Sloan plays the Regent

Veteran rockers shake up the Monarch on Main

It was virtually a full house at the Regent Theatre on Saturday night for veteran rockers Sloan on their tour for their latest album, Based on the Best Seller. They received an enthusiastic welcome after they came on stage following the screening of a few short movie-preview- style clips promoting their latest release. They launched into full flight with a couple of tracks from this album followed by an eclectic selection from their earlier work, Their songs are typically short— around three minutes or under—but highly energetic, with a driving bass line and soaring guitar riffs to accompany the sometimes terse-and-to-the-point vocals. With a career spanning 35 years, the band has plenty of material to choose from. While there was some focus on their latest album—their fourteenth release—they played some of their better known songs such as The Other Man and The Rest of my Life as well some deeper cuts from the past. The band took a short intermission before returning to play a second set starting with their 2025 song, Dream Destroyer. The band asked everyone in the audience to stand up for their final song, Money City Maniacs, to bring up further the already high energy in the room. The audience wanted more, and the band came back on stage for a three-song encore. They sang the first song they ever played live, Underwhelmed, and the audience joined in exactly on cue. The band finished the night with a verse from The Good in Everyone.

Band member Jay Ferguson said he really enjoyed playing at the Regent. “I like playing the theatre- style shows. This was a nice old theatre to be in and it was a good crowd,” he said. The band was formed in Halifax in 1991 coming out of the underground music scene there. Mr. Ferguson and Chris Murphy started playing together in 1987 in the band Kearney Lake Road, and after that band folded they invited Patrick Pentland (from another defunct band) and Andrew Scott (a friend from art school) to form what would become Sloan in 1991.

“It was such a small musical community in Halifax back then. Bands would form and break up and reform. Everybody knew each other. This was the band that had an opportunity to make a record and play outside of Halifax and it snowballed from there” said Mr. Ferguson. The band took its name from the nickname of a friend who was known as “Slow one”.

The band is remarkable for its longevity, which Mr. Ferguson credits to the egalitarian way the group operates. “All the band members can sing and write music. It’s an artistic outlet for everyone. The revenue from playing shows, the songwriting royalties, all the money is split four ways. It keeps everybody in the same financial boat and we’re all pitching in for the same common cause,” he said. Typically, each band member will bring their music ideas into the group. That could sometimes be an almost complete song that just needs a few tweaks, or a partial composition that needs filling out. The resulting albums are more like a collection of songs, rather than having a particular theme. From the beginning of their career the band has released both vinyl and CD albums, and subsequently used digital service providers to get their music out to a broad audience. “We do a lot of specialty projects like limited edition live records or boxed sets. We manufacture those ourselves and sell them at shows or direct to fans via our website,” added Mr. Ferguson.

The band is in the midst of a tour through Ontario to promote its new album, and they are accompanied by the “new guy” Gregory Macdonald, who has been playing live shows with Sloan since 2006. Mr. Ferguson said that while there’s an emphasis on songs from the new album, the band recognizes that fans come to the concerts to hear some of their old favourites. “We’ll try to play the more recognizable ones, like The Good in Everyone or The Other Man, that are known to somebody who doesn’t have any Sloan records and might recognize those songs from the radio. But we also recognize there are a lot of people who come to see our band many times and maybe they want to hear something completely different, so we try to play deeper album cuts and different ones on each album,” he said.

After this tour ends, the band will start preparing for the summer music festival season. Before then, perhaps sometime in late May, they will have their Murderecords garage sale in Toronto. They will have vinyl records, cassettes, T-shirts and some limited edition items available, all sold from Chris Murphy’s garage. “It’s a hangout for uber Sloan fans,” said Mr. Ferguson.