Time: 8 p.m.
Cover: $10

 Ian Kelly http://www.iankellysmusic.com/

It’s hard to get a read on Ian Kelly. And that, if you didn’t already guess, is a good thing. But let’s give it the old college try.

First-off, you might say that he’s the big guy with that unique voice – an unusual fellow who makes music that you can’t quite pigeonhole. It takes a while but eventually the intriguing arrangements, lyrics that stick with you and compelling melodies win you over. That’s what happened with his previous album Speak Your Mind. It was a real slow-burner, continuing to shift units more than two years after its release, going gold in Canada -– marking 40,000 copies sold -– just weeks before the launch of his brand-new third album, Diamonds & Plastic.

Ian has always done it his way. He’s from Montreal’s west end, with an anglo mom and a franco dad, but he grew up mostly en français, yet – just to keep us a little off-balance – he’s always written and performed in the language of Dylan. He says that’s just the way the songs come out. If you know Ian at all, you know full well the language choice was anything but a careerist move.

To muddy the waters further, he was actually born Ian Couture but took his mom’s last name early-on when he learned there was another singer sporting the same name. He started playing music as a teenager on his older brother's drums and quickly moved to belting out Pearl Jam chestnuts with his first band, Jim Bob and the flying chickens. A few years later, now out of school and working as a soundtech at Spectrum in Montreal, he bought a computer and started doing his own home recordings, a do-it-yourself approach that he’s never truly abandoned. He learned to play a bunch of instruments, not that he claims to be all that great on any of them, and he wrote, recorded and produced his first album, Insecurity, entirely at home on his own, playing every note on the disc.

Once he did that, he figured he might as well put it out himself, on his own label, appropriately named Me, Myself and I Music. The first proverbial big break came one night at Théâtre St. Denis when Ian was working on the local sound crew at an Alanis Morissette show. They were short an opening act and Ian volunteered. Soon enough, he was on stage and he suddenly realized – ‘Hey I can entertain 2,500 people. Maybe there’s a full-time gig for me in this biz.’

The second break came courtesy of the long-running Télé-Québec music show Belle et Bum, where he played shortly after the release of the first album. Audiogram head honcho Michel Bélanger happened to see the performance and he was mighty intrigued. He sensed an uncanny determination in this young man.

With his first real record deal in his back-pocket, Ian in typical fashion went and made another pretty-well do-it-yourself album – the difference was that it was DIY with more financial resources than the first time around. The result was Speak Your Mind, the ultimate sleeper hit, slowly but surely sneaking its way into our consciousness (and album collections).

That’s the one constant with Ian. He does it all intuitively. The formula is that there’s no formula.

It’s hard to get a read on Ian and that is absolutely a good thing.