The last time I saw Simone Schmidt sing was during 2012’s Poor Pilgrim, an annual all-day show traversing Toronto Island. There were a capella folk songs inside St. Andrew-by-the-Lake Church; later on, as the night’s last ferry approached, an R&B duo performed slow jams dockside. In between, not long before midnight, Schmidt stood on the steps of the Algonquin Clubhouse, playing a guitar as she drawled songs about humiliated mental patients and rueful addicts. Fire ants were crawling everywhere, intent on demonstrating the etymology of their name, but nobody moved.
The first time I saw Simone Schmidt was in a course on Romantic poetry at the University of Toronto; I’m not sure either of us finished it. But she was already writing lyrics for her country band One Hundred Dollars, poetic without the sense of someone flipping through a thesaurus: “The little lies, they don’t mean that much / Love me while you’re waiting on another.” The group brought that mythically Southern genre—its character studies in sin and desperation and solidarity—into a modern Canadian context, recording queer murder ballads or adopting the perspective of a Fort McMurray oil worker.
