Beck’s radio-friendly poppy rock pub friendly as well

Craig Bakay | Feb 26, 2020

Charlottetown’s Rachel Beck is a former teacher who is obviously an attentive student herself.

Area music fans might remember her playing Blue Skies a couple of years ago as The Beck Sisters with her sister Amie but last Saturday night with her band Alicia Toner (fiddle/vocals), Kerine Bouchard (cello/vocals), Robin Ettles (bass) and Nick Coltas-Clarke (drums), she was a more pop-rock person than the folksy Beck Sisters.

Beck played an assortment of her own songs, including most of her latest CD Stronger Than You Know as well as some of her older work like Warrior (the video of which features one of her daughters). And listening to her music, you can’t help feeling there’s a little bit of Carole King and/or Joni Mitchell in there.

And there is.

“There’s a bit of throwback in there,” she said. “The songs have a poppy beat and they’re short (2-3-minute average) — more radio-friendly than a lot of music these days.”

Beck acknowledged the King and Mitchell influences, along with Annie Lennox, Fleetwood Mac and Sarah McLachlan but there’s also another one.

“My dad used to play in bands around military bases,” she said. “He was big into rock’n’roll, Clapton and Rolling Stones.

“So I used to listen to what he listened to.”

Just a bit of trivia for the fans — the people she jumps off a bridge with in the video Hearts On Fire aren’t musicians.

“They teacher friends of mine,” she said. “And we’re all wearing wet suits under our clothes.

“That water was like 4 degrees.”

Toner opened the show with her guitar-player fiancee Greg Gale and showed she can not only belt out a song with the best of them, she’s one kick-ass fiddle player as well.

Beck and her band made the Sharbot Lake stop in between performances at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa and Hamilton. She’s currently on tour all over Ontario before heading out west and then back home to the Maritimes.