Indie pop with a side of Silly String, water guns and parachutes. Here’s why Rich Aucoin wants you to feel like a kid at his show

One of my favourite memories is walking into gym class as a kid and seeing a giant, colourful parachute spread out on the floor. I knew what came next: My classmates and I would run toward a red, blue, green or yellow wedge, lift the handles high above our heads, and lower the parachute around us to create a fleeting rainbow fortress.
It’s a common childhood experience — one that breeds a visceral type of nostalgia. And that’s exactly why I always start here when describing a Rich Aucoin show. If you keep the parachute but swap the gymnasium for a bar, the nursery rhymes for indie-pop mash-ups, and the children for a bunch of uninhibited adults, you’re close to understanding one of Canada’s most unlikely DIY scene institutions.
The Halifax-based Aucoin has been crafting his show for the last 15 years. In that period, he has cast his parachute for massive crowds at Yonge-Dundas Square and intimate groups in basement venues. He’s travelled to Australia, Asia, Europe and South America, hopping from cultural meccas like Berlin to remote islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean. With each iteration, he’s been tweaking and adjusting the formula.
“Right now, I can objectively say this is the best show it’s been of all the years,” Aucoin told the Star.
His signature performance has been a consistent comfort in an ever-changing industry, but it is headed for its final curtain call. When the artist’s New Nostalgia tour wraps in Toronto at Longboat Hall on Nov. 16, he’ll retire his parachute once and for all.
“This is a good time for this to end. I’d always intended to stop around my 40th birthday,” Aucoin said. “I feel like I’ve got more years left in me. But there are so many folks in the audience that I can see, when we move on to a seated show, will be ready to take a break from the kneeling and jumping up and down.”
Aucoin’s shows are cardiovascular workouts. Audience members are encouraged to sway, crouch and explode into the air between call-and-response singalongs. All the while, video projections create a sort of time-travelling journey through decades of film, TV and music. One moment you’re chanting about your capacity for introspective change, the next you’re screaming Smash Mouth’s “All Star.” If you’re doing it right, you should be drenched in sweat by the time the final notes ring out.
You can bet Aucoin will be. The artist’s commit-to-the-bit showmanship has proven infectious even to the most resistant of wallflowers.
“The way I present the show, there are elements that let everyone realize that we’re doing a thing. That this guy’s silly, but it’s OK. It kind of disarms people,” he said.
Not all audiences have welcomed Aucoin’s enthusiasm. He recalls playing before the Tragically Hip at Ottawa Bluesfest and having to cast his parachute among a sea of confused, seated concert goers conserving their energy for Gord Downie.
But it’s a level of discomfort the performer has gotten used to — a necessary asterisk for any artist operating on the fringes.
“I feel like I’ve always been kind of an outsider in this industry,” Aucoin said. “I think there was a moment when people were like, ‘Let’s see what this guy does.’ And then they realized, ‘OK, he’s going to stay DIY and weird.’”
“DIY” and “weird” are certainly two words to describe Aucoin’s approach. But if you whittled his creative ethos down to a mantra, it could also be: why not? Why not sync up your first EP with the 1966 cartoon “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” and get a cease-and-desist order from the Dr. Seuss estate? Why not embark on your first cross-country music tour by bike to raise money for the Childhood Cancer Canada? Why not have one of your shows narrated by an Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonator? Why not integrate a parachute?
Aucoin’s multicoloured trademark had its genesis in Toronto at a 2009 NXNE concert. At the time, he and his band were experimenting with ways to shake up their performances. There were midshow water-gun fights, confetti canons, 3D glasses, and that time everyone in the audience was handed a can of Silly String.
“We’d basically go to Dollarama and see how far we could get with 50 bucks,” he explained.
When he added a 20-foot parachute he found online for $90, the crowd’s reaction confirmed that he was onto something, so he went home and composed “Are You Experiencing?” a song “specifically written for the purpose of jumping around under a parachute together.”
Since then, Aucoin has gone through 11 parachutes, upgrading to his current 45-footer. (For those looking into parachutes, 45 feet is as big as you can get before going custom, as well as the largest that will fit into checked baggage.)
For many fans, these moments huddling under the parachute are the highlight of the night.
“It’s something you encounter with such strong memories as a kid, and then you don’t see it again. But this is the one spot where you’re still the kid,” Aucoin said. “The anonymity the parachute gives people also makes them feel like they’re in this private moment where they can let loose. No one’s going to be like, ‘Hey, did I see you jumping around all silly under there?’”
In person as well as onstage, Aucoin’s playfulness feels like a permission slip for those around him, a one-man antidote to pretentiousness. He acknowledges that many people have reached out to him crediting his concerts for injecting a sense of connection and positivity into their lives.
“I take all those messages, and I have a spot where I store them for fuel in the tank,” he said. “Anytime something has been rough throughout this whole endeavour, I’ve gone back to those messages and been like, ‘OK, I gotta keep doing it for this person.’”
But if his fans offer fuel, the industry guzzles it up. Over the past year, Aucoin has been open about his difficulties selling tickets for the American leg of his tour. He posted screenshots to Instagram revealing the number of tickets sold and how many remained, with captions like “High Ticket Warning in Effect” and “Just 995 tickets to go!” It’s an extreme level of transparency in a fake-it-till-you-make-it business, though Aucoin’s struggle is familiar to many indie artists.
“All this was built on word-of-mouth,” he said. “I never had to post about playing a show to sell tickets. It wasn’t on you, as an artist, to figure out how to cut through the noise and the algorithm. Now, you shouldn’t even bother touring until you’ve figured out how to get the word out to sell tickets.”
This shift is another reason Aucoin feels ready to close this chapter. The artist recently released a synth album, “Synthetic: Season 3,” and hopes to phase into more after-hours and electronic festival performances. He’s also looking to enter film scoring. In the new year, he’ll start brainstorming the new iteration of his live show, making the transition from standing sweat-fests to seated experiences.
“People are like, ‘Oh, it’s never going to be like this again,’” he said. “But just wait. In 2½ years, I’ll come back and we’ll be seated somewhere and you’ll get all the same feelings. But we won’t have to stay up until one in the morning at a loud bar with blasting music. Instead, it’ll be reasonable. There will be two screenings, a 7 p.m. and a 9 p.m. Then you’ll be home and in bed, no problem.”
In the meantime, Aucoin’s most pressing priority is his final parachute show in Toronto, where he’ll be playing with a full band and plans to install a 20-foot movie wall at the back of Longboat Hall.
“There’s an expensive confetti cleanup fee,” Aucoin said. “So I want to make sure we get our money’s worth. We’re just going to make a big old mess.”