The Silver Hearts

The Silver Hearts began as a duo of Charlie Glasspool and Trevor ‘Tiny’ Davis in early 2000. Within a few weeks they had evolved into a quintet. Ensconced as the house band at the ancient, ramshackle tavern The Montreal House, the band attracted old friends and grew into an anarchic horde of over a dozen players and singers by the time of their first album, Live at the Gordon Best (2001). Veterans of Peterborough’s folk, hard rock and experimental music scenes of the 1990s, the Hearts brought a dark, absurdist edge to their reworkings of blues, country and tin-pan-alley music, and tore into originals, standards and contemporary covers with equal ferocity and grim glee. Epic three-set shows turned the band into a powerhouse, loose-but-tight ensemble of archindividuals, and put the pressure on the band to master such arcane instruments as sousaphone and theremin and to always learn or write more timeless songs to fill out the set. The Silver Hearts reached their creative zenith on the albums No Place (2002; CBC Bandswidth album of the year) and Our Precious City (2004), adding another idiosyncratic chapter to the history of experimental folk music, and contributing a few otherworldly instrumentals, heartbreaking ballads and abstract dance numbers to the people’s songbook in the process. After releasing a full-album cover of Tom Waits’s Rain Dogs, the band went on hiatus, regrouping temporarily to make Dear Stranger (2006) with Andre Ethier. The band celebrated its tenth anniversary by resuming full activity and playing the Arabaki Rock Festival in Sendai, Japan in May 2010. They are currently working on an album of entirely original material - their first in nearly a decade. Peterborough's legendary beer hall orchestra; since the year 2000.