Bluesfest Day 8: Talk delivers a love letter to his hometown Ottawa

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In the most spectacular homecoming performance of his meteoric career, the artist known as Talk turned his opening performance on Friday night’s Bluesfest main stage into a love letter to Ottawa as Mother Nature paid tribute with plenty of sunshine and sweltering temperatures.

Talk’s hour-long performance was full of hometown pride, from an introductory video montage he adapted from the Ottawa Senators to the pizzas from Willie’s, his favorite local spot, that he handed out to fans at the end. There was even a surprise guest, the Sens’ lovable mascot, Spartacat.

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The plus-size Juno winner, 28, who now lives in Toronto, wore his blonde locks tied back and wore a Sens jersey and Sens jumpsuit for the occasion, completing the look with a signature pair of size 14 Crocs.

For the Stittsville-raised artist, whose real name is Nick Durocher, his Bluesfest debut was a “really big full-circle moment,” he said in a pre-show interview backstage. “My very first concert was Simple Plan at Bluesfest in 2005. I have core memories of being here with the friends I still have, and they’re here tonight.”

He told the crowd the same thing, yelling, “I went to Bluesfest all the damn time when I was a kid,” before listing off some of the acts he’d seen, including Black Eyed Peas, Kiss, Rush, Black Keys, Foo Fighters, Jimmy Eat World, and more.

Curse words aside, Talk performed with the passion of someone determined to make an impression in front of a crowd that nearly doubled in size during his performance as the place filled with country music fans jostling for a seat to see the evening’s headliner, Tyler Childers.

In my opinion, he not only achieved it, but exceeded it, delivering a performance that ranged from the most poignant to the most profoundly emotional, a performance that would have been difficult to follow at any other venue.

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Durocher demonstrated an almost superhuman vocal ability and a feel for melodies that sound familiar, as if they’ve been hidden in someone’s brain for ages. He also spoke openly about his struggle with anxiety and how writing songs boosts his confidence.

At one point he said his song A Little Bit Happy, which revolves around the line: “If I could see the way you see me, I could be a little happy.” was written for his “beautiful” girlfriend, who watched the show along with his parents, neighbors, cousins, aunts, uncles, best friends, worst enemies, and thousands of fans new and old.

“It’s a song that means a lot to me,” he added. “It’s a song that gives me confidence when I don’t feel confident in my own heart. I wrote it for anyone who has ever felt that way.”

At the other end of the emotional spectrum was the purely fun Croc Kick, the moment when Talk kicks every rubber clog off his foot as far into the crowd as possible. The catch was that he wanted to throw them back at himself on stage because he has a hard time getting his signature shoes in such large sizes. His wish was happily granted.

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Talk performed all the hits from his solo career, which is still in its early stages with just a single album, 2023’s critically acclaimed Lord of the Flies & Birds & Bees. Accompanied by a band that backed him up with their solid support and gave the show a sense of rock’n’roll grandeur, he reached new heights with songs like History, Train, Wasteland and Hollywood, a song he wrote for his mother. Another highlight was Afraid of the Dark, a sweet song about love that he said he wrote for his grandmother.

To complete the set, Durocher tackled a medley of upbeat covers of Wolfmother, Foo Fighters, and Jimmy Eat World (the second version of The Middle I’ve heard at this bluesfest), as well as a solo acoustic version of Radiohead’s The Creep that probably didn’t get everyone singing along like he’d hoped, partly because the young country fans didn’t seem to really know the song.

The whole thing was rounded off with a song everyone knew. The quirky, poignant love song “Run Away To Mars” was Talk’s breakthrough. It was written in his parents’ house after he moved back to Stittsville from Toronto during the pandemic. On stage, it soared to the heavens as everyone sang along.

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It’s the tune that made Talk a star almost overnight when a video of him singing it live went viral on social media and changed his life.

“It’s hard to explain what happened because I don’t really know, but for some reason everyone is seeing it at the same time,” he said backstage. “You look at his streams and it’s maybe a few thousand a day and then it’s 600,000 a day. People noticed.”

“The best way to describe it is that it was the right song written in the right way at the right time. Everyone felt the same way I did. It was the right time and the right place for the song.”

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