Foster’s Dinner Concert Series continues with an evening with Jory Nash

Thursday March 28 dinner concert at Foster’s Inn features folk singer-songwriter Jory Nash for what promises to be an evening of uplifting music and hilarious stage stories.

Singer-songwriter Jory Nash returns to Stratford for the second in a series of dinner concerts at Foster’s Inn on Thursday, March 26. Enjoy a three-course prix fixe meal, then sit back and relax as the dining room transforms into a listening room with enticing music and witty story telling from the charming Jory Nash.

“I’m looking forward to coming back. I certainly have played Foster’s before and it’s a beautiful little venue and the food was lovely. It’s almost like in the ‘60s, dinner and a show,” said Nash.

Coming back is appropriate to say, as Nash left music behind in 2019 after 15 years of full-time creating and nine albums. The music business had changed and what had worked for him no longer gave the same response. Streaming had taken over and he became disillusioned with it all.

“As the business changed, downloads took over and now streaming. I wasn’t able to adapt. I kept clinging to this idea that the CD would sell and it didn’t. Everything that had worked for 10-plus years wasn’t working anymore and I wasn’t able to figure out the new paradigm and so my choice was to step away,” shared Nash.

He did what he could to make money, dabbled in the stock market, worked in the trucking industry, anything and everything he could to make a buck. Life threw challenges at both him and his wife to overcome and now that they have, Nash has returned with newfound passion and determination.

In 2024 he started doing some shows and followed up with a new album, his 10th, in October 2025. The album, The Light Still Shines on the Main is probably the most personal to him, covering those absent years and all that he and his wife faced.

“My wife is an artist, and she married an artist and of all, she was most disappointed when I stepped away. So, it didn’t take any convincing from her when I said I might like to try this again. She did say, don’t **** this up because you can only come back once. Do it well. Put everything you’ve got into it, and I took that to heart and I worked on the songs for a year,” said Nash.

He wrote about his wife, and her journey to cancer remission. While writing, his older sister was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer and passed away. He found himself on a sort of song cycle about loss and recovery, death and family and new beginnings.

“It became part of a whole cycle. I don’t tend to write that way, I tend to write songs and then you find the ones that work best together and you patch it together to make a record. This is the only collection of songs that really do have a cycle within the context of the album. It’s a classic album in the sense that it’s a really concise piece of art,” Nash said.

Time away has given him new perspective on what it means to be successful as an artist. He no longer measures success in the same parameters he used to make previous recordings.

“I’m really proud of it and people seem to connect in a way that has meaning for them, and that has meaning for me,” he said.

An album as personal as this one brings self-discovery, that he still had the ability to write songs. He learned that he could write in the first-person narrative without hiding elements of himself. It is probably his most raw, where he stepped away from his safe style of writing with success.

The Foster’s show will be a blend of new and old music, songs by writers he admires and a lot of anecdotal funny stage stories. His setlists tend to be quite fluid; he reads the room and plays what seems to fit the audience mood. Covers could include songs by Gordon Lightfoot, John Prine or even Smoky Robinson.

“The folk community used to have a lot more Barry (James) Paynes in it. People, local presenters who are artists themselves; people who put the energy and time to spreading the gospel of music in our community. So, when someone like Barry says, ‘Would you like to come play?’ It’s not just a no brainer for me, it’s an honour to be a part of something with someone who is just so artistic and community centric,” said Nash, of local promoter and musician Barry James Payne who is assisting in the dinner series.

Tickets are available for dinner and the concert, or the concert only and can be purchased online at www.fostersinn.com and select the menu option “Buy Concert Series Tickets.”