CanRock aficionados have been eating good over the past year, with celebrated concerts from Our Lady Peace (July 2025), Neil Young (August 2025), Sloan (March 2026), and Metric (June 2025), playing their complete 2009 album Fantasies to a sold-out crowd at the Amphitheatre With the Ever-Changing Branding.
About that last one: Metric’s once-in-a-lifetime, top-to-bottom performance of Fantasies last June also stealthily worked in another rare opportunity: opening act Sam Roberts Band, playing their own We Were Born in a Flame (2003).
While merely an opener then, it’s now Sam Roberts and friends’ chance to get in on the act, with their own headlining anniversary tour, showcasing the band’s stellar 2006 album Chemical City. We had a chance to check it out this past weekend at Massey Hall, where a visibly moved Roberts waxed poetic about the passage of time, about his ever-faithful fan base, and about looking ahead (to his next, as-yet unannounced, album).
Chemical City, inspired by the not-exactly-flattering nickname of Sarnia in southern Ontario, grew out of Sam Roberts’s interest in telling a story across a single, ten-track album.
Highlights include Canadian chart-topping singles “The Gate” and “Bridge to Nowhere”, though we’re more partial to the expertly-named “An American Draft Dodger in Thunder Bay”, with its tale of a Vietnam War draft dodger. Surprise guests – Dartmouth, Nova Scotia’s own Matt Mays, who (fun fact) actually appeared on a single track on the original Chemical City album – indie rocker Danielle Duval – made for a thrilling and unpredictable evening. The album’s final track, the forlorn ballad “A Stone Would Cry Out”, featured Roberts alone at the keyboard under the spotlight, with gusts of smoke billowing behind him. The audience lapped it up.
Much like Metric’s Fantasies program, Roberts, recognizing the forty-seven minute Chemical City was hardly enough to fill an entire concert, leveraged the moment to then launch into a greatest hits assembly of tracks covering nearly a quarter-century of music-making.
Highlights of the concert’s back half included We Were Born in the Flame stalwarts “Where Have All the Good People Gone?”, “Don’t Walk Away Eileen”, and “Brother Down”, alongside “Them Kids” and “Detroit ’67” (the two biggest hits off Love at the End of the World, 2008).
Probably the most exciting moment, however, was Robert’s second-ever performance of a track which just missed the cut on the original Chemical City, and which Roberts makes a strong case for inclusion in future performances: the lovely, lyrical, “Fall Before You Finish”. According to Roberts, the first run at Chemical City’s story generated slightly too many songs to include in the final pressing, and it was with some regret that “Fall” was left out. Here, at Massey Hall, it felt right at home – as did we all.
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Tickets for the Chemical City Anniversary tour available here.
