IN CONCERT
What: Johnny Reid with Glass Tiger and Jessica Mitchell
Where: Charlie White Theatre, 2243 Beacon Ave., Sidney
When: Monday Feb. 26 and Tuesday Feb. 27, 7 p.m.
Tickets: Sold out
Note: Reid also performs Feb. 28 at the Port Theatre in Nanaimo and March 1 at the Cowichan Performing Arts Centre in Duncan
Johnny Reid should look at the epic scope of his upcoming tour that takes him across the country for 51 concerts in 70 days, and feel dread.
Instead, he looks at his calendar and feels like a kid on Christmas morning. Getting up on stage isn’t what the Ontario-raised, Nashville-based performer would call hard work.
“It’s easy being myself,” Reid said. “I would hate to be up there trying to be someone else. My dad can’t tell you the difference between a G chord and a C chord. But he can tell you what’s real and what’s not real. I think that’s been the difference. I can connect with people on a very truthful level."
The tour by Reid, 43, will get underway next week with the first of two sold-out shows in Sidney at the 315-seat Charlie White Theatre, by far the smallest venue on the upcoming run.
Reid said audiences will feel like they are watching “a 100-inch television in a small apartment” when his 13-piece band, the Soul Providers, does its thing inside the Sidney theatre.
With tickets priced at about $150 a seat, the singer from Scotland was able to bring almost everything other cities will see on this run, despite the modest size of the venue.
Reid’s other Vancouver Island dates are both at bigger venues — the 800-seat Port Theatre in Nanaimo on Feb. 28 and the 731-seat Cowichan Performing Arts Centre on March 1. Most rooms on the tour have a capacity of between 1,500 and 3,000 seats.
“For us, we’re basing our budgets on 110,000 seats across the country, so we can still afford to go in there and put on a special show in some of these small communities,” Reid said. “I just thought it would be really special.”
The five-time Juno winner is touring to promote his 11th record, Revival, which arrived in November. But the tour has another purpose, too. Reid is bringing 1980s hitmakers Glass Tiger along for the run, and has a portion of each show set aside to showcase the band’s considerable catalogue. “It just made sense for me to invite the guys to come out on tour and get up with me and sing a few of these songs.”
Reid produced the band’s most recent recording, 31, a compilation of newly recorded Glass Tiger hits re-imagined with traditional acoustic instruments. The album also includes a collaboration between Reid and Glass Tiger frontman Alan Frew, who immigrated to Canada from Scotland a few years ahead of Reid.
“Everyone talks about the American Dream, but a lot of people forget about the Canadian Dream,” Reid said. “Alan and I have a lot in common, and though we’re a few years apart, he, like me, was taken away from everything he knows when he immigrated to Canada. But he made his own way in the music business, and so did I.”
It’s impressive to see how far Reid has come as an artist since his debut in 1997. Revival is up for two Junos — including album of the year — at the upcoming gala, bringing his career nominations at the annual music-industry awards to 16.
Based on ticket sales alone, Reid ranks as one of the most dependable performers in the country. His tour of Canada in 2012 sold 250,000 tickets, resulting in some of that year’s biggest gate receipts.
Though he now lives in Nashville with his wife and three children, Reid strongly identifies as Canadian. When it comes to music, however, he’s all over the map.
Revival features a version of She Just Wants to Dance, by bluesman Keb’ Mo’, that made its way onto the album at the request of his eight-year-old daughter. “She’s a big Keb’ Mo’ fan,” Reid said with a laugh. “But she’d always say: ‘I wish it was faster.’ Keb’s version is super-cool, but she wanted it faster, so we put some rhythm to it.”
Reid and his band also tackle Delbert McLinton’s Every Time I Roll the Dice on Revival, which was his way of paying tribute to one of his Scottish idols. “I wanted to pay homage a wee bit. Delbert was a huge Frankie Miller fan, and a friend of Frankie’s. As a wee boy, I wanted to be Frankie Miller.”
His connection to Glass Tiger, the Grammy-nominated hitmakers behind Someday and Don’t Forget Me (When I’m Gone), didn’t show up in the album’s liner notes, but their influence on Revival is there nonetheless.
When he looks across the stage next week and sees himself alongside Frew and his fellow Glass Tiger co-founders, Sam Reid and Al Connelly, it will be with pride in his heart, Johnny Reid said.
“When I moved to Canada [in 1988], I was an immigrant in a strange place with strange people. It was a new culture, a new everything. But when I heard My Town [the band’s 1991 collaboration with Rod Stewart] on the radio in Toronto, it made me feel like I was back in Scotland. Fast forward 30 years, and here we are together. It’s a funny life.”
