Engaging, amiable, and hilarious during his between song banter, Ken Yates becomes a focused, solitary figure when he sings. Performing his new album to a very happy crowd recently at Vancouver BC’s Fox Cabaret, we saw and heard that dichotomy repeatedly during an intimate and emotional performance.
I have a knack for discovering “new” artists years, even decades, after the fact. For instance, I stumbled upon Canadian power pop band, Treble Charger, a couple years back when I heard “Red” only to learn the band has been active on and off since 1992.
Awkward.
So, discovering Ken Yates only 12 years after his debut album, Twenty-Three (2013), is progress, I suppose. Taking a deep dive into his back catalog and listening to that first album, Yates’s evolution as a songwriter and player is immediately evident. From a folkie, James Taylor-like musical presence on his debut to this year’s release, Total Cinema, its indie pop melodies weighted by world-weary and often cynical lyrics, Yates is carving out a unique and thoroughly compelling musical niche.
My entry point for Yates was last year when I discovered (there’s that word again) his 2022 album, Cerulean. With songs like his collaboration with fellow Canadian, Kathleen Edwards on “The Big One,” or the Jim Bryson-like “Fairweather” (on the album’s extended edition) the record remained in heavy rotation last spring. His second album, Huntsville (2016) earned him the recognition two Canadian Folk Music Awards for Songwriter of the Year and New Artist of the Year can bring. His 2020 follow-up, Quiet Talkers, released during the pandemic signaled “a shift from primarily folk music to more of a contemporary sound.”
Ken’s songs, sweet and accessible melodies notwithstanding, are anchored by complex, imagery laden lyrics. Total Cinema’s song cycle is certainly no exception, exploring subjects as diverse as love and loss, birth and death, the yin and yang of existence. It’s this dichotomy that one finds in Yates’s songs-catchy choruses and metaphor-rich, emotional verse, but with protagonists wrestling with harsh realities. To see and hear his tunes performed live, however, brings added weight and heft to them. Total Cinema’s clean, warm, lush production is replaced by the energy of Ken’s guitar, Gus Berry’s bass, and Andy Borger’s drums combining in classic ‘greater than sum of parts’ power and spontaneity while still lending each instrument both prominence and drive, thanks also to some nice soundboard work.
Stream Total Cinema by Ken Yates on Spotify:
A medium-sized bar featuring live music, the Fox Cabaret’s acoustics are remarkably bright and clear, the power trio’s musical muscle filling the high-ceilinged listening room. Formerly an adult theater from 1983 to 2013, after extensive renovations (and, ahem, stain removal) the Fox reopened in 2014 as a live music venue. And so a packed house welcomed Ken on this highly anticipated stop on the Total Cinema tour with Vancouver-based Marie Dresselhuis opening on Dec. 3 with a half hour set of bright, lovely folk songs.
Within minutes following Marie, Ken’s trio appeared onstage and leaned into a powerhouse performance of “Cataclysmic End.” Played live, the song’s lyrics take on an end of the world urgency especially when paired with explosive power chords, a heavy backbeat, and booming bass. From Ken’s occasional melodic musings about the apocalypse, we dove into the quirky love song, “My Love for You is a Straight Line.” Opening with a lazily strummed introduction, its folkie roots evident, the song morphs from a satisfying little pop ditty into an irresistible chorus that strings together conflicting but universally held attitudes about love: “My happiness is all up and down again, my head is in a constant spiraling, my sadness is a road I am circling, but my love for you is a straight line.” Certainty and ambivalence in one chorus.
The show settled into an easy groove, revisiting songs from Quiet Talkers, the title tune and “Surviving is Easy,” and Cerulean, “The Future is Dead.” Returning to the new album, Ken introduced “Superimposed” as a love song to his wife. With deadpan humor, Ken described his high school and young adult years as “basically gym shorts and tear away pants,” a fashion choice based on a love for basketball. “Yeah, that’s the guy she fell in love with.” A bouncy, up-tempo “Superimposed” mirrored the joys, contradictions, and realities of relationships and marriage, its image-rich closing lyrics honestly imploring:
“So don’t hide your tears let them come in waves
It’s only water it’s only rain
Don’t even try to tell me I should go
How could I even when you’re superimposed on me?
Don’t hide your tears let them come in waves
It’s only water it’s only rain
And in the silence where your sadness grows
Hangs a picture of you superimposed on me”
At the concert’s midway point, a two-song acoustic solo set demonstrated the emotional power Yates’s music can have. “Sidewinder,” the album opener, stripped of its rhythm section became a plea for normalcy and sanity: “And in the meantime we’ll survive in between the lines, of what is living and what’s just life, Sidewinder.”
Not to get maudlin, but the next tune nearly reduced me to a puddle of mush. Speaking about loved ones who’ve passed, Ken talked about how the loss of friends and family makes each of us members of an exclusive club to which no one wants to belong. Though he sings it nearly every night, “Perennials” is always difficult to get through. With lyrics like “When you become a story people gather round to hear, carving out your name in the celestial sphere” reminding me of the people I’ve loved who have moved on, I must admit to becoming a bit dewy eyed myself.
Watch this gorgeous performance of “Perennials” by Ken Yates with Lockeland Strings:
With the band returning, the trio launched into two more new songs, “Greatest of All Time” and “Paincaving,” both up-tempo pieces that sounded suspiciously similar. Or, as Ken introduced the second tune, “This is the same exact song. I don’t know why I put them together in the set list!” Reaching back to again to Cerulean, we got “The Big One” (another song about the end of the world) before turning up the pace for the final three songs. “Under the Cover of Light” got the previously mellow crowd fired up and dancing while Ken’s heavily distorted guitar on “Total Cinema” gave the title tune a growling menace not present on the album. The song’s unforgettable hook, paired with lyrics like, “These little movies in my mind, they’re still playing all the time, but you know all the darkest corners of myself” again revealing the complexity of the new album.
Watch the official video for “Total Cinema” by Ken Yates on YouTube:
The main set closed with the highly anticipated, “The Great Resolution,” a song that recalls Neil Young’s opus, “Ambulance Blues.” That somewhat obscure Young masterpiece, its vaguely biographical lyrics commenting on a range of social, political, and personal issues was a defining moment in his career. “The Great Resolution,” with lyrics that range over the personal (“Thanks for the notice, it was nice to be invited, I was elated to see something but the inside of my eyelids”), the political (“Screaming the ‘kingdom will befall us’, like they’re fucking William Wallace”), and the profane (“The Heavenly Father gave us all some daddy issues, criminal negligence that holy water’s cold when it first hits you”), like “Ambulance Blues” observes the human condition with humor and sincerity, yet still feels intimate (“You were sleeping in the back of a sprinter van at the Capital Ballroom, living that life still while you can”). Built around a killer hook and a hypnotic descending chord progression, on the album it’s a quiet and moving song. Live, it builds inexorably through the closing coda where Ken finally takes a solo, insistent fills that nest perfectly into the melody. You wish it could go on forever.
Stream The Great Resolution by Ken Yates on Spotify.
As noted in a recent review, the “pretend” encore has become standard, discarding the artifice of walking offstage only to come back seconds later. Performing “The Master,” Total Cinema’s final tune, brought the show to a deeply satisfying and jarringly honest conclusion. An introspective, dense tune with lyrics like “The years ahead could spell regret, and they start coming faster, and if you hold it in the darkness wins. I know, I’m the master” may sound like a downer, but it also sounds like an artist finding his place. And coming to terms with it.
After years of long hours on the road, shitty gigs, and “gas station coffee,” if this show was any indication, something has broken open for Yates this year. The new album, critical and commercial attention, and a new baby, have made for an exciting but, I imagine, exhausting 2025. Though in a recent interview Ken said, “The music industry has a way of making you obsess over things that are out of your control and make you forget about what’s most important, actually enjoying making music. In that sense, I’m grateful it took me well into my 30s to start having any traction, because by then I had enough life experience to realize what’s important, and not kill myself both mentally and physically for whatever ‘dream’ I was chasing.”
Here are some more photos of Ken Yates, at Vancouver’s Fox Cabaret on Dec. 3, 2025. All photos courtesy of and copyright Mark Caicedo.
