Jennifer Castle with Neil Haverty SAT APR 19, 2025 7PM DOOR, 8PM SHOW General Admission | 19+ @ Mills Hardware
Polaris Shortlister Jennifer Castle Brings Her Camelot Tour To Hamilton
Jennifer Castle is a Canadian songwriter, musician, and poet. Camelot, the legendary seat of King Arthur’s court in Early Middle Ages Britain, was probably not a real place. A corruption of the name of a real Romano-Briton city, the word “Camelot” accumulated symbolic, mythic resonances over centuries, until achieving its present usage as a near-synonym of “utopia.” In the mid-20th century alone, Camelot inspired an explosion of representations and appropriations, among them the violent, affectless Arthurian court of Robert Bresson’s 1974 film Lancelot du Lac and the absurdist iteration of Monty Python’s 1975 Holy Grail, both of which feature armored knights erupting into fountains of blood; the mystical Welsh world of novelist John Cowper Powys’s profoundly weird 1951 novel Porius, with its Roman cults, wizards and witches, and wanton giants; and the nationalist nostalgia of President John F. Kennedy’s White House. Unsurprisingly there are fewer Camelots in more recent memory. Camelot, Jennifer Castle’s extraordinary, moving 2024 chronicle of the artist in early middle age, charts a realer, more rooted, and more metaphorical place than the fabled Camelot of the Early Middle Ages (or its myriad depictions), but it too is a space more psychic than physical. In Castle’s Camelot, the fantastic interpenetrates the mundane, and the Grail, if there is one, distills everyday experience into art and art into faith, subliming terrestrial concerns into sublime celestial prayers to Mother Nature, and to the unfolding process of perfecting imperfection in one’s own nature. Co-produced by Jennifer and longtime collaborator Jeff McMurrich, her seventh record is at once her most monumental and unguarded to date, demonstrating a mastery of rendering her verse and melodies alike with crisply poignant economy. For all their pointedly plainspoken lyrical detail and exhilarating full-band musical flourishes, these songs sound inevitable, eternal as morning devotions.
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As frontman of Toronto alt-folk ensemble Bruce Peninsula and as a solo artist, Neil Haverty has released several critically-acclaimed LPs and toured extensively, including stops at SXSW, Supercrawl and the Dawson City Music Festival. Neil has focused mainly on screen composing in recent years, scoring feature films (Wildhood, Body & Bones), video games (Floodland) and episodic series (Avocado Toast, Who Owns The World). This year Haverty is preparing to release a slew of new music, including more score work and plenty of singing songs too.
Link To Tix Mills Hardware Presents Jennifer Castle Sat, Apr 19 at 08:00 PM EDT at Mills Hardware