Aug 23 Rocking for a Cause

Written by Your Favorite Enemies. Posted in Uncategorized

Our summer was planned well in advance. It all started late in 2014. Before the year ended, we knew already what festivals we would be playing over the summer. Festivals are like that – acts are chosen way in advance, and you are deemed to keep everything secret until they announce it themselves. After spending so much time on the road in the last 3 years, the guys of Your Favorite Enemies wanted to spend a little bit of time at home. That, and they wanted to take some time to work on upcoming projects. In the beginning, only 3 festivals were planned. The “Rock Fest pour la Santé Mentale” wasn’t one of them. But when the organizers, Roger and Stephanie, invited us to play, told us about the festival and its meaning, there was no way we could say no. It was a little crazy schedule-wise, didn’t make much sense for us to play there. But we had to do it. The cause, Mental Health, was one that was close to all of us, for so many different reasons. And somehow, we all feel it’s a shame that so many people are still ostracized for things such as depression, anxiety, post traumatic stress disorder, eating disorder. They’re everywhere around us, and we’ve always believed music could bridge people together, could cross borders and crush self-imposed limits.

It’s with a lot of excitement that we drove the 2 hours separating Drummondville, where we are based, to the city of L’Épiphanie, where the festival would take place. A humble place, dimly lit as the sun was slowly going down, where music was loud, but a place where you could still sense the laughter through it all. A place that felt like family right away. This is what it felt like to me; these huge outdoor family reunions, where people usually gather around a campfire and eat corn on the cob. But this time, what was gathering people wasn’t any family bond. There was no need for that. What was gathering people was music, and this hope that something could be changed in this world, starting by our very own actions.

Your Favorite Enemies got on stage, filled with excitement and welcomed by the screams of the crowd. The show lasted for 90 minutes. And it’s been a wonderful 90 minutes. Meaningful, and powerful. I guess you could say that every concert from YFE is just that way. But that night, it was that little bit more special. It’s hard to explain, but I think that with everybody having the same desire in mind before the show even started made the flow of emotions even stronger than usual, right from the start. People were jumping in the crowd, Alex had a little boy get on stage with him, and as the show ended with the drums being dispieced and thrown into the crowd, one of the organizer joined in and did crowd surfing. The show ended in a rage of applause and screams for an encore. Unable to get back on stage, we did the classic YFE encore: spending time talking with everyone after the show! The band members took pictures, signed albums and t-shirts, and talked, talked, talked! Even though the show ended around 11:30pm, we didn’t leave until well past 2am.

We got home it was 4:30am. But somehow, even though the ride had been very long to come back, much more so than to go there, but we just couldn’t sleep. The tension was still too high! Thank you for making of this moment such a wonderful one, for making of the night one that will never really be over!

See you guys for the next concert, in Drummondville, on August 27th at the Festival de la Poutine! In case you do not already have your tickets, they are available here!

– Stephanie