Every Thursday, we publish live music and performance events at pubs and clubs in Peterborough and The Kawarthas based on information that venues provide to us directly or post on their website or social media channels. Here are the listings for the week of Thursday, November 17 to Wednesday, November 23.

If you’re a pub or club owner and want to be included in our weekly listings, please email our Nightlife Editor at nightlife@kawarthanow.com.

As difficult as it is to wrap one’s head around Canada Day in mid November, with a little push it is possible.

This morning (November 17) at Peterborough City Hall, members of the Canada 150th Anniversary Celebrations Committee did their level best to excite the masses, revealing that iconic Canadian rock artist Kim Mitchell will open Peterborough Musicfest’s 31st season on July 1, 2017.

The 64-year-old Sarnia native will take to the Fred Anderson Stage in Del Crary Park as part of an ambitious four-day celebration, June 29th to July 2nd, themed “Celebrate At Home”. The concert will herald the opening of the 17-concert Musicfest season, with the entire concert schedule to be revealed next spring.

Anchoring the Celebrate At Home initiative is a $100,000 grant from the City of Peterborough, a portion of which made it possible to secure Mitchell for the Canada Day concert — his fourth Musicfest appearance. In 2012, his August 4th appearance was cut short by bad weather, but he returned on August 21st to play a full show before thousands of classic rock fans.

In bringing Mitchell back to Peterborough, Musicfest general manager Tracey Randall has secured a musical artist widely revered for wearing his Canadian pride on his sleeve and thus a perfect fit with the Celebrate At Home theme.

In addition, with Mitchell’s extensive hit song catalogue, she’s guaranteed a huge crowd for the concert series’ opening salvo — assuming Mother Nature plays nicer this time around.

Mitchell began his professional musical career in the mid 1970s fronting Max Webster, which released six studio albums from 1976 to 1981, recording hit singles such as “A Million Vacations” and “Paradise Skies”, and toured extensively.

VIDEO: “Go For Soda” – Kim Mitchell

However, his subsequent career as a solo artist brought him his greatest success in the form of three Juno Awards, including Male Vocalist of the Year in 1990, and a string of hit singles such as “Go For Soda”, “All We Are”, “Patio Lanterns”, “Easy To Tame”, “Rock And Roll Duty”, “Rockland Wonderland”, and “America”.

He also claimed Juno Awards for Most Promising Male Vocalist in 1983 and, four years later, for Album of the Year for Shakin’ Like A Human Being, his second solo album.

In total, Mitchell has sold more than 1.5 million albums. Most all of his recordings, with Max Webster and as a solo act, have attained gold or multi-platinum status. All along the way, Mitchell has toured extensively — a regimen that was put on hold this past January when he suffered a heart attack and had a stent put in.

VIDEO: “Patio Lanterns” – Kim Mitchell

“It made me realize that I have nothing to prove any more,” related Mitchell in a May 2016 interview with Jim Barber of MusicLifeMagazine.net.

“I play guitar and I am going to go up there on stage and enjoy myself and appreciate the fact that I get to go up on stage and play in front of people who like what I do. I don’t stress out about all the stuff around being a touring musician any more. I am where I am in my life and my career, so I am just going up there and relax and do my thing.”

“I am all about customer service. People are coming out to hear certain songs and hear me playing them. But they have been morphing and going through some changes. So Go For A Soda sounds a little different the way we play it on a given night. And we will start to jam out on some of the songs and be a little freer with the arrangements. I like to give people what they want.”

VIDEO: “Lager & Ale” – Kim Mitchell

And giving people what they want is what Mitchell will do on Canada Day next year. That, he says, remains his proudest accomplishment in a music career that has featured many benchmarks.

“Being able to take people to a special place through our performance and music. When that happens, I’ve accomplished what I set out to do.”

For more information on Peterborough’s Canada 150th Celebrations, visit the committee’s Facebook page at www.facebook.com/PTBO150 and follow along on Twitter at @Ptbo150.

For more information on Peterborough Musicfest’s 31st season, visit www.ptbomusicfest.ca, or follow Peterborough Musicfest on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ptbomusicfest and on Twitter at @PtboMusicfest.

With his huge talent, if he just sang and played guitar, that would be more than enough. But Séan McCann has something more to offer: raw honesty, inspiration, hope, and all stops in between.

The folk-rock musician, who for 20 years made his creative mark with Great Big Sea, is coming to the Market Hall Performing Arts Centre (140 Charlotte Street, Peterborough, 705-749-1146), presented by the downtown venue in partnership with the Canadian Mental Health Association, Halliburton, Kawartha, Pine Ridge (CMHA-HKPR).

McCann’s Peterborough show is the final stop on his fall Road To Recovery Tour. Billed as “an evening of song and story,” the concert on Saturday, November 26th will see the Newfoundland native share, through his music and his words, his lengthy struggle with alcoholism.

McCann quit drinking on November 9, 2011, and came to the realization that sharing his journey would be of benefit to those struggling with their own demons.

His first post-Great Big Sea album, 2014’s Help Your Self, marked the beginning of McCann’s own healing process; a journey aided by his being able to break his silence about the sexual abuse he suffered as a child at the hands of a priest.

“When I put out the record, it resonated with thousands of people, and the lesson that I took from it was that I was not alone,” says McCann in an October 2016 interview with Yasmine Shemesh of www.dailyhive.com.

“People kept coming back to me saying, ‘I know this song, that song’s my mother.’ ‘I know that song, that’s my brother.’ ‘I know that song, that’s my lover.’ ‘I know that song, that song is me.’ I took comfort in that because I realized mental health and addictions affect everybody.”

“You may not suffer directly but you know someone who does. You know, we’re all in this together. It’s not like we’re not connected. Not dealing with it as a society is just not facing the problems. I’m very open about it and I know that it helps people when they realize they can. It helped me when I heard someone talk about it. It really did.”

VIDEO: Séan McCann performs “Mari Mac” at The Kent in Chatham

CMHA-HKPR Manager of Development Kerri Davies says McCann’s willingness to talk about his journey made partnering with Market Hall on the concert — a notion put forth by Market Hall’s general manager Chad Hogan last June — about as close to a no-brainer as you can get.

“We’re reaching a different audience than if we just hung a banner and said, ‘Come on in tonight for a one-hour talk on mental health,'” says Davies.

“People move beyond the fact that he’s a celebrity. Rather, he’s just a human being, able to share the pain and difficulties he has had over what happened to him and how. Once he was able to unpack that and talk about what happened, he was able to move on to getting some help. For someone who doesn’t think they’re ever going to be okay, this might be that little extra push to say ‘Maybe I do need to tell somebody about this.'”

Still, as thrilled as she is that McCann is coming to Peterborough to share his story, Davies quickly reminds us that “we have local heroes” who have done, and are doing, likewise to equally great effect.

“When it’s a celebrity, it’s like, ‘Wow, if they can do this, if they can talk about this big secret, then maybe I can too.’ But when you have someone local you can identify with, that’s when it really brings it home. As exciting as it is to be able to have people like Séan McCann come and tell their story, what really resonates are the stories we tell locally.”

Along with Alan Doyle, Darrell Power and Bob Hallett, McCann founded Great Big Sea in 1993. The band’s over-the-top energetic interpretations of traditional Newfoundland folk songs resonated with Canadians coast-to-coast and beyond. Before the band’s break-up in 2013, it had recorded nine studio albums, released 28 singles — “Ordinary Day” and “End of the World” come to mind quickly — and dominated the East Coast Music Awards from 1996 into 2000.

“It wasn’t enough,” McCann says of his last few years with Great Big Sea. “It didn’t sustain me and that’s important. My only regret is we probably could have said a lot more than we did. But we kept it simple. We kept it simple because simple is easier to sell.”

What’s clear now is McCann’s openness about the abuse he suffered and his resulting alcoholism does indeed sustain him.

“I’m not a religious person — I never will be again, I don’t think — but if I could steal one good thing from the church, it was that once a week, the community would come together face-to-face, shake hands, and sing a song together. That’s a huge, very intimate thing to do.”

VIDEO: Road to Recovery Tour 2016

Davies, meanwhile, notes the CMHA-HKPR will have a presence at the concert in a bid to “create a safe space.”

“I don’t know what’s going to come out of Séan McCann’s mouth,” she explains. “He may say something that triggers someone in the audience, so we want to make sure that people know if there is something that’s troubling or resonates with them, there’s somebody there they can talk to that night.”

November, she adds, is Men’s Health Month, giving the concert’s timing even more relevance.

“It started out being mostly about prostate cancer, but it has morphed into encouraging men to talk about all aspects of their health, including their mental health.”

“Men are the least likely to want to talk about this. They tend to want to tough it out. Hopefully, having a guy like Séan McCann speak about his difficulty helps to take away that false belief that you’re weak if you open up about it.”

VIDEO: “You Know I Love You” – Séan McCann