Meghan Patrick Gets Personal in Ottawa

Meghan Patrick’s fans may not have been legion enough to fill all the seats at the Algonquin Commons Theatre but they were certainly loud enough to fill the room with an energetic buzz.

There were seemingly no casual fans in the room — everyone came prepared to sing along to even the newest releases and the deepest album tracks, to request their favourites and to banter with Patrick in between songs as if they were old friends. 

So committed are Patrick’s fans that the vast majority even arrived on time to see the opening act. The first priority of an opening act is to hype up the crowd, and Kelsi Maine used every trick in the book — sing-alongs, namechecking local favourites, familiar covers and glowing references to the headliner — to meet that goal. Along the way, she showed off enough powerhouse vocals to also succeed at the second priority of an opening act — to win some new fans for themselves.

 

Patrick kicked off her set with an ode to bad life choices, “She’s No Good for Me”. It’s an honest and confessional look at the person she has been but doesn’t want to be anymore and it packs a killer vocal hook in the line “she’s whiskey strong until the whiskey’s gone.” It sets the tone for the rest of the night, which features Patrick alternating between telling stories — often painful stories — from her life and singing the songs that came from those moments.

 

Which is not meant to suggest that the show is a downer. She’s charming and funny and she can rock a song about a bad relationship (“Red Roses and Red Flags”) just as well as a song about drinking beer in a pickup truck. (“Goes Good with Beer”) She doesn’t think much of the suits at her old record label, a subject that came up several times, including before her personal anthem “Country Music Made Me Do It” which details how she has drawn strength from her music professionally and personally. She may not have much respect for the music industry, but she has a healthy dose of it for the music itself.

Noticeably absent from the set list was her break-through single “Bow Chicka Wow Wow”. Not many artists would omit such a crowd-pleasing banger from a live show. But if there was a theme tying together her between song banter, it was that she wants to focus on singing songs that have something more to say. 

 

She also worked the stage and the crowd exceptionally well, grabbing cell phones to frame selfies with the crowd, singing directly into phones to give fans amazing close up videos, gracefully accepting gifts, even dropping into the audience to sing “The Bad Guy”. At one point, fans noticed the outline of a dip tin in her pocket and asked her to share, which she did.

 

After she ended her set, the crowd was clearly well aware of what was coming next, as they chanted both her name and Jolene’s. She lead off the encore with a version of the iconic Dolly Parton song that started acoustic and then rocked out. Her final song of the night was her only #1 to date, “Walls Come Down”. A personal song about a difficult family history that nonetheless rocks, it was a fitting end to the night. 

Patrick plays London tonight before heading south of the border. Tour dates can be found here https://www.meghanpatrickmusic.com/

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