ELORA – Moving to Elora in the 1970s as a child, Nathan Sloniowski found himself attracted to and embraced by the artistic but also downright strange characters who lived in the village.
Nearly 50 years after moving there with his parents, the folk-roots singer has released a nine-song album dedicated to the wonderfully weird Elora he grew up in and one he finds still has that same energy.
Sloniowski, now based out of Almonte, Ont., released his second solo album called thE LOst love letteR to smAll town which he described in an interview as a reflection of the time he spent growing up and visiting Elora and the area and trying to capture the characters and spirit of the town.
“I wanted to try to show gratitude for what Elora was an
d what it is,” he said.
As a child, Sloniowski moved to a farm across from the Elora Gorge Park in 1974 and at the time the town was a very small community of around 2,500 people.
“It was full of eccentric, artistic, strange, weird and wonderful characters and I was instantly attracted to that community of characters,” Sloniowski said. “They embraced a young kid who wanted to play music and wanted to hang out with the hippies and eccentrics. They let me in and I wasn’t the only one.”
The town has changed a lot since that time but that energy is still there, Sloniowski found.
He and his wife Glenna Watts, who is from Fergus and who he met at Centre Wellington District High School, went back to their hometown area for a year sabbatical in 2019 to reconnect with some of the people they grew up with.
“I was also able to connect with a bunch of people who still had that same creative spirit,” Sloniowski said. Once more, he fell in love with the eccentric and artistic people in the community.
“As a teenager, I felt that the community had my back as a person who wanted to develop their creative soul and when we went back in 2019, I felt exactly the same thing. I felt that the artistic community was still very much alive and willing to take in other people who wanted to join them.”
This was what he was looking to capture in his latest album which took inspiration from people like Kathy Sullivan, owner of West Mill Street’s Cafe Crêperie, inspired the song Kathy’s Cafe, Build an Ark about his wife’s grandparents taking in troubled youth and Bury the Hatchet about the rivalry between Fergus and Elora.
Sloniowski released his first solo album in 2004 but also plays in two other bands The Ragged Flowers, a neo-psychadelic folk rock band and The Maywoods devoted to the music of John Prine.
Sloniowski will be back in Elora, playing two shows on March 16 at the Cafe Crêperie with tickets going on sale in the near future.
