Stewart Legere and Adam Warren Photo by Caleb Latreille
In the Summer of 2021 Stewart Legere was performing in Richie Wilcox’s play Good Grief at Ship’s Company Theatre in Parrsboro. He was staying just outside of town on a sheep farm, and would travel to and from the theatre on his bicycle while listening to music. “Adam [Warren] released a record called Love U Forever under his project called waants, and I listened to the whole thing biking to the market in Parrsboro, and I loved it immediately,” he says. “I loved the whole record. I didn’t want to go to rehearsal… I felt like a kid in the 80s. It was very Stranger Things. I was like, ‘I just want to bike around these misty fields and listen to this music all day.’” Then Legere was commissioned by the Theatre Centre in Toronto to do a project for a festival called Hybrid by Design, but during that time in the pandemic where things were just starting to open back up. He was also just about to go to Peru, and he knew that after he spent a month there he was going to be performing at this festival in Toronto, so he was working on his songs and stories, and he wanted to work with a different producer on each one. “They gave me a bit of a budget, so I reached out to Adam and I was like ‘I love your music. I love that album so much. Can we make a song together that I’m going to perform live at this [festival], and we can release it? And he was like-”
“Hell yeah! Thank you so much,” interrupts Warren.
Thus began an artistic collaboration between Stewart Legere and Adam Warren (waants) that has led to their new project- a new album to drop in late 2026 under the name NIGHTCHRCH, a new single out now called “is there a river?,” and a live show coming up June 6th, 2026 at The Carleton where Legere will do a set of his music, waants will do a set of his music, and then they will do a set together as NIGHTCHRCH.
Their initial collaboration for the Hybrid By Design festival was called “You Won’t Be Punished For the Lie,” and Legere says that from there they started to hang out together. “It was an easy hangout.. instant besties,” he says. They have played a number of live shows at Eastern Front Theatre for Valentine’s Day, and then a year ago in just two hours they wrote the bulk of what became “is there a river?.” “It came out so fast, and the way we collaborated was so easy and fun, and I think it was not that long after- and we both had a lot of projects and we’re all busy, and so [we are] really hesitant to take on a new thing- but I think one night, probably after a couple of drinks, we were like, ‘should we do this? Should this be its own little side project? And that felt exciting,” says Legere.
“We did the theatre thing too,” he adds, “We just booked a show. We were like, ‘let’s book a show, and that will drive us to finish some songs [and] release some things.’” He says that there is also a lot of food as part of their rehearsal process, and Warren adds with a laugh that there’s a lot of “elaborate sandwiches.”
On the creation of “is there a river” Warren says that it started with him going through the ideas he had jotted down in the voice notes on his phone. “I had something that I played on my little living room piano, recorded with the iPhone, brought into Pro Tools, [Stewart] made a melody instantly over it, and then we added almost like trap drums to it, and then kept taking it in different directions after that, like the acoustic guitar is something a little folky.” They have trouble narrowing it down to one single genre. “We experience genre in so many different ways, and the things that I might consider, you know, in film, to be horror someone else might [consider] a thriller,” says Legere. “It’s hard to quantify,” adds Warren, “It’s definitely a bridge of our styles.” “We just want to follow our curiosity and go like, ‘oh, it’s exciting to hear this noise…’ Adam is extremely talented and extremely fast at picking things and producing and engineering on the spot in the moment, and he can come up with a little beat and then record it really quickly and have it in [the computer], but there’s also instruments [in his studio], there’s drums, there’s guitars, and so then we’ll add that texture, and the acoustic guitar thing is obviously more from my folky world.”
Then Legere goes through his own Google Drives full of “half finished poems,” and even sometimes old tweets from Twitter’s creative heyday- dividing the work into pieces that he’d like to save for a bigger piece of writing and pieces that he feels moved to share in a shorter format now. “It turns out with this project we are actually getting to use a lot of those things [from our notes] that maybe we recorded within the last ten years and had nowhere to put [it], because I’m pulling poems together and Adam will come up with a little riff, a chord progression, and then I’ll hear a little melody and start pulling- kind of like Minority Report– I’m going through and pulling little things out of the air, and piecing them together and seeing what fits, and then by the end of the afternoon we’ve got a brand new song that didn’t exist before, which is kind of exciting. And I’ve never worked that way before.”
“It’s not always that easy or fast,” says Warren.
“There’s a lot of electronic stuff happening,” says Legere, “we still want to focus on songwriting as well.” He says that they have also had a back and forth on finding the best lyric, or focusing on the structure of the song. Legere says that it’s important that the song is “satisfying to sing live, and that it will be satisfying to hear sung live.” He goes on to say, “People who like the more quiet folky stuff will have something to find in this that’s something they can hold on to, and then people who aren’t in that world, are more in the kind of party dance synth pop world also have something to hold on to, and that maybe there’s a new thing in between- like the Venn diagram that’s for both.”
“It’s also kind of like the overlap between sexy and sad,” says Warren.
Legere says that for the show at the Carleton Warren will play his set as waants, he will play an acoustic set featuring some new songs that he just played for a show in Toronto, and then they will bring those two elements together for the NIGHTCHRCH set. “It’s almost like we’re just going to run face first towards each other with our styles, and that will be that kind of NIGHTCHRCH explosion,” says Legere.
They say that it took them eight months to decide on a name for their project and NIGHTCHRCH ended up coming from Warren’s cousin, journalist Maggie Rahr. “We have a Google Doc with three or four tabs: Long List, Short List, New Short List… I think probably at one point the longest list maybe had a hundred things on it,” says Legere. They can’t remember exactly what Rahr said to inspire the name, but Legere thinks it was something like that the music sounds like “going to night church.” “We both kind of were like this is it,” Legere says. “I think this is it… we both are night owls, there’s a little bit of darkness and sadness, but also like a joy. We both obviously find a lot of meaning and solace in music. It’s a form of worship, right? Going to a really good show can feel like a magical experience.” “Devotional,” adds Warren. “But neither of us are religious people- quite the opposite, ” says Legere.
Part of the ease in working together comes from how much Legere and Warren genuinely like one another.
“Working with fun people is everything,” says Warren, “it doesn’t matter what you’re doing. I work as a backline tech a lot in music as well and your best days on stage are the days when you’re working with fun, pleasant people that you have things in common with. It doesn’t always happen, but I would dig a ditch with someone as fun as Stewart, you know?” “And you may have to,” adds Legere. They both laugh.
They have plans to release another song and two music videos from the NIGHTCHRCH project throughout the summer. They have Stephanie Joline lined up to direct one of the music videos. “She’s rad. She’s a super amazing, smart, really talented, amazing filmmaker. She’s won a bunch of awards,” says Legere. She wrote and directed the mini series Women of This Land (2024), and she has also directed for This Hour Has 22 Minutes. “She was on the music scene when I first moved to Halifax,” says Warren citing the duo The Superfantastics where she played the drums. She directed Legere in the film Stream Me (2021). “I just filmed a little in the film of hers that she wrote last year,” says Legere…”we had a really great time working together, and she was like, ‘let me know if there’s anything [else] that we could do [together],’ and so I sent her a couple of our songs a couple weeks ago, and she heard one of them and [said], ‘I love this one. I want to start filming it right away.’” “It’s a pretty amazing gift to get out of the blue,” says Warren. Legere says that she has all these ideas and plans for how to start and is eager to begin work on it.
“Having my own artist project, one of the hardest things about it is you make music, and then release it, [and] you need all these companion pieces- it’s photography, video- all this stuff is not only expensive but time consuming. You have to hunt around and find the person that’s in your orbit, that’s willing to jump in and do it,” says Warren. “With the right vibe,” adds Legere.
They’re hoping to have the music videos released early in the summer before they both get busy with their solo projects. “We wanted to throw some balloons up into the air so that there’s something out there for people to experience while they’re living their best life in the sun, and then we’ll hunker down and finish the album, and then kind of as the days get darker, we’ll release the full [album] as a little cap,” says Legere.
“This feels like the music that I’ve always wanted to make, but couldn’t make on my own because a lot of it is not my particular skill set,” adds Legere. “I feel very similar,” says Warren, “because you singing takes it to a very different place, and you writing so much content, like the lyrics, you just write very differently from how I would write,” he says of Legere. “It leads me in a totally different direction production wise.” “There’s something about this that I’ve always wanted to do and I never would have done it on my own- and vice versa I guess,” says Legere, “… and there’s the food.”
You can catch the very first NIGHTCHRCH show in Halifax at The Carleton (1685 Argyle Street, Halifax) on Saturday June 6, 2026 at 8pm. Tickets are $28.50 and are available online here, or they are $25.00 at the door. The show begins at 8:00pm and runs 1 hour and 30 minutes with a 20 minute intermission.
You can find NIGHTCHRCH’s first single “is there a river?” on BandCamp.
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