Hamilton has always been known for its music scene. From blues singer Long John Baldry to punk rock groups like Teenage Head, musicians, and music have made their home here. But Andrew Baulcomb is charting a new group of performers in Evenings & Weekends. A generation of musicians that came of age with “renters and boomerang basement-dwellers,” those students who left university just as the bottom dropped out of the global economy.

Baulcomb starts the story in 2006 when he was the senior arts editor at The Silhouette, McMaster’s student newspaper, and singer Max Kerman pressed him one of his first CDs. He ends it when Kerman took the stage at Supercrawl with the Arkells in 2014 before a crowd of thousands. But the Arkells are only one part of the vibrant music scene Baulcomb captures in this book. From innovative DJs to venue owners to radio hosts to punk rockers, he interviews them all and weaves the story of an explosion of music in Hamilton with that of a generation adrift. This is a coming-of-age story that puts a human face on the people who made music happen, and on those who listened to it.