The Great Outdoors - Food, Booze, and Entertainment (2007)

Link

Regardless of whether singer/songwriter Adam Nation’s folk-rock outfit The Great Outdoors is performing as a five-piece ensemble, a moving trio, or even simply as a ‘one-man-band’ solo act complete with kick drum and bass pedals, the outcome at the end of each live show is always the same: a room full of people stirred to laughter, moved to tears, and outright musically hypnotized by one of the premier acts in the country.

As representative of this country’s heartland as the Canadian Shield from which he hails, Adam Nation has been making his living from the stage for over a decade now. Previously wowing audiences as the enigmatic frontman of Canadian indie-rock darlings Counterrevolutionaries, Nation has toured the country from end-to-end countless times, soaking in the ambiance and attitudes of those for whom he pours out his musical soul night after night. A friendly maritime legion hall; a rough and tumble oil field camp booze can; a worn and weathered prairie pub; a raucous and joyous west coast beer garden – Nation has worked them all and more, and he has woven those experiences into the very fabric of his musical mosaic. Perhaps it is this gift that endears his art to so many.

Joined by a rotating cast of some of Vancouver’s finest musicians, including guitarists Steve Wells and Randy Forrester, bassist Craig McCaul, drummer Steve Wegelin, Juno-winners Jesse Zubot and Frazzie Ford, and trumpeter Bud Brodie, Nation continues to win audiences everywhere with his electric and eclectic tales and tunes. Whether touring in support of 2005’s critically acclaimed A Scant Sixty-Three or 2007’s chart-topping Food, Booze and Entertainment, capturing a live album in September of ’07 at the Auditorium Hotel in Nanton, Alberta, or recording any of his four upcoming ‘seasonally-themed’ EPs (one to be released every three months for the next year) at his East Vancouver-based East Van Eden Studios, Nation and company are creating a whole lot more than just great music; they are creating a movement. Damn near an ‘ism’, if you will - that rare kind of ‘ism’ we’d all be better off to embrace.