Tim Hicks
Canadian Country Star Returns to Thunder Bay
Story by Kris Ketonen, Photo by Lee Zavitz
Tim Hicks has a straightforward answer when asked why country is his genre of choice.
“My last name is Hicks, so it just kept coming up over and over again,” he says, laughing. “I’m not even lying.”
But there’s a bit more to it than that.
“When I look back on it, the kinds of music that I grew up listening to—because I grew up in Niagara Falls and there was no dedicated FM country channel to listen to— but the kind of stuff I was listening to was the early 70s The Rolling Stones records, and The Band and Eagles and stuff that would be kind of considered country if it came out now. But in those days, we called it southern rock or roots rock or whatever. And Blue Rodeo is a great example of that,” Hicks says. “One day I woke up and Blue Rodeo was no longer on MuchMusic. They were on CMT, and it just kind of made sense.”
Meanwhile, Hicks would get plenty of country requests when playing bars in his early days.
“People asked me all the time, ’Hey, can you play Keith Urban? Can you play Brad Paisley? Can you do Johnny Cash?’” Hicks says. “I wound up with a repertoire, by accident, of country. I loved it because it was fresh to me. It just felt like an old pair of boots.”
It sort of took me 30 years to figure out where I belong as an artist, and that's on country radio,” he adds.
Hicks is scheduled to release a new album, the follow-up to 2022’s Talk to Time, this month. And he’ll be bringing his new music on the tour that will see him return to Thunder Bay in a few weeks.
“My whole deal is the live thing,” he says. “When I'm writing songs and I'm picking songs and I'm recording songs, it's all about how does this fit into the show, and where does it go? [...] And will it give me a sort of a new moment to either show the band off, or show my singing off, or complement something else in the sets in a different way?”
Tim Hicks plays the Thunder Bay Community Auditorium on May 24. For more, visit timhicksmusic.com.
