Sam Roberts, The Trews 'coming home' to Jackson-Triggs in June

When Sam Roberts and his band kick off the 2024 Jackson-Triggs Summer Concert Series next Friday, June 7 it will be a homecoming of sorts. 

The Montreal-based rocker has opened the series every summer other than its first. It’s a responsibility the six-time Juno Award winner takes seriously. 

“Aside from the COVID year, it’s been an unbroken string,” says Roberts. “We have to set the tone for the entire concert series in that opening weekend. We know we have to put on a hell of a show so that people know the summer has truly begun.”

Anyone who has been to one of those opening weekend performances knows that feeling. And when The Local tells Roberts that his presence indeed marks the start of the summer in the town, he says knowing that sends chills down his spine.

“We better make sure that we’re ready to go every time,” he admits. “If we’re going to herald in the change of a season, the most important season of them all, then we better have our ducks in a row.”

A self-professed wine drinker - red wine, mainly - Roberts jokes that he envisions the band's annual set infusing the grapes in the surrounding vineyards with the spirit of his music. 

“We’re working our way not just into the hearts and minds of the people,” says Roberts, “but into the soil itself.”

Roberts didn’t realize that his first time playing the amphitheatre would be the beginning of an annual tradition. It’s since become a big part of his life and career, a defining series of concerts that have informed how they think of themselves as a band.

Back then the band was used to playing dark, smoky bars, so they didn’t know what to expect when they first hit the outdoor stage at the winery. But Roberts says it only took about five minutes to blast through the barrier that existed in their minds about the novel experience. 

Over two decades Roberts’ audience has both grown and grown older with him. 

“You realize that you can’t just reach into the same pond that you’ve been fishing in all those years and hope to find what you’re looking for there,” says the singer-songwriter. “You have to expand, it’s both the band’s and the audience’s responsibility to find new places to meet. This is a prime example of that.”

Though he sees new faces at Jackson-Triggs each year, he also recognizes many familiar ones as well. In that way, the first weekend of June becomes a bit of a reunion. 

“You can’t script these kinds of things,” he says. “It just sort of has to happen. The ingredients are a mystery to all of us. We wish we could replicate this everywhere we go, but it takes serendipity for something like this to come together.”

Roberts and his band play the amphitheatre next Friday and Saturday, June 7 and 8. Roberts promises songs from throughout his career, including a few from last year’s The Adventures of Ben Blank album. As of May 30, a limited number of tickets remained available for the first show only. 

After a one-week break, Matthew Good hits the outdoor stage at Jackson Triggs. The Burnaby, BC native, a four-time Juno winner known for hits such as Everything is Automatic and Hello Time Bomb, appears on Friday, June 21.

Good is followed by The Trews, who once called the Niagara region home, on Saturday, June 22.  

Originally from Antigonish, Nova Scotia, brothers John-Angus and Colin MacDonald, Jack Syperek and Ramsey Clark moved from Toronto to a ramshackle house in Niagara Falls about 21 years ago. The title of their 2003 debut full-length album, House of Ill Fame, was a nod to those lodgings. It spawned their first big hit, the anthemic Not Ready to Go.

“The first time we ever heard ourselves on the radio was in Niagara Falls, thanks to (St. Catharines radio station) HTZ-FM,” says John-Angus on the phone from Hamilton, where he currently lives. “We got our career off the ground out of Niagara way more so than we did out of Nova Scotia. All the big steps happened when we were living there. Niagara feels like our band’s hometown.”

Earlier this year The Trews did a run of shows to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of that debut LP. Before heading out, though, they hosted three rehearsal shows at old friend Nathan Warriner’s Niagara Falls bar Local (no relation to The Local).

“That felt surreally full circle,” remembers John-Angus. “Tickets were by invitation, so it was full of friends we hadn’t seen in years. To go back to ground zero, just a few metres from the house itself, it was like going back in a time machine. We were set up on the floor, bare bones. It got us in the right frame of mind and set the pace for the tour.”

Though they consider Niagara home, there’s no denying that there is a lot of East Coast influence in their sound over their eight albums and a couple of EPs. 

“What’s pretty common in Nova Scotia is singalong, kitchen party culture,” says John-Angus. “Wherever we go we take a little bit of that with us. That shows up in a lot of the choruses we write and in the nature of our singing and our harmonies.”

Original members John-Angus, Colin and Jack still form the core of The Trews, now a five-piece with keyboardist Jeffrey Heisholt and drummer Theo McKibbon, formerly of Monster Truck.

Though the band’s most recent release was 2021’s The Wanderer, the guitarist says they spent most of 2023 recording several songs.  John-Angus expects a new release and a full tour will follow a very busy summer of festival dates.

As for Jackson-Triggs, he says he loves just about everything about playing there. 

“It’s intimate, but it’s big at the same time,” he explains. “Big production, big lighting, a big PA, but it only holds about 600 people, so there’s a certain intimacy to that. They treat the artists like gold, and we always have fun.”

The Trews show is currently sold out, but the waitlist is open. Tickets are available for the June 21 Matthew Good show at this link.