48 Hills hit up the annual Noise Pop festival (February 19-March 1) to sample the indie music feast. Check out our full coverage here.
Julie Doiron’s “August 10” must be one of the strangest songs to become an unexpected TikTok hit—just a spidery riff and a few harsh chords, strummed 30 years ago by a self-described “broken girl” from the Acadian heartland of Moncton, New Brunswick. When I made plans to see her at Noise Pop, I was unaware of her newfound fame until a friend on Twitter broke the news, and the nature of my assignment suddenly changed. Could Doiron bring the kids out en masse?
I turned out to be one of the youngest people there, other than assorted friends of opener Marika Christine. I know Marika well, and I spent four years in a band with her percussionist, Maria Donjacour. When I pointed out the discrepancy between Doiron’s middle-aged audience and her newfound TikTok fame, Maria resignedly speculated that the headliner’s new fans aren’t necessarily the people who “go to shows”—might not even have looked much into Doiron as an artist beyond what she can do for their Reel. The curse of content.
The crowd at the 4 Star Theater on March 1 probably found her the same way I did: from her work with the great Canadian band Eric’s Trip, or from her two excellent Lost Wisdom albums with Mount Eerie, both of which I saw her perform live alongside Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum in Portland in 2019. When the setlist-bereft singer asked the audience for suggestions, “August 10” was not among the shouts. Eric’s Trip classic “My Chest is Empty” was, though Doiron politely had to explain that she didn’t write it, and she was only taking requests for her own songs. (There went my chance of hearing “I Will Always Love You,” on which she and Elverum do a killer duet.)
The 53-year-old mother of two is probably too nice to admit it, but she seemed slightly peeved at the fact that people tend to know her from one or two things, rather than for the entire sweep of her discography. She made a point of expressing her pride in lesser-known records like 2021’s I Thought of You, and she structured her set around the fact that she “had” to play “August 10” before the 11pm noise curfew, though most of the crowd probably wouldn’t have begrudged her if she didn’t.
No one is more surprised by the song’s success than Doiron, who confessed to being uncertain exactly how she recorded that strange little guitar turnaround that acts as a line break. What was never in doubt during her performance was her chops. Though she might be best-known as a bassist owing to playing that instrument in Eric’s Trip, she’s skilled enough on solo electric guitar that I could imagine her recording a quality album of six-string instrumentals in the vein of Tashi Dorji or Loren Connors. I like when she gives her guitar a little shove to get the note to bend.
Jetlagged and with a sick and elderly dog at home, Doiron started the set a little shaky—but she broke the ice with the audience quickly, and her performance felt more fun and free than the one she played on tour with Mount Eerie, where I can’t recall whether she bantered at all. She has as many stories as you’d expect from a longtime touring musician who’s lived through some hard times, including being kicked out of her apartment by her landlord after he found out she was having a baby (illegal in Canada and the States) and undergoing the humiliation of having her bandmates start a new band without her. (She has a song about it, “Elevator Show.”)
One hopes that fate will honor her long career by blessing her with the kind of genuine cult revival enjoyed by the likes of Red House Painters and Duster, rather than letting her single belated modern rock hit fall to the wayside as a fluke. (It doesn’t help much for her stateside cult that her best album, Désormais, is in French; the other performers seemed to have a spot of trouble even pronouncing her name.) Leaving the venue, I walked behind a teacher whose kids knew “August 10” through TikTok. “My eighth-graders were saying, ‘this is what music should sound like,’” he claimed. If any of those kids start bands, rock ‘n’ roll might sound pretty interesting in a decade or so.
