Soundtracked 28: This Moonlit Evening
When Mad Café opened in the former location of The Black Cup it was a heartwarming, cyclical development for Broken Arts. The same was true when news broke that the old home of Isabella's was being turned into a new restaurant called Stuttering John's. We were already friends with John, his catering group having vended at Broken Arts Fest. When we found out he was planning on having live music as well we couldn't pass up the chance to return to the site of so many former Soundtrackeds.
Soundtracked 28: This Moonlit Evening May 5, 2012 @ Stuttering John's Bistro Bar live: Anthony Damiao WHY Blue The Stone Sparrows Broken Arts lineup: Harley, Defne, Erin, Ashley, Cassy
The Stone Sparrows were a new folk-country band in town and getting a lot of buzz. Anthony Damiao was a Kitchener folk-pop musician who had contacted us months earlier about getting him an Oshawa gig. For the headliners we invited back The Strumbellas. They had played Soundtracked 2 and headlined Broken Arts Fest and were now promoting their debut full-length. They were on board but changed their mind as we got closer to the date. In response we bumped the Sparrows up to headliner status and invited an Ajax r&b band called WHY Blue to take the third slot. They had responded to our open call to perform at our last Broken Arts Fair and we were impressed.
It was nice being back in 19 Simcoe but, despite the popularity of The Stone Sparrows, attendance dropped to 20 paid, the lowest since volume 21. It was our first liquor-licensed show since volume 14, something which people had complained about. Now we were finally giving them what they wanted and attendance was lower than almost all of our Mad Café shows. After nearly three years of events we still had no idea what we needed to do to get people to come out and we still went into every show not knowing if anybody would come. We resigned ourselves to it, though. All we could do was keep trying different things and putting on the best shows we could.
Watch videos of: Anthony Damiao - "Your Name Here" WHY Blue - "Rolling Stone" The Stone Sparrows - "Black Out The Night"