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ADRIAN GLYNN

May 5, 2024

The Square, Vancouver, BC

 

Adrian Glynn's 5th solo album tracks the story of his Ukrainian grandparents’ flight from their homeland in the 1940s, to settle in Montreal. Adrian is a songwriter based in Vancouver and has released more than 8 critically acclaimed albums, both solo and with his folk band, The Fugitives. He has been nominated for a Juno Award and multiple Western Canadian Music Awards and Canadian Folk Music Awards.

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The musicians backing up Adrain on the show night are: Sally Zori (drums/persussion), Catherine Hiltz (bass), Marlene Ginader (violins), Chelsea Rose & Martin Reisle (background vocals) and special guest Ukrainian instrumentalists Beverly Dobrinsky (lira aka hurdy-gurdy) and Ruta Yawney (bandura), as well as The Righteous Ramshackle Chorus & The Windsor Choir.

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Here’s Adrian talking about ‘You’re Just A Place That I Know’ …

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“After speaking with my Aunt Genya, the story-keeper of my Ukrainian side of the family, a couple years ago,” says Adrian, “I began composing a song-cycle that follows the details of my grandparents’ narrative, including: my Baba (grandmother), at 17, being forced by Germans from her Carpathian village into forced labour a thousand kilometers away; my Dido (grandfather) folk-dancing to win cigarettes from impressed Allied soldiers in a refugee camp; my Baba invoking the words of poet Taras Shevchenko to lay her husband to rest after their long life together in Montreal; and lastly, to my own final visit with my Baba in her room at Royal Vic hospital, her memories now a mosaic of dementia as we flipped through an old photo album together.”

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Situated somewhere in Glynn’s wheelhouse of dark indie folk, the album has tinges of traditional Ukrainian folk music, featuring instruments like the bandura and the lira (or “hurdy-gurdy”), as well as a young men’s choir led by Ukrainian-Canadian choral director, Adam Kozak, singing a verse of a cherished Ukrainian poem.

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Recorded on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Wa’tuth peoples (AKA Vancouver) by JUNO-nominated producer Tom Dobrzanski (Said the Whale, The Zolas), You're Just A Place That I Know is Glynn’s first solo release since 2020’s Ghostlight Sessions, and comes on the heels of a 2022 JUNO nomination for The Fugitives’ Trench Songs.

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“This album is not about modern Ukraine,” Glynn emphasizes, “but certainly the current and horrific existential threat to my ancestral homeland spurred me to tell this story of my grandparents’ flight from war to settle somewhere unfamiliar. A story that is all too true for Ukrainians today, 80 years on.”

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At the core of this narrative is a theme of memory— blurry and faded one moment, clear as a photograph the next. Through these lenses the arc of all our stories is (imperfectly) told. The album's title, “You're Just A Place That I Know,” seeks to encapsulate this. “That phrase,” says Glynn, “and its accompanying melodic theme recur throughout the record, meaning different things. Sometimes it describes a place dissolving into dream; sometimes it's a derisive statement, like my Baba’s contempt for a city that hasn't accepted her yet; or sometimes it's familiar and loving, as it describes her husband in laying him to rest — ‘you're just a place that I know; for now.’"

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You can listen to a recent interview with Tom Power on CBC Radio's 'Q' program here.

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WHAT’S BEEN SAID

"Glynn shows his incredible lyrical skills, wedged somewhere between the storytelling whimsy of Iron and Wine's Sam Beam and the honesty of Josh Ritter." -  Vancouver Sun

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“Adrian Glynn, whose lyrics struck me with their complexity, and whose harmonies struck me with their beauty.”

- Stuart McLean, Vinyl Cafe, CBC

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"A doggedly innovative singer-songwriter." - Uptown Magazine

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