Toronto's Great Lake Swimmers play One Longfellow Square

Portland, Maine - The Toronto-based indie band, Great Lake Swimmers, play One Longfellow Square, 181 State Street in Portland, ME on Tuesday, October 2 at 8 pm. They have been compared to The Cowboy Junkies and Iron and Wine for their atmospheric, minimalist early sound that has developed in complexity over time. Lead singer and songwriter Tony Dekker has spent the last decade entrancing listeners with his unforgettable voice and compelling songwriting. Releasing five albums in just over a decade, the band has won a legion of followers throughout Canada and the States for their melodic indie rock powered by Dekker’s ability to weave insightful lyrics into deceptively simple, hook-laden tunes.

Paste magazine calls their new disc, New Wild Everywhere, "a treat of melodic proportions." The BBC calls it "gorgeous and rewarding." For a band who have become known for recording their records in increasingly out-of-the-way places, longtime Great Lake Swimmers producer Andy Magoffin was thrilled to be asked to capture the new album in a real studio (although there is one "field recording" on the disc, recorded in an abandoned Toronto subway station).

Magoffin recalls, “I finally got what I always wanted: Tony Dekker asked me to help his band make a record in a real studio. No extension cords, boat rides, generators, buzzing flies, squirrel noise, missing connectors, furnace cycles, motorcycles, faulty rentals, bad weather or bad headphone mixes to mess things up." Released in April of 2012, New Wild Everywhere thematically picks up where the previous album left off, exploring transcendence in the natural world to describe the universal themes of love, mortality and escape.

Their fourth disc, Lost Channels, debuted at #10 on the Billboard Heatseekers Chart and was a favorite among influential bloggers and NPR staff. The band has received public endorsements by the likes of Feist, Robert Plant, and cyclist Lance Armstrong. Josh Groban has been known to open his show with a Great Lake Swimmers cover, and the band has shared the stage with such varied artists as Calexico, Sarah Harmer, Bela Fleck & The Sparrow Quartet, Hayden, Sloan, Goldfrapp, and Bill Callahan of Smog.