Ontario band with N.S. roots touring Maritimes this November

Inspired by the words of Canadian poet Alden Nowlan, Ontario’s Stranger Still has released its third studio album.

Stranger Still, which formed in 2018, is the brainchild of Windsor, N.S.-born composer Pete Johnston. It’s his long-running project in which he sets Nowlan’s words, who was born in nearby Stanley, to music.

Based in Toronto, Stranger Still has released three albums since forming, with the most recent being We Might Not Tell Everybody This in May 2026.

Johnston is excited to bring the band back to the Maritimes this fall, following an invitation from the Nowlan family to perform as part of the opening of an Alden Nowlan exhibit at Saint Thomas University in Fredericton on Nov. 5.

Nowlan, who died in 1983 at the age of 50, wrote on the human condition using accessible, colloquial language, often mixing writing styles. Aside from poetry, he also was a playwright and novelist.

Johnston, well-known in the Halifax jazz music scene before moving to Toronto in 2001, has been enamoured with Alden’s “rural lyricism” since a university project in the late 1990s.

The band will perform a few other shows around the Maritimes, including Nov. 4 at King’s College in Halifax, Nov. 6 at Moonbrook Manor in Riverside-Albert, N.B., and Nov. 7 at the Cedar Centre in Windsor.

Johnston says the homecoming show at the Cedar Centre will be particularly meaningful for the group as they played “a fateful show there on March 13, 2020, the eve of the COVID-19 global shut down.”

Due to the pandemic, Stranger Still could not perform for nearly two years after their Windsor performance, so the Cedar Centre occupies an important spot in the band’s story.

Stranger Still used the shutdown period to write and record new music, and will be returning to the Cedar Centre six years later with two additional albums worth of songs to play.

Stranger Still consists of Johnston, Mim Adams, Rob Clutton, and Randi Helmers.

Johnston said listeners can expect a totally different set of songs than the previous Stranger Still show at the Cedar Centre, as that performance was very early in the band’s career.

In March 2020, the band had a repertoire of 11 songs. There are more than 30 to draw on now.

Johnston said he made a deliberate choice when booking the Cedar Centre to play.

“A resetting of the clock, or perhaps an opportunity to show the power of music to sustain us through challenging times, as the band kept working through it all, just in different ways than they were used to,” Johnston said in a news release.

The band has also developed a more mature sound, Johnston noted, honing their performance over the years.

The music will be interspersed with readings of Nowlan’s poems, as well as stories about his life.

“At the last show there were audience members who knew the Nowlan family and shared some of their stories as an impromptu part of the performance; this was quite magical, and hopefully will happen again.”

Stranger Still’s music can be found on all the major streaming services, and on the label’s Bandcamp Page: https://all-set.bandcamp.com.

The Windsor show, at 7 p.m. at 69 Cedar St., is $20 or pay what you can.