It’s been a really good year, and one of the busiest for us on record. We recorded an album (more on that later!), attended a handful of conferences in Canada and the United States, did our first American tour, met a ton of amazing people and started making plans for next year. On a more personal front: Graydon has been writing a new book, Laura has been learning the piano, Alex opened a bakery/cafe (Bloomer’s on Bloor near Ossington, it’s amazing — just go!) with his partner Kelly, Shawn went to school to teach Montessori, John went back to Grad school to finish his Masters of Philosophy and Mike got a better job and bought a new house. Things change and things stay the same, because through it all we still managed to keep playing a heck of a lot of shows!

You may have noticed that we’ve changed our name. Well shortened it really, from “Graydon James & the Young Novelists” to the more brevity-friendly “The Young Novelists”. There are a few reasons for this, one of which is that we’re playing a lot more duo shows than we have in the past, and it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to bill them as Graydon James & the Young Novelist; singular. Laura is also sharing more lead vocal duties and it seems to make more sense to simplify the name. We will miss the ampersand, but the savings in font costs will be astronomical.

This year, more than any other, we’ve had so much support from friends, family, and fans, and we can’t can’t express how much that means to us. Whether you’ve come to a show, hosted a show, hosted a few Novelists on your couches and/or floor, sang along, played along, bought an album, watched a video, or told a friend about us it all adds up and often overwhelms us that so many folks care abut what we’re doing. You could be doing many, many things with your time, and you chose to spend some with us. We truly appreciate that and hope that we can give some small part back to you. Thanks for listening!

UPCOMING SHOWS

We’re super thrilled to be playing our next Toronto show at Lee’s Palace with two wonderful Toronto bands The Most Loyal and Tin Star Orphans. It will be our last full band Toronto show until our album release in May, so we hope to see you there. Doors open at 9pm, music starts at 10pm and we play at 11pm. You can find more details HERE.

We’re also very exciting to be playing the St. Lawrence Acoustic Stage series on Saturday February 7 in Morrisburg, Ontario with opener Nick Sherman. It’s a pretty big deal for us; this years series includes The Great Lake Swimmers, Madison Violet, and Chic Gamine to name a few and we’re very honoured to be a part of it. Doors 6:30pm/Music 7pm and you can purchase tickets HERE.

After that we’re headed to Kansas City where we’ve been selected to play an Official Showcase at the Folk Alliance International conference, where we’ll get to hang out with many of our American friends and a whole lot of hugely talented Canadians as well! Chris Hadfield is the keynote speaker this year, which is some kind of awesome, indeed. Maybe we’ll get to tour space one of these days?

And then we prepare for our album release in May. There will be lots more details to be released in the coming months about this, including how you can pre-order the new album (!!), but for now just keep it on the tip of your brain that we’ll be releasing a new 12-track studio recording titled “made us strangers” in the spring. Hope you and yours are doing fantastically well and that your new year is better and better!