Lowry Olafson entertained a small but enraptured audience at the Lethbridge Folk Club, Dec. 3.

 I caught much of his second set  which included  numerous new original songs and lots of limber finger-picking on his guitar.
His voice was reminiscent of Gordon Lightfoot.

 He told entertaining, stream of consciousness  stories and got the crowd singing along with a couple of his songs.
 One of the highlights was his  song  about a stallion called Paizan who stayed in his field home because of a knee high electrified wire, which he was hoping bassist Gord Maxwell, would pitch to Ian Tyson as Maxwell plays bass for him when he isn’t playing with Tyson.

“Ian wasn’t interested because he’s a great songwriter and writes his own songs, maybe one of you would like to cover  this song,” he joked with the audience of approximately 30 people.

 In addition to  playing several new songs and older songs like the  song about Paizan, he also created a beautiful instrumental on the spot, prefacing it with “Here’s an idea I just had,” before playing and looping a beautifully fingerpicked couple bars  of music, then adding several extra bars on the violin and looping them on top of it.

He talked about a new song inspired by reading the  book “the Power Of Receiving,” about the importance of leaving yourself receptive to to the signs of the universe and  accepting all parts of who you are including the parts you don’t like before asking the audience to give them the thumbs up or thumbs down for the song.

 He noted next year will be his twentieth year recording and planned to release his next album one track at a time just to  do something a little special.

 He ended the set by playing a Christmas song called “Christmas is Around the Corner” before being called back for an encore.