Campbell Woods is a troubadour with roots in the Ottawa Valley, currently based in Montreal. He’s a listener and a storyteller; his songs bring out the secret joys and ordinary tragedies of life with carefully crafted melodies and seemingly simple turns of phrase. He gets compared to Townes Van Zant and John Prine a lot; he also reminds us of early Fred Eaglesmith.

Kate Weekes seems to live stories on the way to telling them. She hitchhiked her way to the Yukon, collecting stories along the way. She has been a dog-musher in Norway, toured China with a swing band, and has paddled from Whitehorse to Dawson City. Weekes describes her latest album, Taken by Surprise , as the sonic scrapbook of a bold life lived to the fullest. “Wherever I am traveling comes out in my songs,” she says. For this evening, Weekes will be accompanied by multi-instrumentalist and producer James Stephens.