What’s going on Thursday at the Calgary Folk Music Festival

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Get your Folk feet wet with a two-stage schedule of music.

The War & Treaty at Mainstage, 5:30 p.m.

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The husband-wife duo of Tanya Blount Trotter and Michael Trotter Jr. have quite the story: she performed a duet with Lauryn Hill in Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit; he learned the piano on an abandoned upright in Saddam Hussein’s palace while he was serving in Iraq.

Passenger at Mainstage, 7:50 p.m.

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The U.K. singer/songwriter a.k.a. Michael David Rosenberg hit it big with “Let Her Go,” which won the British Academy’s Ivor Novello Award for Most Performed Work. His latest album Runaway “draws on Americana”—his father is American and he would cross the Atlantic regularly as a child for summer vacations—with “some lap steel, some mandolin, a little banjo.”

Chad VanGaalen at National Stage 4, 8:35 p.m.

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One of Calgary’s top musical exports is always a welcome sight on local stages. Backing band The Bleach Wipes—Chris Dadge on drums, Ryan Bourne on bass, and Preoccupations’ Scott Munro on guitar—help VanGaalen bring his weirdo folk rock to life.

Alvvays at Mainstage, 9:10 p.m.

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The Toronto pop band’s second album Antisocialites is a collection of dreamy gems; it’s also a “fantasy breakup arc,” according to lead singer Molly Rankin, whose partner is guitarist Alec O’Hanley. “We’ve been sort of pulling each other over mountains for the last few years,” she told the Guardian. Finally, Thursday night is a cross-Prince’s Island musical reunion—VanGaalen produced Alvvays’ self-titled debut.

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