There are nights at music festivals where you just have to go in blind and just let the music take you where it wants to go. You have the opportunity to really hone in on your tastes by sampling a lot of what the festival has to offer. Night 3 was a complete and total wildcard for this writer, being that neither The Decemberists (the evening’s headliner) nor Goldie Boutilier were heavily featured on my pre-festival playlists. Last year, Goldie opened the Sommo mainstage in PEI, and we caught the tail end of her performance on the way into the venue. Aside from that brief taste, I was under the impression that she was more of a bohemian folk artist, and the Jazz Fest marketing further reinforced that idea. As for The Decemberists, they existed on the periphery of my Lumineers fandom, as both bands share a similar aesthetic. The Lumineers’ material feels deeply personal, while The Decemberists are more poetic and literary, dealing more in fictional narrative than experiential tales.
That literary take on lyricism creates an emotional chasm for me, which keeps the musical resonance low. I had hoped that seeing The Decemberists perform live might close that gap and provide an accessible entry point to their catalogue. The thought initially stemmed from my experience seeing Death Cab for Cutie years ago. I only came to appreciate the depth of the band’s work in the months and years that followed. By delving into the band’s discography, I was able to build that emotional connection, and after having watched The Decemberists’ performance, I felt it might be one that I appreciate in retrospect, more so than in the moment. The band put on a solid show, which was well-received by the patrons of the TD Halifax Jazz Fest, but it wasn’t enough to win me over as a fan. That might in part be due to the performance that came before they ever reached the stage.
Ahead of The Decemberists was the one and only Goldie Boutilier, an artist who originally hailed from a small mining town in Cape Breton and was ready to enjoy her (sort-of) homecoming moment after performing for the majority of her life. Goldie left that mining town and headed west to California with little more than aspiration and verve. That road to success was littered with a few previous iterations, including Kay, My Name is Kay and Goldilox, eventually leading to Goldie Boutilier. It was a decade ago that Goldie (born Kristin Kathleen Boutilier) battled her label to be released and found herself on a dark, yet well-paved path littered with drugs, drinks and dreams, but eventually made her way to Paris, France, where Goldlox emerged in 2015 and Boutilier became multi-hyphenated as both a singer, model and now DJ. All of these experiences led the talented artist to drop the Lox from her name and become Goldie Boutilier. While that first EP wasn’t released until 2022, it was that iteration that was the most honest and true to who Goldie Boutilier actually is. It eventually led her to the Austin City Limits stage and to being asked to support Orville Peck on tour.
Goldie’s road may not have been smooth, but those challenges and tumultuous moments all helped to forge the artist that Goldie Boutilier is today. When she joined her bandmates on stage on that warm summer evening in Halifax, it was clear that she was a star with no fucks left to give. She found a way to fuse the magic of Debbie Harry, Stevie Nicks and Miley Cyress, and discovered her voice. Her performance was like a bolt of lightning, obliterating all previous expectations and showcasing why she is a force to be reckoned with. While the set spanned her limited time as Goldie Boutilier, she worked a trio of songs from her recently released album Goldie Boutilier Presents…..Goldie Montana (a nod not to Miley’s alter-ego, but instead to the fictional drug dealer Tony Montana) in to her set.
It was clear from the moment that Goldie hit the stage that something special was happening. There was a command of the stage that not many performers possess, and she worked the stage throughout the entirety of her set, absolutely dropping jaws on the hot asphalt of the concert grounds. She showcased in that performance why she is ready to reap the rewards for the trials and tribulations she’s had to endure up to this point. It was a performance that left concert-goers in awe and scrambling to the merch booth afterwards to pick up her EP collection on vinyl. It is nights like these where it is nice to go in blind and end up absolutely floored by a performance, and while The Decemberists put on a solid show (including a cool moment where lead singer Colin Meloy pointed out Boom at Noon’s Mitchell Jodrey, who was sporting a Decemberists tee), they weren’t able to overcome the bar that Goldie set.
