluding yourself into believing you're on the mend): go see Sam Roberts play a show at the Kee to Bala. If you've never been to the Kee, you really ought to go at least once, although I'm afraid to say that the older you get, the sketchier it will probably feel. It's like seeing a show in a grotty old cedar-planked road house in the middle of the woods. Actually, it IS, that, exactly that.

Here is the only way you should ever get yourself to the Kee: rattling around on the seats of a rented school bus (better known by its airbrushed logo as the Magic Bus), speakers blaring Livin' on a Prayer followed by Pour Some Sugar on Me, ignoring the bleary, weary glances of the bridal party occupying the seats ahead of you as you sing along like your life depended on it. "I can't believe this is legal," one of my friends marveled as we shouted out requests and guzzled smuggled cans of Keith's. "I'm pretty sure it isn't," someone else replied.

Sam played his heart out that night, just like he always did. I drank pint upon pint of draft beer and resolved to make this the first night of the rest of my life. "There's no road that ain't a hard road to travel on," he sang. I'd already travelled my hard road back and forth across this blessed country too many times that year, and I knew that many more trips lay in my future. But for that night, at least, all I had to do was dance.



The next time I saw Sam Roberts was a year later, at my first Bluesfest. I had just moved to Ottawa and into my first solo apartment and was dating a new boy (the colossal train-wreck details of which we shall never, ever speak. Seriously, never.) and was pretty much feeling like everything was going to work out. Freya and I had bought full passes for the festival and were giddy with the idea of so many of our favourite bands playing every goddamned night for the next week. Ottawa during Bluesfest really is Ottawa at its finest: vaguely rebellious, beer-sodden, sunny, efficiently celebratory. For ten glorious days, everyone stumbles around town, counting down to the evening's show; you can tell who else you'll be rocking out with that night by their unfocused stares in the coffee lines each morning, the tell-tale festival wristbands. Sam played on a sweltering Tuesday night. Just as he started his set, a misty rain began to fall, just enough to cool everything off. When he got to that line about your friends saving you in the end, Freya nudged me and grinned. We kept on dancing.

I haven't yet found the love that will lead me through my darkest days, but I've found the people that will stand next to me, dance with me, help me find the road again. That's all you need, really.