At the Commodore Ballroom on Saturday, January 15

Folks, we just had our very first celebrity Payback Time, delivered live on-stage by Sarah Harmer. Midway through her set at the Commodore, the Ontario-based singer-songwriter told her audience, “I picked up the paper today and read something, and I thought I’d play something in response to it.” She didn’t mention this publication by name, but it quickly became obvious that Harmer was referring to last week’s Georgia Straight, specifically the Straight Choice highlighting her own concert. In that short blurb, someone who shall remain anonymous (not me!) touted Harmer as “Canada’s Queen Bee of Alt-Country”, noting that Vancouver has never produced any real contender for that title: “The best we ever managed was Oh Susanna, who, while admittedly great, has been entirely MIA since, well, forever.”

Harmer wanted us to know that, despite not having released any new music since 2007, ex-Vancouverite Suzie Ungerleider is alive and well and living in Toronto with her husband and child. Accompanied by only her own acoustic-guitar strumming, Harmer then performed a version of Oh Susanna’s “Home Soon (The Cherry Song)”. It was damn near perfect, apart from the fact that she started the second verse by accidentally repeating the first one, and then got so flustered by the error that she opted to start the whole thing over again.

Anyhow, now that I know Harmer reads the Straight—or at least the parts that mention her—I feel like I had better be nice. That won’t be hard, though. There’s not really much about the former Weeping Tile member’s Vancouver set to criticize. The unassuming Harmer is a thoroughly likable performer. She might be the quintessentially Canadian entertainer, in that she embodies how Canadians, rightly or wrongly, like to think of themselves: earnest, wholesome, and eager to please without being too flashy or obnoxious about it. The two folk-art-style banners that hung at the back of the stage—one depicting a crescent moon in a starry sky and the other an empty canoe on the shore of a lake—reinforced the home-baked flavour of the evening.

In some ways, Harmer is also much like how outsiders probably view Canucks. Which is to say, about as thrilling as an all-day Hinterland Who’s Who marathon. That’s not to knock Harmer (or Hinterland Who’s Who, for that matter). She has a lovely voice and an endearingly unpretentious stage presence, such that you can imagine she’d be pretty much the same over a pitcher of Nickel Brook Green Apple Pilsner at Ye Olde Squire. She also writes songs, most of them subtly melancholic, with very pretty melodies, which her band adds considerable weight to in a live setting. Out of the four excellent supporting players, it’s hard to pick the evening’s MVP. The rhythm section of drummer Kieran Adams and bassist Paul Mathew was rock-solid, and keyboardist Julie Fader’s vocal harmonies were superb. (Fader also receives bonus points for cladding her very pregnant torso in a Keyboard Cat T-shirt.) Guitarist Dean Drouillard gets top marks, however, thanks in large part to the searing six-string workshop he put on during “Basement Apartment”.

The woman whose name was on the tickets plays a mean guitar herself, as she demonstrated when she matched Drouillard’s lead work note for note on “One Match”. On a few numbers, such as “The Thief”, which opens Harmer’s most recent album, Oh Little Fire, things even got dangerously close to rocking out. And if you’re reading this, Sarah, I hope you take that as a compliment.