Ottawa — September 18, 2026
By Alain
The temperature had finally remembered that it was late September, but the music at the new RA Centre grounds kept thing hot. Night Three offered up one of those wonderfully mismatched CityFolk bills: traditional Chinese instruments and folk music on one stage, intricate fingerstyle guitar on another, Ottawa indie rock on the Main Stage and, eventually, two bands capable of making an entire generation remember exactly where they were when the ’1990s and early 2000s happened.
Opening the Westside Stage was Tennyson King, the Hong Kong-born, Canadian-raised singer-songwriter. King brought along Lina Cao on guzheng, creating an unusual and beautiful blend of roots music and traditional Chinese instrumentation. His opening number, “Summer Daze,” immediately established the mood, and when King switched from guitar to the zhongruan, the performance became something considerably more interesting than your average folk festival opener. Meanwhile, Ottawa’s own The New Hires hit the TD Stage at 6 p.m. The five-piece band include: Max on vocals, Phil and Aidan on guitar, Christian on drums and Jack on bass, the band looked sharp in matching suits and sounded even sharper. Their energetic combination of ’90s/2000s alternative rock and modern indie was tailor made for a hometown crowd that already knew the words to many of their songs. Then came Gwenifer Raymond, who proved that sometimes one person, one guitar and an almost alarming amount of fingerpicking are quite enough. The Welsh-born, Brighton-based guitarist created a surprisingly full sound without a band behind her. It was quiet, hypnotic and technically remarkable, the kind of performance that rewards anyone willing to stop, listen and watch her hands do things that seemed physically impossible. Out on the TD Busker Series, Carson Cameron made the lawn his stage, literally. Armed with guitar and harmonica and accompanied by Gavin Newlands on seated drum, Cameron played two sets with no microphone or amplification. It was an appropriately old-school festival moment: no giant video screen, no fog machine, just a musician and an audience gathering around him. Switchfoot took the stage at 7:20 p.m. with Jon Foreman on vocals and guitar, Tim Foreman on bass, Chad Butler on drums, Jerome Fontamillas on keyboards and guitar, and touring guitarist Boaz Roberts. The band quickly showed why its songs have endured, delivering a set that included “Stars,” “Oh! Gravity,” “Sabotage” (a Beastie Boys cover), “This Is Your Life,” “Mess of Me,” “Wake Up, Mr. Crow,” “Dark Horses,” “Natural Causes,” “Beautiful Life,” “Meant to Live” and “Dare You to Move.” Over on the Westside Stage, Jensen McRae drew a sizeable crowd, opening with “Let Me Be Wrong” and “Savannah.” Then came Third Eye Blind. Led by Stephan Jenkins, with Brad Hargreaves on drums, Kryz Reid on guitar, Alex LeCavalier on bass, and Colin Creev on keyboards and guitar, the band offered far more than nostalgia. They turned the field into one enormous singalong. The set began with “Thanks a Lot,” “Dust Storm” and “Never Let You Go,” before moving through “Narcolepsy,” “Faster,” “The Kids Are Coming (To Take You Down),” “Wolf Like Me,” “Graduate,” “Crystal Baller,” “Losing a Whole Year,” “Shipboard Cook,” “Motorcycle Drive By,” “Jumper,” “Heroes” and, naturally, “Semi-Charmed Life.” The encore was “How’s It Going to Be.” Jenkins had told the crowd that the band was performing “without agenda,” and that freedom showed. There was no new album to sell, no elaborate sales pitch just a band revisiting songs that clearly still mean something to people. When “Semi-Charmed Life” arrived, the audience practically sang the song for them.
And that was the charm of Night Three. CityFolk didn’t spend the evening trying to convince us that everything old is new again. It simply put seven very different acts on seven different musical paths and let the audience wander between them. Some came for Third Eye Blind. Some discovered Tennyson King. Others stopped to watch a busker playing without a microphone or found themselves mesmerized by a guitarist they had never heard of before. That’s the beauty of a festival like CityFolk. You can arrive looking for one thing and leave having found something completely different, sometimes from a different decade, sometimes from a different side of the world, and occasionally from the person standing 20 feet away with nothing more than a guitar and a song.
