“He’s a Bryk”

I remember the glimmer in Dave Celia’s eye before the gig years ago when he said almost conspiratorially “I hope you don’t mind, I have a song for you tonight, Bryk.” And then it showed up on his ace album This Isn’t Here and I basked in the glow of a first-rate takedown. Or compliment. Both, I think.

I stumbled onto Dave’s music around the turn of the millennium when by chance I stumbled across his band Invisible Inc. opening for someone else I’ve long forgotten. They were way more musicianly and classic rock-minded than the Queen Street indie crowd. I’d never heard anyone local (other than Swinghammer, or maybe Kevin Breit) play rock guitar with jazz fluidity and punk rock urgency, like Larry Carlton slumming with Steely Dan. Or something. All his songs weren’t quite there yet, you could still clearly pick off the influences, but his writing was way more ambitious than the new wave slackers and pub crawlers you would catch playing a thankless weeknight at C’est What.

Gently blown away, I introduced myself, (hopefully) bought him a drink, and soon realized we grew up barely a mile away in the shallow suburbs of Mississauga. He invited me over to his home studio and played me a bunch of songs that morphed into his first solo record Organica while my jaw kept dropping further with each song. I caught him every chance I could in the year or so before I departed on my great American misadventure, and I suppose my gratuitous tales of career success/failure/success/failure left an impression on him. Dave has worked much much harder at making an actual career of making music than I ever have, and when you hear him sing or even touch the strings, you’ll know it.

So it was double homecoming seeing Dave and Marla play last week. I love their duet record Daydreamers but didn’t realize they had re-recorded thisahem—my song together as a standalone single. Check it out. And then work your way backwards through their catalogues for some tremendous awesome.

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