For nearly 18 years, Tim Hicks was a full-time touring singer-songwriter, playing mostly smaller local shows across Ontario. He worked up to to seven nights a week, playing house shows and bar gigs, but all that changed in 2013 with the release of his album, Throw Down. From there, Hicks went from being a local touring performer to national recognition as one of Canada’s top country singers.
All of those years on the road prepared Hicks for where he is now: a regular on country radio, preparing to embark on a headlining Canadian tour.
“One gig is worth 10 practices because something’s going to go wrong. You’ve got to learn how to field that kind of thing on the fly, like a broken string, or a bad cable, or a heckler in the audience—just learning how to be a performer,” he said.
Years of working around technical issues prepared him for where he is now.
At the Boots and Hearts Music Festival in 2016, performing for over 30,000 people, Hicks had issues with the earbud he wore to hear himself play. He then noticed that his bassist was also having monitor issues.
They both realized mid-song that they were each wearing the wrong earbuds, so they executed a quick switch that went unnoticed by the crowd, resolving the issue and continuing like nothing happened.
“Having gone through all the things that we had to go through in order to get to the national level, I think that a band with less experience might have crumbled,” he said.
Hicks has been playing with the same group of musicians for many years. Although there have been a few line-up changes, they’ve experienced a lot of success together. Hicks sees it as the success of his entire band, and the friends he has been playing with for many years.
“The core of the band has stayed the same, so it’s been a real pleasure to share that with them . . . being able to take my friends with me has been a whole lot of fun,” he said.
In December of last year, Hicks and his band braved out the -20 C weather at TD Place for an opening performance at the outdoor NHL 100 Classic game between the Ottawa Senators and Montreal Canadiens.
Hicks will be performing inside the stadium this time.
He says the he’s most excited about playing songs from New Tattoo, his latest record, which was released in June of this year.
Fans often ask Hicks what his favourite song is to play live. His answer is always: “whatever song we learned most recently.”
“I’m at the point too where we can switch up the set a little bit every night, add a song here, or take a song out . . . we’ve got a lot of songs now, with four records under our belt, so that makes it especially exciting,” Hicks said.
Although Hicks does a lot of touring and traveling to Nashville to work on music, he remains based in St. Catharines with his family.
Hicks says that he’s not looking too far past this upcoming tour. He expects to spend the early parts of the new year working on some songwriting for an eventual new record, but the Get Loud Tour is his main focus.
The only thing Hicks has planned is his intention to fulfill a promise he regularly makes to his family: “Whenever I go away for a tour where I’m gone for a month, when I get back, I have to take [my wife] and my kids and vacation, so we’ll be booking an all-inclusive sometime in January.”
Hicks returns to Ottawa on Nov. 8 for a show at TD Place.
Provided photo
