With this final summation, we’ve come to an end of these recaps. I don’t know if they have been enjoyable or annoying, but I’ve personally enjoyed writing them. We’ve each written some closing thoughts about our experience, starting with Andy, and we truly hope to be able to do it again next year. If you didn’t like any of this and/or were jealously avoiding it, we should get back to regularly scheduled programming starting tomorrow.

Andy: All told, I was very pleased with my NXNE experience.  My chief complaint – which isn’t really a complaint as much as it is an observation – is that there should be more shows during the day.  Dave and I would get up and have nothing to do until 7PM, when we headed out to our first show of the night.  I’m not saying that it’s possible, but having a few venues offer extended earlier hours – say, concerts starting at 2PM, would have been a cool thing.  I think we would have been able to see more bands that we had planned on.

Beyond that, I wish we wold have taken more advantage of the festival headquarters – but I don’t know what really went on there.  I guess I wish we had at least seen if it was worthwhile.  And, we should have gone to a couple of films.  I don’t even know when films played.  If it was in the afternoon, then we really missed out.

I was happy we got to meet up with Chris who runs The Ambitious C, but there were a few other people we should have tried harder to meet up with.  We were all busy seeing shows and interviewing, so I guess I can’t complain too much.  But it would have been nice to meet more of our fellow bloggers while we were there.  I liked seeing Toronto from a different side – not touristy, but how I would if I lived there – hitting good venues, seeing great bands, etc.  And I think that’s the point of any good festival to make the attendees feel somewhat at home.  I will definitely be back next year if they’ll still have me.

Dave: For Andy and I, spontaneity ruled the day throughout the North by Northeast music festival. We had designs on seeing any number of bands and showcases that never came to fruition due to a multitude of circumstances. Either a venue was too far away after a show we had just seen, or there were other things came up that were enticing enough for us to scrap our previously laid plans. The two of us are pretty easy going, and in reality we didn’t have many things we absolutely had to do. Therefore we mostly just went with the flow throughout the days and let things happen organically, making decisions as they came to us. To start we had a list of shows to choose from and a basic game plan, but as the saying goes, plans are made to be broken. I certainly would have loved to see The Besnard Lakes, Wavves, and Avi Buffalo, and I really wish on our last evening we had gotten in to see Surfer Blood along with Les Savy Fav. In the end however, I don’t think I would have changed anything that we did do, to experience something else we ultimately did not. I’m not a regrets type of guy, so I have truly nothing to complain about with this whole experience.

As made abundantly clear in previous recaps, we learned quickly that walking wasn’t necessarily the way to navigate the streets and venues of Toronto for this event. Toronto is expansive and filled to the brim with cool venues spaced out over the expanses of the city. The venues we visited were classics and deservedly so. Because of our Toronto connections we got to experience how the locals do things when an incredibly cool music festival comes to town, as opposed to being of being tourists. I only wish the vibrancy of the city, with its myriad of interesting stores, galleries, venues, pubs and restaurants, is something Rochester could match.

We had a great time meeting various people and hanging out with These Electric Lives in their element. We had some good beer, tasty food (poutine in particular), and saw some excellent concerts. We both had a great time and formed some good memories from our first NXNE experience. We’ve told a good number of stories thus far, but in closing we’ll give a final one that we thought was pretty cool, because remember, we’re just music fans who started a blog and were foolishly given some press passes to cover an amazing week or so of excellent concerts featuring a huge number of buzzy bands in a pretty cool city.

At the tail end of the Young Empires and Japandroids showcase, on our way out the door, Gary ran into a fellow he knew well and promptly began chatting emphatically with him. After speaking with him like long lost brothers for a few moments, we were introduced and the four of us made our way to the exit to begin the trek back to wherever home was. Gary and this friend were engaging in jovial banter while Andy and I trailed behind listening in on brief bits of their conversation. Eventually during our walk this guy veered off and left the three of us remaining on our own treks homeward. Gary then told us who the former member of our group was, Jimmy Shaw. If you have a few minutes take a look at the guy’s Wikipedia page to see how seminal he is in the Canadian and indie music world. Click through his web of connections there to learn how incredibly cool and influential he is in conjunction with how incredibly cool and influential the entire city of Toronto is in terms of the music we, and by extension, you, listen to.

We feel honored to have been able to participate in such a cool event and hope this is the beginning of something bigger for our site. Thanks for reading and indulging all of our write-ups and thinly veiled bragging. Until next year.

Broken Social Scene – Cause = Time (mp3) from You Forgot It In People

Metric – Help I’m Alive (mp3) from Fantasies

Sebastien Grainger – American Names (mp3) from Sebastien Grainger and the Mountains