Tanglefoot

“The five members of the Ontario band Tanglefoot write and sing big, ambitious songs that are heavily influenced by traditional folk music and by the work of Stan Rogers, the late Canadian folk icon.

Like Rogers’, most of Tanglefoot’s songs have stories to tell. Roll On Jamaica is a ballad about Lady Agnes Macdonald, the second wife of Canada’s first prime minister, and how she took in the sights of the Rocky Mountains riding out front in a crate attached to the CPR locomotive’s cowcatcher while her husband relaxed in the back in a luxury car. Miners and Mercy tells the story of a 19th century coal miner who’s seen most of his children forced to give up childhoods to work in mines or mills. The sound abounds with fiddles, guitars, banjos, accordions, keyboards and rich harmonies.” ****

The Montreal Gazette

“Ontario schoolteacher and fiddler Joe Grant formed his acoustic band Tanglefoot in the early 1980s as an earnest attempt to roll back the tide of American culture by writing and performing colourful and heartfelt traditional-sounding songs about Canadian historical events and characters. Tanglefoot has become a solid wall of musical energy, a full-throated, multi-instrumental roar of exuberance and delight in the very life Grant at one time only imagined. If you like original songs deliberately crafted to resemble True North artifacts between 50 and 150 years old, Agnes On The Cowcatcher is a treasure — inventive and resonant, quaint and robust, bucolic and brainy all at once — song as reproduction folk. The material here — among the best of a luminous set are “Feu Follet,” “Miners and Mercy,” “Roll On Jamaica/Agnes On The Cowcatcher,” and “God Had A Plan” — is intended for participatory singing, for thumping feet and clapping hands, for wistful, introspective smiles of recognition, and it constitutes by far the most polished and assertive recording Tanglefoot has made.”

Greg Quill

The Toronto Star

No shows booked at the moment.