What: Jesse Roper with Carmanah
When: Friday and Saturday, 7 p.m. (shows at 8)
Where: Alix Goolden Performance Hall, 907 Pandora Ave.
Tickets: Sold out
Note: A limited amount of tickets may be available at the door
With a list of recent accomplishments that could rival any act on local soil, one would expect Jesse Roper to be busting with a never-fail fortitude.
After all, he is easily the city’s most popular performer at the moment, with a pair of shows on tap this weekend that have topped 1,600 tickets.
The guitar god has performances Friday and Saturday at the Alix Goolden Performance Hall, both of which are sold out. They come on the heels of a gig at the same venue in February, when Roper opened for soul icon Booker T. Jones. But for reasons even he can’t explain, Roper is feeling anxious.
“More often than not, where there’s a ton of pressure, I’m not as good,” he said Tuesday from his home in Metchosin. “I’m better when I’m having a great time and not giving a s--t about anything.”
Roper is expecting some special moments this weekend. Not only is he eager to perform for his friends and family, he wants to reward fans who scooped up tickets for both shows in under a week.
“I didn’t think that was going to happen,” he said with a laugh. “When they asked me to play a second show, I said: ‘Nope.’ Flat out. I’d rather have one full show rather than two half-full. But it worked out. I would never have guessed I could sell out two nights. When they tried to get me to do a third, I said: ‘Absolutely not.’ And I stuck to that.”
At the outset of his career, Roper suffered from terrible stage fright. As audiences began singing his praises, however, pre-show nerves began to dissipate. He’s in a good place nowadays, kicking off 2016 with a sold-out show at Sugar nightclub on New Year’s Eve.
“Last year was a huge learning curve for me, because, all of a sudden, people were listening. I didn’t want to just be good. I wanted to be really good. But I finally got to a point where I realized that every time I just go out and do my thing, I play way better.”
Roper has a good laugh at one of his most recent performances, playing O Canada at a Victoria Royals game on April 9. “I kind of messed it up right at the beginning,” he said. “I was terrified after that. When I screwed up, the only good part was that I realized people were singing along.”
Roper is working on new material, the follow-up to his breakout release from 2015, Red Bird. The full-length album spawned the regional hit Hurricane’s Eye and put Roper on the road for a series of well-received dates in 2015, including Rifflandia, Rock the Shores and the Saanich Fair. His set at Western Canada’s oldest continuous agricultural fair netted the Saanichton event its biggest concert attendance to date.
He released the nine-song EP Food For a Day in 2015 as a fundraiser for the Our Place Society, but those were acoustic interpretations of songs from his catalogue. Roper said he feels good about his new material and will have something out in stores this year.
“For a while, I couldn’t write anything and it was stressing me out. In my mind, I was like: ‘This has got to be so good.’ I’m really proud of Red Bird and I want to have the same feeling with this new one.”
He wouldn’t be surprised if what he records later this year marks a stylistic shift, where “some of the blues-funk is not so bluesy or funky.” Roper said he already has 13 songs he’s happy with, three of which he expects to play this weekend.
He may have more to deliver by the time two big festival dates come up later this year. He is booked to play Victoria’s Rifflandia festival for the second straight year in September, to be preceded by the Pemberton Music Festival, the biggest B.C. event of its kind, in July.
Roper is over the moon about seeing his name alongside headliners Pearl Jam, The Killers, Snoop Dogg and Ice Cube on the Pemberton bill.
“When I was told I got Pemberton, I was way out on a logging road by myself. I didn’t think I would get cell service where I was, because I was out in the bush near Tofino. When I got the call, I was writing a new song that was slow, sad blues, but after I was jumping around by myself, screaming at the top of my lungs. When I picked up my guitar to play the same song, I knew it couldn’t be blues anymore because I was so happy.”
