Blinking Lights and Other Revelations

Dust

2011-06-26T14:49:00.002-03:00

I was first introduced to The Sorrys' music during the course of what was ultimately a summer fling. I dated Aaron for a month or two, and it was the kind of quick, exciting relationship I used to have when I was younger. It was fun, and I felt young and happy while I was in the midst of it. I even chose to believe in its future, a boldly optimistic decision I hadn't made since I was in my very early twenties. But it did feel like a decision, as opposed to the outlook I'd brought into my much earlier relationships. Before I chose, I felt the nagging doubts natural to an experienced thirty-something year-old, particularly in Aaron's refusal to discuss the long and significant relationship he'd recently been in, or how that might still be affecting him. When it ended, as, duh, of course it did, I spent about a week feeling angry and sad, but I got over it. I didn't even miss Aaron, and I didn't want to be his friend. It was significant, though, but its significance was virtually unrelated to Aaron, and all about me. I felt possibility. I remembered that I was worthy; that I could be seen the way Aaron saw me, however briefly. And I knew that I didn't want light. And the two of us were definitely light. I wanted brutal honesty, but I wanted that to come with faith. I had always imagined these things in opposition to one another. I had been so doubtful of every romantic relationship I'd approached since I was 22, aside from this one, and including the one that lasted for four years. I decided, post-Aaron, that I would rather get hurt than enter everything with so much cynicism, despite the odds. 'Cause it's hardly possible to beat the odds if you go into everything so certain that they're stacked against you. And besides, however things ended up, I had a really fun summer.

That was also the first time I quit drinking with real intent. I mean, I had tried to quit drinking in the past, for set periods of time - a week or two that I never made it to. This time I was going to quit drinking for good, for real. It didn't work that time, but it set the stage for several months later when I did, with a lot of help, finally manage to quit drinking for good (hopefully!). It was an incredibly optimistic thing to do, and it came out of my decision to develop a more optimistic outlook, more generally.

The other thing I got out of that summer was my introduction to The Sorrys. And listening to The Sorrys on cd is great and all, but there's nothing like a live performance, something that took me far too long to discover. I was kind of nervous about going to see The Sorrys live, because I didn't want to run into Aaron and all those weird social dynamics. That's just not a way to live your life, though, if you're a music fan and you live in Halifax. This city is small, and your history is everywhere.

Jim, Steven, and Richard are great musicians, and they sound so together, but seeing them live, you also get to see how much they are enjoying playing together. They have so much fun! Even better though, is how they remove that line between performers and audience, inviting the people in attendance to truly participate in the event.

Trevor Millet is the best front-person in Halifax, maybe even in the country. He's entertaining and sometimes slightly offensive. He gets off the stage and wanders around talking to the audience while the rest of his band remains on stage. He drinks his band-mates beers. He is unpredictable, and he doesn't seem to censor his thoughts. He's so much more than that, though, and I feel really lucky to get to know him, however peripherally. He's a really great songwriter, and what makes him such a gifted writer is undoubtedly his genuine interest in the people around him. I get the feeling sometimes that he wishes he could be living parallel lives, that would afford him the time to really get into other people's worlds.

I've been going to watch bands since I was about sixteen, and I've been lucky to have had some favourite bands who have made me feel really appreciated as a fan. Certainly the most notable and constant has been Dave Bidini, of Rheostatics. But there's also, once you get to that level, a degree to which professionalism plays a role in being personable. Not that famous people have to be nice, or remember names, but it certainly makes for better press. When I was in high school, my friends and I used to sneak in through the back doors of Lee's Palace, left ajar by Dallas Good, of Satanatras, or Derek Madison, of Grasshopper,who found us underage fans endearing I think, who got excited by our enthusiasm. They weren't that much older than we were, after all. The way I felt then? That's how I feel when I see The Sorrys play. I love that I can be 35 years old and feel excited about hearing this super amazing band play songs that I love, and then sit down with them after the show and talk like we're friends.

All of that said, I don't feel like The Sorrys are on a different planet of awesome that is far, far away. They're grown-ups, with families and careers and responsibilities. They're grown-ups like the way I should be, could be, would be, if I had made different choices. I write songs myself, and Trevor likes my songs. I mean, he has really listened to and really appreciates them in a way that I don't think many people have or do. It means a lot to me that anybody could be affected by what I write, and especially somebody who writes great lines like, "I have an aversion to disaster, but I like the edges rough." The mutual appreciation makes the audience-performer line even blurrier, and I like that. It's more interesting, and fuller.

In my quest to live my life, and to experience relationships that are clear-eyed, honest, and built on understanding, while also being fun and exciting, I would like my soundtrack to be reflective of that as well.

*It has just been brought to my attention that the lyrics for "Dust" were actually written by Jessica Russell. I'm going to leave it here though. I almost like that it was a collaborative project even more than when I thought that it wasn't.

Dust - The Sorrys

The greatest lie that you ever told was in your laughing out loud.

The greatest sins that you did commit were always against yourself.

And in the end we all turn to dust.

Why don't you tell me, what was your rush?

The greatest pain was in your smile. I knew it was a lie.

But I always loved your smile, yes I always loved your smile.

And in the end we all turn to dust.

Why don't you tell me, what was your rush?

I Love You All The Time

2010-11-11T15:15:00.003-04:00

I got my first laptop in 2006, a wonderful Christmas/birthday present from my mother and my step-father. It was meant to be - and it was - a useful educational tool. I could bring my homework to the bar, afterall! That made me immediately more productive, for a bit, before things got too hazy.

It wasn't just my first laptop though, it was also the first computer I had that wasn't ancient, and slow, and reliant on a telephone line for access to the internet. I was a pretty late arrival to the internet party, but I jumped on board with a fair amount of gusto.

At the time, I was playing in a folk duo called nate and marcel, and of course we recognised that having some kind of precense on the internet was becoming a practical necessity. Myspace was very big at the time, not only as a site for hosting music, but for networking as well. It was a way to get information about shows and releases out to a larger audience, and was especially helpful for planning tours or out-of-town shows. In my initial attempt to create a myspace for our duo, I accidentally ended up with a personal, non-artist profile instead of the one that I'd been trying to make. But I held onto it, and it ended up being utilised far more than my professional one. I'll get back to that. That's what this entry is about.

And there was also halifaxlocals. The atlantic provinces seem unique, with their collection of related "music and skate talk" messageboards. I have sought out similar forums for other communities when planning tours, but I haven't found anything that compares to halifaxlocals.

When I first began posting on halifaxlocals it was to promote our shows, but it wasn't long after I acquired my laptop that I began reading and eventually contributing to other discussions. Halifaxlocals exists primarily as a tool for promoting local musicians and local performances, but that is certainly not all it's about. Everything gets discussed there, from local politics to favourite diners to cell phone providers. It's a helpful resourse, and most of the regular posters are exceptionally articulate, well-informed, clever, and funny, while also being very considerate. Above all, it is a community. It's a weird mixture of real-life and online community, given its regional focus. Most people seem to choose not to remain anonymous, and there's a lot of back and forth between people who are actually friends. These people actually do see one another in real-life. I have never met many of the posters on halifaxlocals, but I have met many of them, too, and there are a couple who are among my closest friends. These friends, we don't know each other because of halifaxlocals, we have just all found ourselves there because of our common interests. The messageboard seems to somehow both facilitate and maintain community, here in Halifax. It is almost always where I first hear about things I want to hear about.

There is another online community I feel a part of, too, and it is very different from halifaxlocals. It's sloppier, harsher, and much more abstract. And it isn't very useful, especially these days, or even as encouraging of intelligent discussion, but I really like a lot of the few remaining people who spend time there, and somehow, so strangely and slowly and inappropriately, that community has become a large part of my life. I am talking about the Myspace General Music Forum.

I guess I fell into it shortly after creating my band and my personal profiles. Aware, thanks to halifaxlocals, of the possibilty and functionality of online communities, I explored the forums on myspace, and I can't remember what it was, exactly, that pulled me in, but I'm pretty sure it was Beej, and The Chucky Danger Band.

There are few things I enjoy more than geeking out about music, and working in a record store, as I did at the time, I felt fairly knowledgeable about current music, especially Canadian music. Beej was a poster from just outside of Toronto who championed many of the bands I adored, and he was also a total jerk about them. He was a bully. He was unwaveringly devoted to his personal aesthetics and played a very loud and often cruel antagonist to anyone with differing ideas about good music. I think I sort of liked that. At least I found it somewhat refreshing in contrast to the incredibly inclusive atmosphere on halifaxlocals, where nobody is ever critical of local artists, with the notable exception of Bill Kidney.

The Chucky Danger Band had just taken home some awards during the East Coast Music Awards, and I resented this. I thought they were a terrible, completely uninspired band, and that there were so many other Atlantic Canadian artists much more deserving of recognition. The Chucky Danger Band decided to spam the General Music forum, and I sort of laid into them. It's not really like me. But Beej thought it was great. And there was and remains something in me - and I think this is pretty shameful - that really, desperately, just wants to be liked, by those intimidating figures with the confidence to let you know when they don't. It's like winning a prize. And I'll tell you, it hurt, when it seemed like he didn't anymore.

But that was just my in. There were a lot of neat people who posted in the general forum, of all ages and from everywhere around the world. Elias and Paul and Matthew and Amalia were all still in high school I think. I had a soft spot for Elias, who was occasionally sentimental and revealing in the midst of his posts about dark and harsh music. He seemed really innocent, and really vulnerable, and I remember occasions where reading the way he expressed himself would bring me right back to the way I felt when I was in high school. Disco and Bedbeats were the NICEST, most inclusive and mature people ever, without being too saccharine; still able to be clever and funny at nobody's expense. Except perhaps at the expense of the Acoustic forum. That night that Bedbeats, Johnny Rubber Maids, myself and surely some others tore into their "What's your favourite chord?" thread was one of my favourite times on the internet ever. Steve Zissou was incredibly cool, in sensibility and taste and expression. Philip and norm were older than everyone else, and they seemed older too; less concerned with hipness. There were some serious snobs in there, for sure, but almost everyone seemed very genuine.

I found out about a lot of new music through that forum. It was great. It seemed that the biggest band then, the most universally appreciated, was a band called Oh No! Oh My! And I liked them so much that I got in touch with the band and arranged to sell their cds on consignment at Sam the Record Man. I played them for my real life friends and we managed to sell out of the five cds they had sent within a week.

Then I left the forum for a long time. Several years. I guess I got more involved in real life. I was drinking a lot, and I had a very active social life that revolved around my favourite bar. It was probably some perceived sleight, though, or something that made me feel unliked, that mostly did it. I really can't remember, but I know how sensitive I am.

I have been an active participant in this community for several (nine?) months now, much longer even than the first time I stuck around. My participation in halifaxlocals had slowed down a great deal, but it has always been a constant. It's a different beast. It feels like myspace is dying. I mean, anyone could tell you that, but to look at it from the inside, it's a different thing, and I wanted to write about it, while it's fresh, and still something that I engage with.

The Myspace General Music Forum has a history. You still hear talk about what it was like back before the forum split. By this they mean that there used to be one music forum that was just called "General" until one day after logging in they discovered that it had mutated into a number of different subforums that divided genres and people who preferred metal to, say, electronic music. It feels like a mythology, and it always makes me think of that Sonic Youth show at NSCAD, back in the 80's, that comes up on halifaxlocals every so often. Where they played to something like ten people. Nobody was there, but everybody wants to claim it. Of course halifaxlocals has its own history too, its "guest book," sloan.net.

Then facebook came along and social networking moved over there. Then myspace stopped allowing links to outside sites for fear of copyright infringements, so general forum users were unable to share the music they loved. Which was the point. Threads and threads, every day, about brand new music, top ten lists, it used to be a music nerd's paradise.

Now it's like a wasteland; so slow, and much less empassioned.

On the internet, as in life, I am a creature of habit. I like familiarity. I like comfort. I like substance and understatement and honesty and beautiful, affecting, genuine things and people and spaces. I also like being liked. And I have thought many times about writing something about myspace, using oh no! oh my! But now, maybe, it feels like it's close to being time to go, again. Some comment by a poster I really like but never quite know how to take upset me a bit yesterday, and I had to ask myself why, and what I feel like I've invested in this and what I feel my returns are. I feel coolness and reception and I react to kindness and insularity and dismissiveness like in real life. Posters are people even when they're just represented by some words they've typed and words of course aren't the always-all-the-time-truth. It's harder to recognise sarcasm or teasing without gestures and facial expressions. And I err myself on both sides; I find myself overly apologetic or agreeable or else off-handed. And what I really want, everywhere, is a genuine connection, but what I end up striving for is just being liked, even by bullies I don't even like myself.

I have some forum "friends" on facebook now, which is neat. And I'm sending some Christmas cds out to some of them, which is also neat. I like that connections in an online forum can extend into the world at large, because connections, however and wherever you may find them are what it's all about. That and the music. But mostly I feel my time slipping away from me. I would rather be out there than in here if I am not being affected or active.

I thought I'd be much more specific about people and my involvement this time around, but it feels too weird and perhaps rude to be too analytical about other people when it's present. The new format is glitchy they say, I'll see, and so they're making virtual suicide pacts, trying to get banned, and just
falling
away.

I didn't think this entry would trun out to be so depressing.

*Beej wrote a song about the myspace general music forum several years ago.
*Doug Mason has a great song about halifaxlocals called "locals culture."

I Love You All The Time - Oh No Oh My

**I have decided not to type out the lyrics this time because I think they're kind of silly, and not relevant, but it's a really great song! Much loved by the Myspace General Music forum circa 2006

Gorgeous Morning

2010-09-25T18:10:00.002-03:00

I feel a little weird writing about Tanya Davis, though this blog entry is something that has been rolling around in my brain for years now, in bits and pieces. I feel weird because I know her – not at all well, only very peripherally – and I find her writing so emotionally and personally affecting that I actually feel sort of strange and bare when I run into her in Halifax. I don’t know of another songwriter who is so vulnerable in her writing, and I don’t know of another songwriter who speaks to me in quite the same way.

I was introduced to Tanya Davis’ music when I worked at Sam the Record Man. She brought in a copy of the recently released cd, “Make a List,” to be sold on consignment there. My friend and co-worker Jonathan suggested I listen to it; he thought I’d like her. “She calls these song-poems,” he said, rolling his eyes, and then he quickly added, “But it’s really good!”

And I couldn’t get enough. On days when I was confined to the third floor I would sit there and replay that cd for hours. I’d never heard anyone speak about loneliness that way. There was hope, too, and constant lists, so many lists, of reasons to do what you do, things you should be doing, ways that people can be known, ways in which they aren’t enough, all of the dark and light little corners of human experience seemed to there, spoken and sung in this fragile, honest little voice. It was truly revolutionary for me. It used to make me think about the excitement with which Jon Landau had famously declared, “I saw rock and roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” There was that same experience for me and I remembered why I loved music so much, why I felt such a connection to certain artists and songs. Sure, there’s nothing new about what Tanya Davis has to say. What’s new is that she says it with such earnestness, with such a lack of pretension or self-censorship that it feels so remarkably different from anything that anyone else is saying.

Tanya Davis has been getting a lot of attention lately, and this makes me very happy. The Andrea Dorfman-directed video for her poem, “How to be Alone” has been everywhere on the internet, and viewed/heard and enjoyed by bigshots like Roger freakin’ Ebert, even! This is not a sad poem and it is not about being lonely, despite what some critics have seen in it. But a lot of what she writes is about about being lonely, and about being sad, and I believe she does an excellent service for humankind by articulating these experiences so unself-consciously.

It is hard to pick, but I picked gorgeous morning, for “It wasn’t worth those happy breakfasts that I missed.” Truth.

Gorgeous Morning - Tanya Davis

some of the people thought that I was crazy
for leaving all that
but they didn't see me at seven in the morning
in the months before i left

within a few minutes of opening my eyes
there was the dread of the day
sitting by my bed waiting for me to rise
and pretend like everything was okay

and it makes for bad digestion when you are crying onto your toast
and if that's how breakfast goes you know you're in for it
but i had no intentions then, go to work and come back home
my feet heavy and slow every minute of it

i could be a person climbing up the ladder
and checking the right boxes
moving through the brackets higher and higher
with more gains than losses

and i could have a cottage in a pretty spot
and make it there twice a year
all the other months in the city with my job
and my money and my tears

the glory of the morning did fade and dim
where once it was my best love and i was so grateful for it
but those days working with no passion did change all of this
and it wasn't worth the happy breakfasts that i missed

so on one gorgeous morning i told them i was leaving
and it was so relieving to say it out
and i worked hard all afternoon and the weeks before the leaving
until finally one evening was my last walk out

Claire

2010-01-21T19:41:00.003-04:00

"Who the hell are the Howl Brothers?" I stared at the round piece of vinyl, knowing there was some kind of joke I wasn't in on. It was one of the first Rheostatics shows I ever went to, maybe my third or fourth, and as we made our way into the Bathurst Street Theatre we were all handed a recording of the Howl Brothers' song "Torque Torque." I don't remember how I learned the identity of the Howl Brothers - whether it was during the band's performance or shortly thereafter - but I soon learned that they were a fictional band created by the author of the novel Whale Music, and that The Howl Brothers actually were Rheostatics, and that this song was to be included in the upcoming film, Whale Music.

I did know about the book in a vague way. I knew that its author was a Canadian by the name of Paul Quarrington, and that the novel had been the inspiration for the Rheostatics album of the same name. I was very familiar with the album. It was, and remains, a favourite, and even by then I had listened to it so many times that I had committed each lyric to memory, sat in anticipation of the beginning of each consecutive song, was all set to switch to side "b" at exactly the right moment.

I went to that Bathurst Street Theatre show with a friend of mine from SEE School, a friend who was a million times cooler than I was. The drummer for Barenaked Ladies, Tyler Stewart, was sitting a few rows away from us, and I wanted to say something to him, to acknowledge his significance, here, because it was Tyler Stewart who brought me to Rheostatics.

I was a big Barenaked Ladies fan for a short little while. In grade eleven, when Derek worked at the Rogers Video at Dundas and Royal York, Adam and Jill and Maryan and Nicole and myself and/or whomever else was available would visit him there on slow nights, and we'd bop around the video store to that infamous yellow cassette. Everyone had a copy of that Barenaked Ladies tape. It was everywhere, along with the baseball caps. I wore my bright red barenaked cap with frequency and pride. They were also on tv a lot, and I swear, every single time I saw Barenaked Ladies on television, I saw Tyler Stewart wearing a Melville t-shirt. After a little investigation I learned this was the name of a Rheostatics album. And it's because of Tyler Stewart that I found myself at Sam's on Yonge street purchasing a copy of their brand new album, Whale Music. I had no idea what Rheostatics sounded like.

The rest is history. It's amazing, all of the things I could and will and have said about this band and their significance to me. It's frankly astonishing that this is the first blog entry I've devoted to them. Although I have written a song, an academic paper, and a facebook "note" that reads like a blog entry, back before I started this thing.

I did speak to Tyler Stewart that night, and I said "Thank you for introducing me to Rheostatics." That probably wasn't very cool, I certainly should have said something about his own band, even though I was totally over them by then. It would have been polite. He was nevertheless very kind to me, and told me I was welcome. I think he seemed really glad to have introduced a new fan.

***

Several years ago Rheostatics played a show at Reflections. It was very poorly attended, but I was there, of course, and with me was my friend Claire, who had never heard the band before.

Claire played cello with me. We used to be a folk duo called nate and marcel, and this Rheostatics show took place not long after Claire and I returned from a brief and whimsical tour we had gone on in southern Ontario. What was initially just a trip home I was to have taken with my father and his partner (now wife!) Susan, became a hastily-planned tour, with Claire and her enormous stringed instrument joining our party of three.

One of the funnest things about that trip was listening to music in the car. I had made many mixed tapes in anticipation, and collected all of my old, tried and true favourite mixes as well. The car stereo didn't work, but we brought along a tiny battery-operated cassette player that we managed to position atop of the cello in a way that ensured that it only ever fell over when we had to exit the highway.

Claire didn't know a thing about popular music. I was astonished when she had to ask me who was singing "Like a Rolling Stone." Though I suppose it all evened out when she laughed at my mispronunciation of Haydn. But she was the best to play new songs for! She really listened, and she loved hearing all of these new musicians. I got to play her all of my favourites.

Claire brought that same enthusiasm with her to that Rheostatics show. I don't know if she ever followed up with them, ever purchased any of their albums and listened to them at home, but she sure had a great time at that concert. Being an "Amelia," perhaps it is especially exciting to hear my name referenced, but I know it was also pretty cool for "Claire." I wish I had as cool a song with my name. It was so much fun showing this band to her, because a Rheostatics show is like driving through my old neighbourhood, for me. And where I live, with all of these great people I'd sometimes like to explain myself better to, we are so far away from my childhood homes. It sounds silly to say it, I guess, but there are things about my relationship with this band that are defining.

I read Whale Music. I read it in a basement apartment on Woodbine avenue in the year 2000. I liked it a lot. I thought it was well-written and funny, and I devoured it pretty quickly. It certainly didn't affect me in a significant way, though, not the book itself. But it goes like this: Paul Quarrington wrote a book about a fictional band called the Howl Brothers, loosely based on The Beach Boys. Rheostatics, inspired by this novel, named an album after it. When the movie Whale Music came out, Rheostatics were asked to do the soundtrack. Among other compositions was the song "Claire." The lyrics had already been partly written by Paul Quarrington. I took my friend Claire to see them play and she thought it was so cool that such a great band had a song called "Claire."

Paul Quarrington passed away this morning, and I am especially sorry for all of the people whose lives were directly touched by him, but I am also sorry for all of the people who didn't even know he was here. He really, really made a difference. Rest in Peace.

Claire - Rheostatics and Paul Quarrington

Purify me.
Purify me Claire.
Let me see you save a mind that isn't there.
Purify me.
Clarify me, Claire.

Liquify me.
Liquify these walls.
Let me see them gushin like Niagara Falls.
Liquify me.
Vapourize me, Claire.

Purify me.
Purify me Claire.
Let me see you save a soul that is impaired.
Purify me.
Clarify me, Claire.

Claire confide in me.

Happy Christmas (War Is Over)

2009-12-04T21:22:00.000-04:00

I just learned that Shaved Fish was released a month before I was born. So I guess it's no wonder that John Lennon's "Happy Christmas (War Is Over)" feels like it's been with me all my life.

There was a time before it felt like Christmas music was an enormous part of my life; before I could spend hours debating the best version of "Jingle Bells." (I still don't have a definitive answer to this, although Crash Test Dummies and Barenaked Ladies are both surprisingly good contenders.) But there was never a time that Christmas music was not a part of my life. It just used to be less like a favourite t-shirt and more like a dependably warm but unremarkable afghan.

There are a few exceptional songs, though, that stood out, for whatever reason, and that don't have to do with my life After Christmas Music but that resonate with me so much because of my exposure to them as a kid, surrounded by my family. 'Cause family is ultimately what Christmas is about.

I used to play this song every year, pulling out the cassette and placing it in the big black dual cassette player/record player/radio that was our stereo for as long as I can remember. Every Christmas morning, it was the song that I wanted to hear. I know I used to do this, because I remember remembering this. But when I think about this song, I'm not transported back to my home on Edgevalley drive, where I spent 11 Christmases, but to the house on Stoneham, where I only spent one.

Mom said to me once, "I was so proud of that house." She was talking about the way that things go, and about how sometimes you can be prepared to embrace what you get because you get what you need, and that's all that you were asking for anyway, and then be so ecstatically, wonderfully surprised by the fantastically rich, double chocolate cream cheese icing on the cake. She told me she didn't think she'd ever meet anyone, that it wasn't in her plan. She just wanted to be able to afford a modest home for herself and her kids and to have her independence. And she got it. The icing is a whole other story. A really great one.

My parents separated during the summer after my second year of university, that first time around, that time I dropped out, not really knowing why I was there in the first place except that it - university - seemed to be the thing to do. Their separation was hard on my dad. Really, really hard. It was hard on all of us in different ways, but for Mom it was also incredibly freeing.

I loved my Dad a lot, but he sure did stress me out. He was angry, incredibly self-involved, unpredictable. I suffered from the worst tension headaches as a teenager, and I'm convinced their virtual abandonment was not so incidentally related to my father's absence. [Let me say here, for the record: My Dad's changed a whole lot. And my Dad is a million times happier now than he was then. And although he had a rough go of it for a number of years I doubt that he regrets much of it because of how he can appreciate what he has now, largely because of it.]

The year I lived on Stoneham I worked at Chapters. It was great. Sometimes I think it was the best year of my life. I've never read so many books. I was surrounded by family, and friends from high school, and new friends I made at the bookstore. I felt like I belonged there, with my new bookstore friends; I've never felt so secure within an extended social group. Nearly every night we'd gather at Hemingway's, the bar across the street, after work to talk about ourselves and books and where we were going. I felt well-liked, and confident, for the most part. I had all this disposable income. And I felt hopeful. I don't know why, with all of that awesome stuff around me, I got it into my head that I should be somewhere else, but maybe it is exactly for that reason: It is very difficult to make a major life change when you don't feel supported or good about yourself. I decided to move to Halifax, a city I'd never even seen.

My favourite thing about that year, though, was getting to spend it with my mom. I got to see her happy and herself. It was like an enormous weight had been lifted off of her shoulders, and she knew that she was going to be okay. We had a lot of fun, spending time together as adults; having coffee together in the morning, watching and laughing about "Days of Our Lives" on occasional, lucky free afternoons. And we really talked. She helped my fragile, twenty-year-old heart when it got bruised. She picked my up from Katherine's house all the way in Rexdale! And she always kept the porch light on for me.

Shaved Fish is my Dad's cassette, but it got left behind, like lots of his stuff. My mom probably still has it in the same drawer in that enourmous black cassette holder that's always been there, except somewhere else.

On Christmas, on Stoneham, I remember running downstairs in the morning, fast-forwarding side b to the very last song and hitting "play." I felt like a kid and I still feel like a kid to hear it. It is mine and dad's and mom's and home no matter, wherever, I go. And that year, it felt especially joyful. Happy Christmas. War is Over.

Happy Christmas (War Is Over) - John Lennon

So this is Christmas
And what have you done
Another year over
A new one just begun
And so this is Christmas
I hope you have fun
The near and the dear ones
The old and the young

A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear

And so this is Christmas
(War is Over, if you want it, war is over now)
For weak and for strong
The rich and the poor ones
The road is so long
So happy Christmas
For black and for white
For yellow and red ones
Let's stop all the fight

A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear

And so this is Christmas
(War is over, if you want it, war is over now)
And what have we done
Another year over
And a new one just begun
And so this is Christmas
And we hope you have fun
The near and the dear ones
The old and the young

A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear
War is over, if you want it
War is over now

Merry Christmas

Ballad of the Devil's Backbone Tavern

2009-10-17T15:37:00.000-03:00

Several years ago I came to the sad conclusion that I probably wasn't really a writer. I mean, it's something I'll always do. I'll always write little songs and stories, but I don't actually have what it really, really takes. Confidence, nerve, and above all: Commitment. I won't quit my day job, and there aren't enough hours to do it any other way. I won't be miserable. I mean, I still work in a bookstore; not a government office. And I would be miserable and not quite myself if I wasn't compelled to embrace the bursts of inspiration that arrive happily and unbidden. Nothing is more satisfying than saying it how I mean to.

But there are brave souls in this world who have the confidence, nerve and commitment that I lack. And I would be far worse off if I didn't have them to read and to listen to. I can't even imagine the person I would be.

I have a lot of friends who make music in Halifax, and most of them do this in their spare time. Like a hobby, I guess I mean. Songwriting seems of a different order than most "hobbies" but maybe I only think this because I don't feel compelled to play hockey or knit sweaters the way I feel compelled to write songs. Maybe it's actually all the same. For those of us who don't abandon our day jobs.

But there are those few people who make it their livelihoods, and I can't give them enough respect for that. Like the two fantastic people who rolled into town last night to play a show at the Seahorse Tavern Not nearly enough people were there. Or, at least, there to see them.

The first time I saw Paul MacLeod and Lucas Stagg perform, I was working the door at Ginger's Tavern. I knew nothing about them, but judging a show by its poster, I already suspected it would be good.

Ginger's did not have a regular or walk-in crowd, and being one of many venues in a city that supports so many locally revered band and their fan bases, crowds were always hard to come by for a couple of unknowns from Ontario. But Paul MacLeod shouldn't have been an unknown. His impressive resume includes collaborations with members of Rheostatics, an album produced by Hawksley Workman, and a long stint as a member of The Skydiggers. It still amazes me that I had no idea who he was.

I liked them both so much before they even picked up their guitars. Both Lucas and Paul are genuine, interesting, entertaining people and conversationalists, who always maintain their positive outlooks and their curiosity about new people and places. I went downstairs and tried to convince friends and regulars to shell out the measly five dollar cover charge, eventually finding only two recruits. But being the professionals that they are, they nevertheless played their hearts out to the three paying members of their audience, and to myself at the door and Myndi at the bar. It could have been - should have been? - a disheartening experience for them, but they were obviously having a blast. Their tiny audience sure was appreciative.

I came really close to drinking that night. It was one of the two most tempting evenings I spent around alcohol since I quit, and I can remember so clearly my inner struggle. Because it was about - as was the other occasion - the best things about drinking. The way that it can - in early stages at least - foster community and comaraderie, make conversation easier, looser, the way beer can be both relaxing and celebratory. And it was about music and bars and I don't know that that romantising I do will ever quit. But I had a great time anyway, and without the regret that would surely have followed.

They came back a few months later and played three shows in town. I went out to their shows at Gus' and the Seahorse alone, but I convinced a few of my friends to come out to the matinee at the Carleton. Because, I suspect, that show was the free one. And I can't really begrudge people for that. It's hard to get excited about performers you've never heard before, and I can't state emphatically enough that there's no way in hell I would have attended many of the shows I saw at Ginger's were I not being paid to be there. So it's a leap of faith to see someone new, and despite recommendations, money is always an issue, and besides, there are always other, safer, shows going on.

But I kind of worried they'd never come back. A selfish worry, because I like hearing them play so much, and I like hanging out with them, too.

A few days ago their car broke down a couple of hours outside of Montreal, leaving them stranded, with expensive repairs to take care of, and forcing them to miss a couple of their shows. My anxious self would not have done well in this situation. I don't pretend to know Lucas or Paul particularly well, and surely they have moments or days where they consider packing it in for a greater level of security or stability. But it seems to me that more often than not, they consider themselves very fortunate to be able to do what it is they love to do. I would think it would be hard, to come out this way every few months, across such long expanses of highway and trees and sparsely populated communities, to play for only marginally larger audiences each time. But I guess that is how it's done. And I guess it is infinitely better than most things that people do to get by.

I should have probably used a song by Paul MacLeod or Lucas Stagg for this entry, but Todd Snider - he says it all right here, way better than I just did.

Ballad of the Devil's Backbone Tavern - Todd Snider

Old Miss Virgy tended bar at this shack out in the hills
It never made her any money, boys, but paid off all of her bills
Now she must have been 80 years old but her heart was warm
And her beer was cold
She gave away more than she ever sold
Smiling all the time

I used to sing off in the corner every Friday night
To a loud crowd of cowboys, bikers and bar room fights
They were drinking beer, carrying on, not a one of them listening to one of my songs
But old Miss Virgy sang along
She said she knew 'em all by heart

And then one night after closing she poured me another beer
She said "Come on over and sit down you little shit
I got something you need to hear"
She said "Life ain't easy getting through, everybody's gonna make things tough on you
But I can tell you right now if you dig what you do, they will never get you down"

She said life's too short to worry
Life's too long to wait
Too short not to love everybody
Life's too long to hate
I meet a lot of men who haggle and finagle all the time
Trying to save a nickel or make a dime
Not me, no sireee, I ain't got the time

Now I ain't seen Ol' Virgy in must have been about ten years
I've been bumming around this country singing my songs for tips and beers
Now the nights are long
The driving's tough
Hotels stink, and the pay sucks
But I can't dig what I do enough, so it never gets be down

I say life's too short to worry
Life's too long to wait
Too short not to love everybody
Life's too long to hate
I meet a lot of men who haggle and finagle all the time
Trying to save a nickel or make a dime
Not me, no sireee, I ain't got the time

Son of a Rudderless Boat

2009-08-25T18:29:00.000-03:00

I just got back from Ontario. I always leave that province with a little bit more inspiration, a heart that's a little fuller, and some more direction than I had when I arrived. After the sun came down somewhere in eastern Quebec, I tried to help keep the drivers - my father, his wife Susan - awake and motivated by talking and asking questions. We talked a lot, Dad and I, about leaving there to live here. We bitched about the cold, materialist certainty of grey, brick-buildinged Toronto, but we also talked about the smaller places in Ontario and in Toronto itself. Home in all of its personal enormity, as well as possibility in the immediate familiarity of towns and cities and neighbourhoods we could live, if we had to, for some crazy reason, leave this coast. The people we miss because they make us miss them so, because they love us and we love them so.

My dad parroted the old cliche, "Blood is thicker than water." But you know, you get older, it's true.

Watching people get old from afar is weird. Missing the years in between exploring the woods, climbing rock piles on sturdy legs, taking the boat out on the bay, and the slow and cautious, precious steps in smaller rooms than ever imagined.

I am so lucky to have had a relationship with all four of my grandparents. Certainly luckier than most. Even my grandmother - my active, playful grandmother - who died of cancer far too young, at 61, when I was 12 or 13, is someone of whom I have countless fond, funny, sweet memories. And maybe it is only because her absence allows me to romanticise our relationship, but that was probably around the time I stopped feeling particularly close with any of my parents' parents. I suspect it's more likely, though, that being a teenager had as much to do with that. And then moving three provinces away when I was in my early twenties.

Sean and I used to do this thing, when we were together, when one of us got back from a trip somewhere, where the returning person would be asked to state his or her favourite moment. And I know I should, you would think I would, say: Ted and Hayley's wedding, of course. Ted and Hayley's wedding was beautiful, perfect, a darn good time in every way imaginable. But I've got to give the Favourite Moment Award to the only time I cried during my trip to Ontario.

I have and always have had a different relationship with my mother's parents than I do with my father's parents. Neither relationship is more or less significant, just different, because of who they are and who I am.

For a lot of years I don't think I felt at all close to Granddad, my father's father. Neither he nor my father are the best at keeping in touch, and I saw far less of him after his wife passed away. And besides, Grandma and Grandpa - my mother's parents - had the cottage. We'd spend week-ends and even weeks at a time there, with them, every summer. But I really don't think it's just circumstance and proximity. It's my Granddad, too, and I think I have finally pinpointed it. Granddad talks to everyone, young and old, without reserve, without censorship, with criticism and intelligence and honesty. And in turn, I feel that I can speak to him that way. That I would not have to be polite if it were at the expense of being genuine.

My mom's parents, on the other hand, are people I sure as shit wouldn't swear or smoke around. Which is not to say they're especially proper or anything. But when Granddad, a few days ago, requested that I play that song with the line about masturbating, I happily obliged, before imagining Grandma and Grandpa's horror-stricken expressions should I perform the same song for them. Never in a million years.

Grandpa took me fishing on Georgian Bay, taught be how to bait a hook years before I became a vegetarian and had the only fight I remember having with him, which is likely why it seems so particularly painful when I conjure the incident up in my head. Fighting with my grandfather about his going fishing, on the front deck that he built. Self-righteous tree-hugging teenager I was then.

Grandma held me up the window at their condominium in Brantford to watch the trains go by, read me books, sang me songs. She was always singing. Her voice has this integral, soothing, sing-song quality even, so that when I imagine her voice it always sounds like a tune, and which my mother has undoubtedly inherited. These two Sellar women, they have always made me feel safe.

No one knows what people will take from them. They just put themselves out there the best they know how. There are incidents I remember so vividly as speaking so clearly of their individual characters, and all the while they are and were carrying their own histories and relatives who began long, long before I did. It is probably in their sons and daughters that I know them best.

In Burlington, Ontario, my mother and I had a brief visit with Grandma and Grandpa at the retirement building they now reside in, until they or someone else determines that they are no longer capable of residing there alone, without assistance. That time is coming soon. Grandpa moves slowly, Grandma can't remember to take her medication. They don't want to let go, and who can blame them? The visit was less personal than it might have been, because my mother and I brought along an old friend of theirs, who had moved his travel plans around so that he might spend the afternoon with Frank and Jean Sellar before leaving for China. Gerry, this friend, lives in England, and hadn't seen them in twenty years. In the meantime, he had lost his mother (who lived to be 97!), his wife, and, tragically, his youngest son. At 70, Gerry is a good fifteen years younger than my grandparents, but must nevertheless be feeling his age in ways that he didn't a decade ago.

"China!" Grandpa exclaimed. "Aren't you tired?"

"Frank," he said, "Of course I'm tired. But I want to keep going, for as long as I can. Because I know all too well that one day I'll have to stop."

Granddad was in the hospital for two months earlier this year. He was fainting all the time, and no one could figure out how to stop this from happening, and no one wanted him to leave the doctor's constant care. Except for Granddad, who figured that if he was going to die, he would much prefer dying in the comfort of his own home, being able to see Dog Lake from his bedroom window. He and his wife Anna live at the end of a series of unpaved roads, a half hour drive from Kingston, Ontario. Granddad is lucky to be able to afford this financially, and to have a healthy, willing, and able wife to assist him.

He is still fainting all the time. It is such a terrifying struggle to help him down the stairs, even on the lifts that have been installed there, as I witnessed on Friday, when the four of us finally did help him downstairs and into the living room for the first time in two weeks.

But he doesn't seem old at all.

A few months ago, I wrote a song about my grandmother's death. More about my grandfather, really. Outside of the condominium they lived in in Mississauga was a small house that was always locked. Granddad and I would take walks around the grounds - the garden, the fish pond, until we would finally come to that house, and peer into the windows, imagining what it was used for, or who lived there. The first and only time I ever went inside was for the reception that followed my grandmother's funeral, and I sure wished it had remained a mystery.

The song came up in conversation with Anna when she, Dad, Susan and I were sitting around the kitchen table on Friday morning. "You should tell your grandfather about it," she said. And I really, really wanted to, but I just didn't know how appropriate it would be. "It's sad," I said.

And so, "It's sad," I said to Granddad, as I took out my guitar, upstairs in his room, just a few hours before I was to leave this province and these people that I am made of.

But some things are sad. Lots of things are sad. I couldn't get through the song without crying, but I couldn't stop either. Granddad was tearing up. And Anna, too. She was Grandma's best friend. And she is Granddad's wife. And no one, no matter how much they are loved, and needed here on this earth, gets to live forever that way.

It was a moment. I'm so glad I could let my grandfather know how much I love him, and that I could see how much he loves me. And if I have to say good-bye, I'm glad I could say that too.

And then he asked me to play the masturbating song.

Dad and Susan and I outwitted a tornado in Ontario, beat a hurricane in Nova Scotia, driving all night. We told stories about ourselves. My father's voice is so much like his father's.

We opened windows and played cds to stay awake when we ran out of questions, or one or two of us passengers began to fade.

We listened to Kev Corbett's brand new album, "Son of a Rudderless Boat." We heard "The Driving Song," taking the same route, as though it was written for us. And we listened to "Son of a Rudderless Boat," and with new ears I felt light and lucky, and so happy that it was my father up there in front of me, driving me home, persevering, saving us from the storm. "Row hard, in this rudderless boat," I was thinking, as the sun began to rise somewhere in New Brunswick or Nova Scotia.

**I didn't format the lyrics like I usually do, not because I'm lazy, but because I asked Kev to send then to me so that I didn't have to listen over and over and over again and type them out myself (because I'm lazy), and he was happy to oblige, and I like they way they looked, in paragraph form, so I kept them that way.**

Son of a Rudderless Boat - Kev Corbett

Grampa sailed a dory; he fished upon the sea. And though he knew what he was for, he didn’t know just what to be. He lost his arm at a logging camp. And up ‘til he died, he still chopped his own wood. He told me a story ‘bout going out with a new guy in the boat and when they got out on the water new guy just sat there and choked, so back inshore later on Gramp says, b’y, you can haul that fish yourself. We’re all scared out on that water, but next time you can swim, or you can help. He said, gotta work hard, gotta pray hard and just try to keep it strong and if you want to work with me man, gotta pull that weight along ’cause by the Father and by the Son and by the Holy Ghost, by the angels and the saints and by the heavenly host, by the fields of grass that bore me, and the sea that awaits I know I got no control, but I will fear no earthly fate. From the ocean we did come, and to her we shall return. She puts the fire out in us when our souls cease to burn and so to find true love and tend it is your only hope. Just give up the ghost, man. You’re a son of a rudderless boat.

My father tried his hand out as a fisher of men It was at least one job for a papish boy from the steel plant back then but he jumped that ship, I guess, left his robes upon the ground and I, for one, am glad he did, musta seen this gig comin’ round. He’s a student of his time, a renaissance guy to be sure. He lets me hoist myself, but my ears ring with his words: Son, I pray that you grow to be a very gentle man with Respect for those ‘round you and respect for the land ‘cause life don’t owe you another 10 seconds, you already got today but I believe it comes around if you treat the World that way and everything you need to know you learn from watching others fall but you’ll rejoice in their successes if you really heed the call. You’ll choose the high or the low road when life has you by the throat. It’s a choice we all get to make. We’re all sons and daughters of a rudderless boat.

I’m learning to love the Winter. Spring ain’t too far away.

So my paddle hits the water and I’m off among the trees. And I’m just lucky to be here, living like this in times like these I feel the weight of the whole world in all the choices that I make under the gazes of our mothers, and environmental stakes. By my unborn children, by the lepers in the streets, by the world already drowning in pools around our feet, may we come to patch this leaky boat that we’re all here sinking in and stop making up some right to throw the weaker ones in. By the earth and air and fire and water lapping at the shores all our spirits are the same and all our hands are on the oars. May we come to fix this tired old world before we drown in smoke. I’ll do my part. Row hard, in this rudderless boat.

Love This Town

2009-07-16T23:47:00.000-03:00

Joel Plaskett is a pretty flawed songwriter. He's written lyrics that make me blush, cringe, and shake my head. He needs an editor. His friends should have told him about how lame it is to rhyme "extraordinary" with "ordinary," and not to have included this couplet in the chorus of one of his songs. One of his biggest hits, as it would turn out. It's not even a rhyme when it's the same word! And come on, Joel, you don't have to deconstruct the word "extraordinary" for us! Give your fans a little more credit!

But then again, I kind of think this sloppiness is endearing. Cute. Genuine. And I somehow let it go, with him. I don't think I'd let anyone else in the world get away with the stuff I let Joel Plaskett get away with. He's one of my favourites, and I think he's one of the best. In spite of.

I tell a lot of people, when asked, that I moved to Halifax because of Sloan. Which is the short answer. Sloan and most of the other groups who made up the scene that had been touted as the "next Seattle," and which I'd romanticized in high school, had broken up or moved to bigger centres. Bands like Eric's Trip, Leonard Conan, and jale. But Joel Plaskett's band, Thrush Hermit - I got to be here for the end of them.

The very first time I saw Thrush Hermit play was in Toronto, at an early Edgefest being held at Ontario Place. Their whole set consisted of Steve Miller Band covers. It was awfully unexpected and hilarious and fun. The next and only other time I saw them was for one of their last performances, at the earliest incarnation of the Marquee, about a year after I moved here.

Joel, he keeps high school close and, well, I do too. I don't know what it's about. Not having kids? Not having grown-up responsibilities to keep my self-indulgence at bay? Or maybe I'm not that special, and it really is a universal thing he's tapping into. Maybe so many of us are so wistful about our pasts, our "glory days" as New Jersey's Plaskett might say it.

Another thing I love is his consideration of place. It wasn't long after my friend Tim copied his Smeared cd onto a cassette for me that Sloan were high tailing it out of here. It's not just in this one song that Plaskett asserts the importance of remaining in Halifax/Dartmouth despite the city's small size. ("All my friends, where did they go?"/"To Montreal, Toronto.")

When Joel Plaskett played "Love This Town" last night, he changed the last verse. He gave Kelowna a break after Kelowna gave him one. He said he "wasn't afraid to change [his] tune."

It's been more than a decade since Sloan recorded an album that impressed me, even a little. Plaskett, he makes me shake my head sometimes and then two minutes later he makes me want to call an old friend from high school, or else walk these friendly, familiar Halifax streets.

I can't think of a better or more appropriate location at which to watch Canada Day fireworks than in Dartmouth, at Alderney Landing, listening to Joel Plaskett play his songs about this place.

Canada: it's a fine country. I'm glad I live here because it means I don't have to go through customs when I want to see my mom or the mountains or the prairies. But it was a sense of civic pride, not national pride, that I felt on Canada Day, looking up at that stage, and then across the harbour. It's not about why I came, but how I came. And it's about why I stay, most of all.

***

I have several half-finished blog entries. I've got to get something out. So I'm just getting this out there, knowing I hit some sloppy notes but also knowing I got it right in some places, and I think, considering, that this action is fitting.

Joel Plaskett opened up for great big Paul McCartney last week-end, in little old Halifax, and a field full of impassioned music lovers sang along to this tune, nearly drowning him out. I hope Paul was listening.

Love This Town - Joel Plaskett

Listen up kid
It’s not what you think
Staying up too late
Had a little too much to drink
Walked home across the bridge
When the Marquee shut down
There’s a reason that I love this town

Nobody cares how much money you have
If you’ve got enough to get in a cab
There’ll be drinks on the house if your house burns down
There’s a reason that I love this town

I saw your band in the early days
We all understand why you moved away
We’ll hold a grudge anyway

I shot the shit with Miniature Tim
If he needs a tune, then I’ll write one for him
We like the same books and we like the same sounds
There’s a reason that I love this town

I played a show
In Kelowna last year
They said pick it up Joel
We’re dying in here
Picture one hand clapping
And picture half that sound
There’s a reason that I hate that town

If you saw my band in the early days
Then you’ll understand why we moved away
But you’ll hold a grudge anyway
Because it’s fun

Davey and me
Face down in our soup
In some French restaurant
Outside Riviere Du Loup
Last night out on tour
We burned the place to the ground
There’s a reason that I love this town
There’s a reason that I love this town
There’s a reason that I love this town

At The Airport

2009-04-09T18:40:00.000-03:00

I used to say that my friend Andrea Lindsay and her boyfriend-turned-husband Guilhem were my favourite couple in the history of ever. There was all kinds of romantic about the way they defied the odds and their geographies and managed to remain together. But it wasn't just that. It was the way they were together; the way they amused one another. The way they matched each others wits and always looked to be having the best time they'd ever had.

Andrea was my roommate during my second year of university. She slept on the couch in our living room because our other, mostly absentee, roommate Kim wanted to maintain some kind of claim to her bedroom. It was clearly a front; a way in which to insist to her mother, who often visited, that she was not in fact living with her horrible boyfriend Josh. I was lonely in September, with Kim mostly away, and with Anne, my only other real friend in Sudbury, still living on campus and not venturing far from it. Andrea's own experience living in a large house populated with girls I'd known from residence was also isolating. Sudbury was a hard place for us and our somewhat snobbish southern Ontario airs. We became fast friends, intuitively, and figuring out, in November, a way for us to live together for the remainder of the school year was, despite typical roommate issues, no small saving grace.

Andrea was at Laurentian University for two reasons: because she could major in vocal music there and, I think even more so, because they had an exchange program with a university in France, where her boyfriend lived. Their meeting was seemingly both fated and brief. Guilhem had been a French exchange student at the high school Andrea went to for her OAC year, although he had attended the school the previous year and before Andrea had transferred into it. In the meantime she had gotten to know Guilhem's old friends, and they were introduced when he came to visit the following year. I think they knew each other for about a week before he returned to France, but they stayed in touch and made a commitment to one another, taking such a brilliant leap of faith. I can't even imagine.

Laurentian University got rid of its exchange program and Andrea left Sudbury to finish her education in her home town of Guelph. For years, Guilhem and Andrea flew back and forth to see one another over holidays and summer vacations. I first met him during the summer following our year in Sudbury, when I spent a week-end with them in Guelph. And I understood immediately how there are things that are worth that amount of trouble. Andrea's an exceptionally clever and funny person. She's engaging and silly and just plain hilarious and it was hard to imagine how she would find an equal; someone who could light up a room and draw your ears and eyes so easily and earnestly. Guilhem is perfect; every bit as quirky and smart and open. It was the absolute opposite of being a struggle to make conversation with him. And every one of the handful of occasions on which I've found myself in his presence - and on his couch - it has felt like he too is an old friend.

Guilhem has since immigrated to Canada. The two of them have been married and living together in Montreal for years now, and I think I will be devastated if they ever break up!

I said that I used to say they were my favourite couple ever, and that's because I've decided that I feel ready to pass the torch onto another brilliant couple whose relationship I actually get to observe as more than a very occasional house guest on my way through Quebec.

My brother Ted and his finance Hayley are the new champions. Their relationship, while certainly not filled with the kinds of obstacles confronted by Andrea and Guilhem, is also pretty unique among the many couples I've gotten to know. They are honest to God high school sweethearts whom I'm pretty sure have never even been on a date, never even kissed another person in their whole lives. I used to think it was weird, that surely they both must want to experience other relationships, or even to have some more time to explore their own interests as single people. But that probably just stems from some sub-conscious jealousy about how they managed to get so lucky so young.

I've been fortunate to have Ted and Hayley here in Halifax for the past twenty months, while they both attended school out here. I haven't made the best use of this opportunity, I suppose, and I am a bit regretful about the times we should have spent together. They're both leaving in less than three weeks, to go back to Ontario, where they will surely reside, together, forever. But the times we did have were wonderful. I feel so grateful for the opportunity to have gotten to know Hayley as well as I have. I used to think she was shy but I don't anymore. I love seeing them together. I love that my brother is with the kind of person who would totally be glad to have me sleep on her couch, and with whom I could converse for hours, hardly noticing the time at all. She's smart and curious and easily entertained, and no one amuses her more than my brother. Is that the ticket? Being able to amuse one another for the rest of your lives? If that's marriage it sounds like a whole lot of fun.

Ted and Hayley are getting married this coming August, and they're searching for a first dance song. Why they don't just dance to their song, Queen's "Your My Best Friend" is beyond me, but I suppose that in their otherwise fairly untraditional wedding they would at least like a somewhat traditional - at least slow - song to which to have that dance. So of course I volunteered my time and my music collection and spent last night making a cd of potential first dance songs.

It was way harder than I thought it would be. Of course I couldn't include most of my favourite love songs, which are usually either a little bit dark or else of the nostalgia variety. And even happy love songs that describe situations or characters so far removed from Ted and Hayley's experience had to be eliminated. Which means all of those thanks-for-saving-me-from-all-the-crappy-things-that-happened-before-I-met-you songs were out. And really, that doesn't leave a lot. I did come up with enough to compile a cd for them, and one of the songs I included was Old Man Luedecke's "At The Airport."

I have such a clear and embarrassing memory of seeing Old Man Luedecke play a show at Ginger's just after Sean and I broke up. I mean, the events of that evening aren't all that clear. I don't remember if it was immediately after, or if it was two weeks later, after my return from a much needed week with my Mom, in Ontario. I'm not totally sure that Sean was there too but I believe he was. I know it was while we were still living together on Allan street. I know I had to go back there that night. I remember sitting up close to the stage, and that the venue was fairly empty, and it was like Chris Luedecke was singing directly to me. Which must have been very uncomfortable for him because I was bawling my eyes out and completely wasted. My very clear memory is of how concerned he seemed about me. The room seemed so small and I felt so alone and terrible and lost and his concerned expression was a small but remarkable comfort. I must have stopped crying, but I stayed, and I listened to every song. He is, after all, the kind of authentic folk singer it is difficult to turn away from.

Now, I don't know Chris Luedecke very well, but he has always struck me as being a worrier. In fact, I am pretty sure that at some point during every conversation I have ever had with him he has expressed concern about something he felt he should be doing or had not done properly. I could win medals in Worrying Events were they to be introduced, and I hope they never are, because I obviously don't need another thing to worry about. I'm extremely confident in my ability to freak out about inconsequential things. But I think Chris Luedecke would make for a pretty mean competitor. I think a part of having that kind of constitution involves having a difficult time with acts of faith. Not that faith is impossible, but it is rare and, for me at least, almost always counter-intuitively second-guessed. So it makes me really happy and hopeful that a guy like Chris can write some of the songs that he does.

I like to think that I'm open to the possibility of wonder and whimsy and - yes - true love, even as I get older and more distrustful and more isolated and self-involved. It's refreshing to hear love songs that are just about love; not obstacles or regret or fear or character building. It's a bold kind of honesty that I defensively shrink from with explanations and apologies.

Oh, Ted and Hayley are lucky, and I think they should dance like robots to Queen not even if it might make them laugh during that very special moment, but absolutely positively because it will.

At The Airport - Old Man Luedecke

Oh the static of our phone calls,
Coming down like brick walls.
And you're so beautiful I can barely see you.
It's like we've never touched,
Our kisses long but rushed
And your cheeks have never seemed so serene.

At the airport, at the airport,
There's kisses there that cannot be believed.
At the airport, at the airport,
There's kisses there whose memory never leaves.

And in the baggage line,
I'm in another time,
But mostly all we can really say is "Hey."
But I get to take you home
Where we can be alone,
It's better than any Christmas Day.

At the airport, at the airport,
There's kisses there that cannot be believed.
At the airport, at the airport,
There's kisses there whose memory never leaves.

Oh the static of our phone calls,
Coming down like brick walls.
And you're so beautiful I can barely see you.
It's like we've never touched,
Our kisses long but rushed
And your cheeks have never seemed so serene.

At the airport, at the airport,
There's kisses there that cannot be believed.
At the airport, at the airport,
There's kisses there whose memory never leaves.

Left and Leaving

2009-03-01T16:39:00.000-04:00

I have such a heavy heart these days. If I think about it too much my eyes tear up and I have to find a corner to hide in. And I can't avoid it; I stand on that street to smoke, I walk down it to get to and from. I think about places I could go to eat my lunch, places I could sit and read when my work day is done. I wonder where or if I will meet my friends. A lyric from another Weakerthans song hits me over and over: "A spectre's haunting Albert street." If anyone loves a city like I love Halifax, it is John K. Samson (Winnipeg). And Barrington street, like Albert street, is haunted by the things that it has been. Worst of all, there is nothing I can do.

The block of Barrington street between Prince and Sackville streets is my turf. It is my neighbourhood more than any neighbourhood I have ever paid rent to live in. And of course it is not the buildings but the people within them who create community, and when the buildings are left vacant, there is nothing to foster that community, is there? Brick and wood are assigned the characteristics of the people who inhabit them, and it is such a tragedy to look through tears in paper covering glass, to reveal empty spaces that used to be filled.

I first got to know Barrington street in the fall of 1997, when I worked at United Bookstore. The manager of United Bookstore, Dave, is still one of my favourite people in the city, and we still see one another nearly every day, for brief moments that never cease to brighten my day for our easy familarity; his relentless and fond teasing. We talk about music and books and people we both know. When I first moved here and only knew a handful of people, he invited me to spend holidays with his family. He told me stories about his own history in Halifax, a transplanted Torontonian himself. He still tells people about how he taught me how to change a light bulb. United Bookstore does not only sell books. They also sell junk food and cigarettes and bus tickets, so there were customers we would see every day; friendly faces from the offices upstairs in the Roy Building, who became part of the scenery; part of the community that I was also a part of, of people who spend their days in down-town Halifax.

When I moved back to Halifax in 2001, after my brief return to Toronto, I spent a couple of months waiting for Sean, my then-boyfriend, to join me here. He sent me a series of mix tapes during this period, that each included at least one song from The Weakerthans' recent album, Left and Leaving and at least one song from Sarah Harmer's recent You Were Here. It's remarkably coincidental that both album titles so explicitly refer to space and time. And if it isn't intentional, both records nevertheless feel like concept albums, exploring the respective speakers' personal spaces. I always placed You Were Here alongside of my relationship with Sean, from the basement apartment he inhabited on Woodbine Avenue in Toronto (the apartment that always smelled of bleach, as described in "Basement Apartment") to the eventual knowledge of his infidelity ("Coffee Stain") , and all of the good stuff that came between and after; like it was written for us. And while You Were Here seemed to have a lot to say about my interior life, Left and Leaving spoke to my surroundings and my ideas of "home." These songs were wonderful gifts, through the mail, from the town where I was born, to the town where I chose to live.

It is funny, because I have always had the strangest relationship with Left and Leaving. Sometimes, I swear it is the best album ever written. And on other occasions I am so irritated by its intentional cleverness. All last week, I kept singing those songs to myself.

The Barrington street location of Sam the Record Man closed its doors on February 20, 2007. I worked there for a couple of years. Sean hired me, several months after we broke up, and I maintain that it was the best possible thing for our relationship. It helped me slide into a friendship, our relationship changed necessarily by our new boss-employee relationship, and by seeing each other, all the time, in this brand new context. The store's closure was sudden and shocking, but I could hardly say entirely unexpected. Everyone who worked there knew it was pretty amazing that we all still had jobs. Record stores were on the brink of disappearing. It was a hard blow for everyone who cared about music. The building was a landmark, and everyone who grew up in Halifax seemed to have recollections of purchasing favourite albums there or seeing local bands performing in-stores. For a week my co-workers and I put merchandise in boxes and boxes on trucks and congregated, afterwards, next-door at the Granite Brewery to grieve over pints of Peculiar. If we were not all friends, exactly, we were all familiar, and of course nothing was ever going to be the same again. We would see one another infrequently. We would miss and be missed, and it was so sad, saying good-bye.

There are things about working on Barrington street that seem inconsequential but that are actually enormous. Buying cigarettes from Dave; buying my coffee from one of several people whose first names I know, at Just Us! coffee roasters; the deaf man rumoured to have been a former boxer, who asks for change at the corner of Prince and Barrington, who tells all the women he loves them, and jokingly threatens to fight all of the men. And until its closure one week ago, there was the Granite Brewery/Ginger's, where I not only worked the door on many nights when there were performances upstairs, but which I also relied on to be a meeting place or at least a place where I could spend my lunch breaks in warm company, with coffee and a book.

There is another entry for the Granite, and surely one for Sam's, because they are too big on their own. But they are also inseparable from my experience of Barrington street. I was introduced to a lot of friends in that bar, and I got to know a lot of other friends more intimately there. It was wonderful to walk into the bar and see staff from United Bookstore, Sam the Record Man, Just Us!, Neptune Theatre, and JWD (where I now work), all enjoying the personal relationships they had with that space, and watching relationships develop with one another. Of course the alcohol helped foster much of the camaraderie, but I haven't had a drink in over seven months, and I still feel like a piece of my heart is being ripped out and trampled on.

I love my job. I work in the coolest used bookstore in the history of ever. But I worry about my security there, about the security of that street and the small businesses that make my neighbourhood what it is. I worry about the paper-covered windows; the buildings that stand vacant for months and years.

And I don't know what to do with myself. I feel aimless. I know I can call people on the phone, but it isn't the same. I miss the organic nature of the community that the Granite Brewery allowed. The best things about this city are vanishing. I miss my friends already, and I feel like my home is slipping away.

Left and Leaving - The Weakerthans

My city's still breathing (but barely it's true)
Through buildings gone missing like teeth.
The sidewalks are watching me think about you,
Sparkled with broken glass.
I'm back with scars to show.
Back with the streets I know
Will never take me anywhere but here.
The stain in the carpet, this drink in my hand,
The strangers whose faces I know.
We meet here for our dress-rehearsal to say " I wanted it this way"
Wait for the year to drown.
Spring forward, fall back down.
I'm trying not to wonder where you are.
All this time lingers, undefined.
Someone choose who's left and who's leaving.
Memory will rust and erode into lists of all that you gave me:
a blanket, some matches, this pain in my chest,
the best parts of Lonely, duct-tape and soldered wires,
new words for old desires,
and every birthday card I threw away.
I wait in 4/4 time.
Count yellow highway lines
That you're relying on to lead you home.

Galbraith Street

2009-02-01T15:49:00.000-04:00

Like the speaker in this song, I've lived in many homes on many streets, and said several sad good-byes. But Van Dusen Blvd: None compared to the good-byes I said there.

When I was nine years old, my parents purchased a much bigger house in a much more upscale neighbourhood and residing there, as I did, until I was twenty, Edgevalley drive of course felt like home, but when I think of my childhood, it is to the red brick home on that dead-end street that I immediately return.

225 Van Dusen Blvd. was the middle house on a dead-end street, nestled in between the Tracado's and the Chalk's homes and across the street from the Lundy's. Delta Tracado lived on the corner of another dead-end street, and when I crawled through the hole in the wooden picket fence that divided our properties I was only a few steps away from the mountain deposited by the snowplow, out of which we would make fortresses and ammunition. Behind the pile of snow and the imposing fence was a factory that we only imagined. The factory at the end of Van Dusen, alternately, was easily visible through the wire fence, and it clearly belonged to Canadian Tire. It must have been noisy living where we did, but I never recall the noise of trucks and work as a nuisance; more as the natural soundtrack to the chaos of childhood.

We had a backyard big enough for a small metal swing set and gymnastics routines and the forts that my brother Geoff and my neighbours and I would make out of found cardboard boxes, usually acquired from the forbidden factory property. Geoff and I have enduring memories of the acquisition of said boxes. I remember how Delta and I would taunt him relentlessly. I remember asking him to sneak through a hole in the fence to retrieve a cardboard box I had spotted, only to turn around and tell my mother that he was disobeying her by trespassing onto the factory property. One time, Delta and I hid him in her basement insisting that the cops were looking for him and the property he'd stolen. We made him be quiet and fearful for hours while we laughed at his expense. On one occasion I even made him wait up until the wee hours of the morning to attempt to retrieve the soccer ball he'd kicked over the fence in our backyard during the daylight hours. I told him that it was the only time of day during which the guards were on their breaks.

But often, Geoff and I were on the same team. Such was the case with the ball tree we planted in Sarah Lundy's yard. The tennis ball miraculously sprouted beach balls and soccer balls while she was asleep at night. We were all friends when we skated on the rink the Lundy's would make in their backyard. I remember pushing one another across the ice in big plastic garbage bins.

Delta's house always smelled exotic. Her parents had accents and the Portuguese food they cooked made her house smell different from my own. And they had plastic covering their furniture! I don't know how that fit into their perceived foreignness, but it certainly was different from my own home.

My father would take Geoff and I for walks, across Islington avenue, to the very end of Van Dusen Blvd. and to Mimico Creek. Often, he called these "quests," and he created characters we would encounter along the way. Or we would walk in the other direction, through the industrial landscape, often collecting bits of discarded plastic that we called "sparklies."

Cats were a big part of living there. Xerxes was my companion for my entire life up until that point, and he even made it to Edgevalley Drive with the rest of the family. But there was also Sparky, the stray cat who disappeared as mysteriously as he'd appeared. For years Geoff and I wrote letters to Sparky and threw them out onto the lawn, hoping he'd receive them and return to our home. Instead, several new strays would appear in Sparky's place. My mom had a particularly soft spot for the cat with one green eye and one blue eye, whom we alternately called both "Whitey" and "Dirt Pit."

The garage at the end of our gravel driveway was painted two very uncomplimentary shades of green. (When I walked by the house a couple of years ago I was shocked to see that the garage still retained that colour scheme!) Delta and I plugged my portable cassette player into the outlet there and we made up gymnastics routines to Madonna's Like A Virgin and performed these for my parents. I never mastered the back flip. I can still feel the pain of landing flat on my back on the hard ground.

I remember walking to Islington school across busy streets, holding my brother's hand, past the subway station and the Ship Centre, up the metal stairs to Cordova Ave. I felt an immeasurable sense of pride and responsibility. We walked past the insurance building that my father had made me fearful of by insisting that if I went on their property they would paint me green. (I'm sure you've forgotten, Dad, but I never did!) Past Kenway Park, where once a year the employees of the Bell telephone building would have a family party that the neighbourhood kids got to attend.

There are so many other things. There were so many other kids.

My brother Ted was too young to have any real memories of Van Dusen, but I'm so glad that Geoff can still recall some of them. That is the best thing about siblings - having someone with whom you can share that perspective. Nobody else will ever know me like that.

Galbraith Street - Ron Sexsmith

I woke up on Galbraith Street
Where the houses stood like twins
Oh and even though the door's been closed
I can find a way to get back in

For in daydreams my mind returns
Like a ghost upon the hill
As I knock upon old doors again
And find my friends all live there still

So many good times to speak of in a life
But none compared to the good times I had there

The world looks so much brighter when
You believe in every word
Now I'm holding on to all those years
Like a tear before it falls unheard

So many goodbyes to speak of in a life
But none compared to the goodbyes I said there

The sun went down on Galbraith Street
I saw it from my childhood bed
As the red and gold brick houses stood
Underneath a crimson sky that bled

Carey

2009-01-24T11:56:00.000-04:00

It's the summer of 1999. Joni Mitchell's Blue is playing on the tiny record player that sits atop of Karen's refrigerator in her apartment on Summer street. She and her two roommates have turned their living room into a third bedroom to save money, to all live together, so the tiny kitchen is where they congregate; where they entertain friends when they come over. And the kitchen is tiny, and usually cluttered with dirty dishes that they are usually warring about.

The weather is perfect. Just outside the kitchen door, we smoke cigarettes on the fire escape with Karen's neighbours and friends and we look down and across at the graveyard while Kitty's meows compete with Joni Mitchell's voice and the sunlight to try and figure first in this memory of this perfect summer day.

Everybody Karen was friends with was a student then. Everybody except me. But I would finish work at two in the afternoon and have free time like students and I was student-age, so I reaped some of the benefits of living within this young city, this enormous student ghetto, without actually having to write essays or study for exams or owe the government tens of thousands of dollars.

I was friends, then, with a ridiculous number of people who suffered from mental illness and/or substance abuse in very pronounced ways that were very new to me and also, I must sheepishly admit, very exciting. I was also friends with a lot of hippies. Like, serious hippies. The kinds who live off the land in places called things like Gandhi Farm. (Honest. To. God.)

Karen and her friends, maybe because they were in school and had that focus, were a lot more stable than most of the other people I was hanging around with then. And believe me, they weren't that stable. Karen would have gotten along wonderfully with most of my friends from Toronto, but I know she thought that Butterfly and Kenova and Skylark were all pretty weird, and I don't think she quite trusted any of them.

Karen stole my boyfriend from me, is how we met. Some months later she approached me at a party we were both at and invited me out for a "coffee" at the Grad House. I went because I was totally curious, and knowing Karen now, I am sure her own curiosity is what initiated her request. We drank beer instead, and the rest is history. A very significant chunk of my history with Halifax and its people can be traced back to that meeting.

I really liked Karen - immediately, intuitively - from the first time I met her through our common ex, in the slightly glorified rooming house they were both staying in above Bob & Lori's Food Emporium. But it took me a long time to really trust her.

She was such a King's student. (For non-Haligonians: King's College is a university in Halifax that's affiliated with Dalhousie. Its Foundation Year program is one of those Great Books things, and all first year students skim very quickly through many of the texts considered canonical in the western world. A lot of King's students come from private schools, and a lot of them come from Ontario. They seem to like to talk really loudly about how smart they are. A lot of them dress like hippies and have the kind of naive sense of social justice that is borne out of having lived a very privileged and entitled life. To be fair, they are also, usually, eighteen years old.) Karen would throw around a lot of big names in a way that struck me as being kind of obnoxious and intentionally intimidating. It also made me feel incredibly insecure.

But Karen was no hippie. And she was no entitled private school kid. And she was not easy. I know she struggled with a lot of personal issues. And she did some pretty unconventional and interesting things, like taking a semester off to go live in Yellowknife, NWT. Stuff like that surprised me about Karen. We spent one Valentine's Day at a strip bar (The Lighthouse, RIP). In fact, for a month or two we hung out there once a week, 'cause we thought it was a pretty funny thing for us to be doing, until it just got depressing.

Karen was also a gossip, and maybe that made me hesitant to trust her. She was fascinated with other people's lives and wanted to know everything.

But all of these concerns, every last one, are ones that I have about myself.

I think that, a lot of the time, I felt kind of together and responsible around my really messed up friends, and I think I sometimes felt like kind of an aimless fuck-up around Karen.

Mostly, though, Karen was remarkably easy to be around. We liked the same albums and books. We laughed at the same things. The same kind of curiosity about people that made her talk made her remarkably easy to talk to. Her education and intellectual curiosity inspired me to further my own education. So many hours over beer or coffee, conversation into the wee hours of the morning, and it's hard to imagine how we fill these hours in other places with other people we didn't used to know then, but so it goes.

The building Karen lived in on Summer street was torn down several years ago. They left the facade up, but it just makes the building look so shallow; it's depressing. I know the building was creaky and old and expensive or impossible to repair but who wants to live in a building without character, or quirks, or history? Not me.

A couple of months ago Karen came back to Halifax for a visit, from her home in Japan, and she brought her new husband and these weird Ramen noodle-flavoured caramels. We didn't have much time together, because there is never enough of that - time - but what we had was perfect. I could count on my fingers the number of people I trust completely as friends, as constants, and Karen is certainly among them. It was like those years in between didn't matter, or were inconsequential, to the fact of this unlikely, unavoidable friendship.

Carey - Joni Mitchell

The wind is in from Africa
Last night I couldn't sleep
Oh, you know it sure is hard to leave here Carey
But it's really not my home
My fingernails are filthy, I got beach tar on my feet
And I miss my clean white linen and my fancy french cologne

Oh Carey get out your cane
And I'll put on some silver
Oh you're a mean old daddy, but I like you fine

Come on down to the mermaid cafe and I will buy you a bottle of wine
And we'll laugh and toast to nothing and smash our empty glasses down
Let's have a round for these freaks and these soldiers
A round for these friends of mine
Let's have another round for the bright red devil
Who keeps me in this tourist town

Come on, Carey, get out your cane
I'll put on some silver
Oh you're a mean old daddy, but I like you

Maybe I'll go to Amsterdam
Or maybe I'll go to Rome
And rent me a grand piano and put some flowers round my room
But lets not talk about fare-thee-welis now
The night is a starry dome.
And they're playin that scratchy rock and roll
Beneath the matalla moon

Come on, Carey, get out your cane
And I'll put on some silver
You're a mean old daddy, but I like you

The wind is in from Africa
Last night I couldnt sleep
Oh, you know it sure is hard to leave here
But, it's really not my home
Maybe it's been too long a time
Since I was scramblin down in the street
Now they got me used to that clean white linen
And that fancy french cologne

Oh Carey, get out your cane
I'll put on my finest silver
We'll go to the mermaid cafe
Have fun tonight
I said, oh, youre a mean old daddy, but you're out of sight

Bad As They Seem

2009-01-13T18:40:00.000-04:00

The absolute worst month of my life was spent living in a tiny trailer in Barrie, Ontario. I had just graduated from high school and September and university and freedom were so close I could practically touch them. But practically was not actually, and this scheme concocted by myself and my friend Kathleen looked like it just might work.

Kathleen's family had a cottage in Barrie. It's a weird place to have a cottage. My understanding is that when the cottage was built, it was still very much on the outskirts of Barrie, and that any neighbours were far afield and fellow cottagers. But by the time I was introduced to Kathleen's cottage, it looked like a fairly rustic but basically ordinary house on an ordinary suburban street. It was just a couple of blocks away from the lake, but it was equally close to the Loblaws. We didn't spend much time in the cottage, though, except to make use of its indoor plumbing. The cottage was used not only by Kathleen's immediate family but by aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents as well, so our residence thereabouts was conditional on not actually staying in the cottage. We lived in the trailer out back.

I had always thought it would be cool to live in a trailer. I really don't anymore. The trailer Kathleen and I shared was especially tiny; one of those little metal boxes where the one bed folds down to become the kitchen table, and the other bed turns into the sofa. The tiny refrigerator worked, and we kept out food there, but when we wanted to make meals we had to transport the ingredients into the cottage itself. The toilet didn't work, either. Nor did the sink. The trailer was really only practical for sleeping in.

My mom later confessed that she never would have allowed me to move to Barrie if she'd actually thought we'd be able to find jobs there. But we had; both of us were hired to work at Taco Bell, where we suffered all the degradation that accompanies working in a fast food restaurant. We additionally suffered a sexist manager who didn't let girls work the deep fryer; instead both Kathleen and I were on the front line - taking orders and cleaning the plastic tables.

I honestly don't remember much anymore about the month we spent in Barrie. Little incidents are recalled like snapshots. That time we had a "party" and invited some people we worked with over to drink beer and listen to music. A dozen of my cds were stolen that night. There was the oasis-like evening Kathleen and I spent singing Christmas carols in the public bathroom down by the lake.

Kathleen claimed to have food poisoning, and she took a week off work. I didn't believe it then and I don't believe it now, but I don't know much about Kathleen, and I really didn't then, either. A few years ago a friend of mine made a comment - completely unrelated - about someone else whose closest friends all seemed to live far away. "Well of course she thinks they're her best friends," this person observed, "It's so easy to be friends with someone you never see." I'd never thought about that before, but it immediately made me think of Kathleen. Her two best friends were childhood friends. Neither of them knew much about the actual events of her life. One of them, Kathleen confessed, would have been horrified to know about some of the things she had done. One of these friends lived in Barrie, but the two of them didn't see each other at all that month. Of course it hurt her heart. And there were other things going on with Kathleen, as well. She was miserable, uncommunicative, probably clinically depressed.

But I wasn't old enough or experienced enough to know how to deal with Kathleen's allusions or depression or secrecy, and she wasn't comfortable enough to be honest with me. That little tin box just felt like resentment and the ghost of a friendship.

The way we left things makes a good story, but there was nothing good about the experience we kind of shared. And I got off comparatively easy. If Kathleen is anything like who she was when she was eighteen I'm sure she's haunted still by things I've never known.

We had a stupid fight. I have no idea what it was about, but having had enough of Kathleen's bitterness and coldness and negativity I finally told her to "Fuck off," to which she responded, "Don't ever tell me to fuck off in my trailer." I was bawling my eyes out as I telephoned my mom at two o'clock in the morning and asked her to come pick us up. We kind of made up as we sat there waiting for the sight of my mom's headlights. Or at least we reached an understanding about how some things are just insurmountable. I really loved Kathleen, but we weren't ever really friends.

All month long, I listened to Hayden's little indie cassette in my yellow Sony sports walkman; taking the bus to work, walking to and from the grocery store. I obviously can't blame the dirgey tone of that album for my misery, but it sure didn't help. And yet, it was perfect. I just wanted to wallow, and Hayden did it for me, that's for sure.

Bad as they Seem - Hayden

Girl of my dreams...
Things are as bad as they seem
She is only sixteen
That's why she's only a dream
Woman of my dreams...
Lives right down my street
Has a daughter who's sixteen
That's why she's only a dream

What do I do this for?
Got to get out some more
Go down to the grocery store
Meet someone I'll adore
Someone who'll make me laugh
Someone to be my better half
Keep me warm under the sack
Share with me my midnight snack

Job of my dreams...
Things are as bad as they seem
Working where I did at fourteen
Making less pay it seems

Chorus

House of my dreams...
Things are as bad as they seem
My parents' house I'll stay for free
Until I'm at least fourty-three

Merry Christmas (I Love You)

2008-12-21T13:27:00.000-04:00

The best Christmas album to come out in this millennium is, I think, Hawksley Workman's "Almost A Full Moon." In this, he celebrates family and friends and the holiday season. This song in particular speaks to the warmth and love that exists despite the unexpected and tragic events that happen in the world.

I'm not going home for Christmas this year. "Home" in this instance meaning where my mom lives. I won't be waiting up with my brothers until midnight or one in the morning to sneak downstairs to open stockings that "Santa" has just recently filled for us with Archie comics, clementines and Kinder surprise eggs. I won't be going to Burlington to see Grandma and Grandpa and Aunt Barb and Uncle Peter and Sam and Alex, and to not eat turkey and cranberry sauce but scarf down mashed potatoes and stovetop stuffing. I won't be hearing Grandpa's recitation of "Twas the Night Before Christmas" or singing carols with my mom and whomever else can be convinced, around the piano.

My brother Geoff will likely not be there to wait up for stockings either. He's just moved into a new apartment with his new wife Patricia. And my brother Ted won't arrive in Toronto until 11:30 am Christmas Day. There was no Chester family dinner at the Old Mill restaurant this year. And Sean lives in PEI this season, so my Christmas mix making was even independent of him.

But on Christmas Eve I will be seeing my brother Ted and his fiance Hayley at my Dad's house in Porter's Lake, where he lives with his wife Susan. Christmas always manages to feel Christmasey, wherever I am. I feel blessed.

I meant to write all kinds of blog entries about Christmas songs this month, but shopping and work and house cleaning has left me with little free time, and, I suppose, I just haven't felt the exactly right kind of inspiration for writing as much as I'd like.

Friends and family near and far: I wish you all Happy Holidays. I wish we could all be together. You're dear to me and in my thoughts and my heart.

Merry Christmas (I Love You) - Hawksley Workman

If god takes you he leaves
a huge footprint of love
and kindness behind
which is where you once stood

And I know you're afraid
to get on the plane
after what happened that day
and selfishly I want you here in my way

But animals come
and animals go
and love is just a laundry line
we hang on until

we're dried out by the sun
and when you think your turn is done
you end up getting dirty
and it's all again begun

Now words i think are just
a noisy dirty wind
makes the trouble we get in
so why do we speak

Now we made another war,
that's what men are good for
men with stupid insecurities
and not a lot more

And satisfied they try
its written about again
but who the hell reads history?
apparently not men

'Cause nothing's guaranteed
except the politics of need
did the Romans see the ship go down
or were they asleep?

I shouldn't expect to live
and I shouldn't expect to die
but I wouldnt mind being beside you, dear
on that laundry line to dry

And for my grandma and my brother
my father and my mother
and you my sweetest lover
to you all I will say

Merry Christmas I love you
and god is above you
Merry Christmas I love you
and god is above you

Merry Christmas I love you

Fairytale of New York

2008-12-07T20:40:00.000-04:00

Fairytale of New York is my A#1 absolute favourite Christmas song in the history of ever. No two ways about it. This is a very informed claim, having enthusiastically sifted through thousands of versions of hundreds of Christmas songs, because I am weird like that. And because, thankfully, Sean is weird like that, and introduced me to the whole Christmas music phenomenon.

He did not, however, introduce me to this song.

I get kind of pissed off by people who make the claim that this hardly counts as a Christmas song because said people feel they can listen to it all year round. It's a very derogatory comment to make about Christmas music. But truth be told, my formative and best memories of "Fairytale of New York" are of Toronto summer nights spent dancing sloppily, drunkenly, and with Justin, to this song at the James Joyce Pub, strummed by that guy who would play all of our requests. For us, he played The Beatles, David Bowie, Stan Rogers, and the Pogues. Now, I mind the Toronto summer heat, but then I never did, and for reveling in it there was no better companion than my dear friend and very first drinking buddy.

Justin and I had a very easy relationship that was sometimes made complicated by our youth, our sensitivities, our genders, and our unabashed enthusiasms that occasionally got tricky with our tendencies to go hard rather than going home. I remember a particularly sobering and difficult conversation at Hob Nob Donuts following one such evening. I remember it like I was approaching the end of something that I needed to have in my life. I remember feeling like I knew that we could never go back to the way things were; the way things were when our friendship was uncomplicated by things that should have been left out of him and I. It was okay, though. We were okay. We repeated some of the same mistakes I suppose; but no, they weren't really mistakes - just growing pains I guess. And I think we learned through one another a lot of what we really wanted.

I also think about Justin when I think about Christmas, though the soundtrack to our Christmases together would have been far less inspiring than the soundtracks to our summers. We began a few consecutive Christmases at Country Style Donuts at Dundas and Islington, it being the only place open so late on Christmas Eve night, and I'm sure that whatever godawful music they were playing there was entirely appropriate to a suburban donut store franchise. These evenings would follow our tradition of tobogganing at Centennial Hill with our brothers.

Justin's mom sold her house on Saskatoon rd. several years ago. He has no family left in Etobicoke. My mom lives on Kipling Avenue, now, in an area that's fairly close to the home I grew up in on Edgevalley Drive, but in a house that is not quite my home.

I don't get to see Justin much anymore. It's been a couple of years since his last visit to Halifax, and now when I go "home" he's not one of the people I get to see. He has his own house with his wife and a dog (!) in the Ottawa Valley. I've never even seen it. We hardly ever talk on the phone, and the rare emails we send are fairly concise. Justin has always been sparing with his words. He is, through and through, a man of action.

The closest friends I had in high school were Justin, Katherine, and Tim, and they remain, despite distance and generally pretty shoddy upkeep, three of my closest friends in the world, to my mind at least. They are all very good with words, but Justin has never ever needed to reassure me. Not even that one time I thought he did. He is one of the few people in the world, like family, whom I know will always love me; and he does love me, in his understated and very loyal Justin way, just for being me.

Fairytale of New York - The Pogues

It was Christmas Eve babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me, won't see another one
And then he sang a song
The Rare Old Mountain Dew
I turned my face away
And dreamed about you

Got on a lucky one
Came in eighteen to one
I've got a feeling
This year's for me and you
So happy Christmas
I love you baby
I can see a better time
When all our dreams come true

They've got cars big as bars
They've got rivers of gold
But the wind goes right through you
It's no place for the old
When you first took my hand
On a cold Christmas Eve
You promised me
Broadway was waiting for me

You were handsome
You were pretty
Queen of New York City
When the band finished playing
They howled out for more
Sinatra was swinging,
All the drunks they were singing
We kissed on a corner
Then danced through the night

The boys of the NYPD choir
Were singing "Galway Bay"
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas day

You're a bum
You're a punk
You're an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
You scumbag, you maggot
You cheap lousy faggot
Happy Christmas your arse
I pray God it's our last

I could have been someone
Well so could anyone
You took my dreams from me
When I first found you
I kept them with me babe
I put them with my own
Can't make it all alone
I've built my dreams around you

Heart of Gold

2008-11-30T14:16:00.000-04:00

I assume that anyone who ever reads this blog is also a friend of mine and therefore probably knows that I'm no Neil Young fan. I recognize this as being kind of quirky. I sometimes go so far as to identify my indifference towards Neil Young as a character flaw. Because, like, everyone whose musical taste I respect is into Neil Young. It's not just his voice that irked me, though his voice was definitely a part of it. No, it was his actual songs. I thought they were boring; that they didn't - to steal Sean's preferred description - "swing." Admittedly, I never delved too deep, but I've also been exposed to more than just the hits. I'd listened to "On the Beach" and "Tonight's the Night" and "Harvest" in their entirety, in someones vain attempt to convert me. And I didn't hate Neil Young's music. I wouldn't get up and leave like I would with The Doors or Soundgarden or Joan frickin' Baez. I just felt pretty meh about the guy. I did like the songs "The Needle and the Damage Done" and "Thrasher," though. That's as much as I would give.

I nevertheless spent $75 to see Neil Young play at the Halifax Metro Centre last night. I went for the opening band, Wilco, really, but I did indeed stay for Neil Young, and a lot of his set was pretty boring, but a lot of it was pretty magical, too. I don't really want to write a concert review here; I just want to talk about my reception of "Heart of Gold."

I bet I've heard "Heart of Gold" like five hundred times. On car stereos, in shopping malls, at friend's houses, in pubs, at open mic. nights. It's one of the first songs I ever learned how to play on the guitar. But last night, watching Neil Young play this song on stage, it was like I had never heard it before. I was blown away. I was reminded of hearing Johnny Cash's version, on the last of the American Recordings, of Ian and Sylvia Tyson's "Four Strong Winds." I couldn't shut up about what an amazing song that was. Like it was something new. For some reason, "Heart of Gold" finally hit me last night, in its simple message and phrasing, in the way Neil Young sang over the chords he played on his acoustic guitar. I even got his voice. What an earnest, simple, beautiful song. I love it.

Heart of Gold - Neil Young

I want to live,I want to give

I've been a miner for a heart of gold.

It's these expressions I never give

That keep me searching for a heart of gold

And I'm getting old.

Keeps me searching for a heart of gold

And I'm getting old.

I've been to Hollywood, I've been to Redwood,

I crossed the ocean for a heart of gold

I've been in my mind, its such a fine line

That keeps me searching for a heart of gold

And I'm getting old.

Keeps me searching for a heart of gold

And Im getting old.

Keep me searching for a heart of gold

You keep me searching for a heart of gold

And Im getting old.

I've been a miner for a heart of gold.

The Emperor's New Clothes

2008-11-28T00:42:00.000-04:00

Sinead O'Connor's incredibly moving, enduringly affecting album I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got was released in 1990, during my first year of high school. Most of the songs on this album are about relationships, and while I had no real idea about relationships then, I was certainly obsessed with having one, and with the boys I dreamed about having ones with. Crushes in high school seemed to hit harder than any that I've experienced since. I guess because even friendships were shallower then - or more innocent, to be kinder. I didn't have any experience with real intimacy, and I didn't have the weight of a large and confusing and multifaceted history or world view that I needed empathetic ears and honest dialogue for. I was just fourteen. By the time I started to recognize the difference between actual friendships and people I had fun hanging out with I'd learned to make these distinctions because I'd been let down, misled, or just plain wrong about the people I imagined I knew. So crushes these days, while fun and I think necessary, are also comparatively very fleeting. They never carry that kind of investment, because that kind of investment just doesn't make any sense. First crushes, first hurts; there was no barometer.

I honestly didn't understand the song "The Emperor's New Clothes." It was the line "How could I possibly know what I want when I was only 21?" that I ran into like a brick wall. I didn't understand what she meant, because 21 seemed so impossibly old, and I figured that I already knew what I wanted, at fourteen.

In my canvas World Famous backpack, along with my NoteTote and my Beaver Canoe pencil case, I carried years and years of ridicule into Martingrove Collegiate. In middle school, my classmates would spread my germs and cross their fingers as I walked down the hall. On most afternoons as I walked home from school, the houses on Anglesey boulevard looked blurry through tears that I could never hold back, no matter how hard I tried. I went to Martingrove because nobody I knew from middle school was going there, and I started going by my full name, Amelia, shedding the shortened "Amy" I had been called up until that point. I bought bright purple Converse sneakers and I joined the drama club and the choir and I went to dances and I talked loudly, and people thought that I was fun and open.

It strikes me now that I was incredibly lucky to have been received as I was. I could have been devastated. It seems insane that I tried so hard to be known, to meet people, when all of the people I used to know just called me cruel names and left me to eat lunch alone. I took everyone at face value. I didn't even recognize that people lied about stuff. I was so blissfully innocent in grade nine.

I guess high school is probably like that for a lot of people, if not most people - a training ground for dealing with other human beings. I thought I had a best friend. I thought I was in love. I thought I knew what I wanted.

It makes all kinds of sense that I was moved, along with my peers, by Sinead O'Connor's cover of Prince's "Nothing Compares 2 U," sitting on the bleachers in the gymnasium at 8 o'clock on a Friday night, watching the boy I wanted to be dancing with as he danced with someone else.

It took a few more years before I connected to "Emperor's New Clothes." I eventually required more reasons for wanting things and people in my life, and for wanting things and people out of it. Of course this song is explicitly about the speaker's experience of enduring other people's reactions to her pregnancy. It's also one of the most empowering songs I can think of. It's so bold and bare and honest and despite the assertive declarations there is, too, the "I would return to nothing without you." Everything is there, and no, at fourteen, despite my purple sneakers and my brand new school I couldn't for the life of me understand how someone so old just couldn't have it together. And when I hear this song, I can remember that confused reception. I know exactly how that felt. Two decades ago.

The Emperor's New Clothes - Sinead O'Connor

It seems like years since you held the baby
While I wrecked the bedroom
You said it was dangerous after Sunday
And I knew you loved me
He thinks I just became famous
And that's what messed me up
But he's wrong
How could I possibly know what I want
When I was only twenty-one?
And there's millions of people
To offer advice and say how I should be
But they're twisted
And they will never be any influence on me
But you will always be
You will always be
If I treated you mean
I really didn't mean to
But you know how it is
And how a pregnancy can change you
I see plenty of clothes that I like
But I won't go anywhere nice for a while
All I want to do is just sit here
And write it all down and rest for a while
I can't bear to be in another city
One where you are not
I would return to nothing without you
If I'm your girlfriend or not
Maybe I was mean
But I really don't think so
You asked if I'm scared
And I said so
Everyone can see what's going on
They laugh `cause they know they're untouchable
Not because what I said was wrong
Whatever it may bring
I will live by my own policies
I will sleep with a clear conscience
I will sleep in peace
Maybe it sounds mean
But I really don't think so
You asked for the truth and I told you
Through their own words
They will be exposed
They've got a severe case of
The emperor's new clothes
The emperor's new clothes
The emperor's new clothes

Get in the Car

2008-11-22T22:19:00.001-04:00

The first time I went to Whitehorse I went on a whim. It's probably the coolest thing I've ever done.

I'd been living in Toronto for over a year and I'd ended up there accidentally in the first place. I had taken a plane from Halifax to Toronto with a friend of mine, and we were planning to hang out there for a couple of weeks before hitchhiking across North America, but stuff happened, and that trip never did.

There's a thing I notice that happens to me when I spend too much time in Toronto. I start to think about myself like I did when I was a Torontonian, and I receive the things that my family and friends say to me in a different way than I do through telephone wires. I start to think that things like hitchhiking through the United States just to see it and with no real destination in mind, or much money to speak of, are kind of crazy. So I did an equally but oppositely stupid thing: I stayed in Toronto and I got a well-paying job at a call centre.

I did, however, meet a pretty great guy while I was in Toronto, and though he promised to move back to Halifax with me, I got impatient with the waiting and with the crappy customer service job, and so I spent a couple of months traveling across Canada on a Greyhound bus. In stupid Vancouver I made the decision to travel further north before heading back east. I didn't know anyone in the Yukon or have any idea what it was like out there, but I figured I had nothing to lose, and all kinds of time, and so I went. I took the Alaska highway north to Whitehorse.

Being on a Greyhound bus in Canada was not so whimsical; it was something I'd been planning for several months. I had friends in Sudbury and Regina and Vancouver and Victoria and Kamloops and Montreal and Sydney, and I wanted to see them all and the places they had come from or come to before I settled back down in Halifax.

I have never been able to sleep well on buses, but I love them anyway. I love four o'clock in the morning at the side of the highway outside of an Irving or an Esso. Stars and the moon and the sting and smell of winter. My fellow, non-smoking, less anxiety-ridden passengers sleeping soundly in their uncomfortable seats. I move in slow motion, half asleep, exhausted, but invigorated by the cold and empowered like a secret by the blanket of night and the nothing else in sight. What an enormous country I live in. It's twenty hours from Whitehorse to Edmonton.

"Get In the Car" is a song that Kim Barlow wrote for her album Luckyburden, a concept album in which she tells stories about the fictionalized residents of Keno City, Yukon, a town just outside of Whitehorse that boomed briefly and his since become a virtual ghost town.

I don't seem to have much in common with the girl who is the subject of the song. I especially don't know what it's like to live in a town as small or as rough as Keno City, and to spend my teenage years desperately wanting to see something bigger. But I sure do know what it's like to want to get the hell out of a place where I feel stuck and uninspired. And I sure do know what it's like to be young and hopeful and excited by adventure. And I sure do know what it's like to miss Mom.

I promise to actually write about Whitehorse here one of these days.

Get in the Car - Kim Barlow

"Get in the car," Chrissi said, "Let's get the hell out of Dodge."
Steve jumped in fast with a few things stuffed in his backpack.
And they fish tailed down the dusty road, eight o'clock on Saturday morning,
Fresh out of high school and leaving.

"Where are we going?" Steve said, "Are we going to Whitehorse?"
Chrissi laughed, "Hell no, Whitehorse is the biggest town I've ever seen."
Warm sand, rock stars and bookstores, food that doesn't come in a can.
We're going to LA, follow our stupid dreams.

Nothing left to stay for everyone we know is crazy,
They just drink and work and fight,
Let's change our names it's time we're moving on.

When they got to Liard he asked her, "Where'd you get the car?"
And he studied the fading bruise on her cheek and she said,
"My dad won it at poker last week."
And they floated with the hippies and the tourists who had
Flower vans and RV's, romantic notions pointing north.

In the wee hours, and the stars were shining, they nearly hit a young moose,
Running down the middle of the highway.
But they passed it in the passing lane, neither of them said a word.
Both of them were thinking of their mothers.

Nothing left to stay for every one we know is crazy,
They just drink and work and fight,
Let's change our names it's time we're moving on.

Alaska Highway, mile zero, the end and the beginning.
They stopped for a pee and nailed their graduation photos to a sign.
Chrissi leaned out the window and screamed, dust swirled in her hair,
And Steve knew he would follow her anywhere she asked him

Get in the car,
Get in the car,
Let's get the hell out of Dodge.

Clown & Bard

2008-11-01T12:03:00.001-03:00

You couldn't avoid looking at the train tracks from This Ain't the Only Cafe, the establishment beside the Townehouse Tavern, where, with their fancy imported beers and homemade salsa, it was much easier than it was at the Townehouse for me to pretend like I didn't have a problem. I never took the train home for holidays, I never even considered the option, despite watching the trains come and go. When I went home to Toronto I would take the bus that departed from a terminal outside of down-town, an area of town I only ever went to because I was getting on or off of a bus.

I don't remember the first time I thought it, but I remember the first time I wondered aloud about having a drinking problem. I was twenty years old. I said it to Sandra as we left the Townehouse Tavern in the direction of her home, beneath the railway tracks. I can't remember her exact words, but they carried the weight of both an acknowledgment and a dismissal at once. In the spirit of Well, what can you do.

During my second year at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, I spent a lot of time at the Townehouse. It was my first experience of a bar that felt like home; a place as comfortable as a living room, with faces that I knew and could rely on to be there; a place I could go by myself. In the midst of a city I felt no connection to - a city I even kind of hated - and attending university for no reason other than that being my idea of the thing to do once high school was completed, I was initially drawn to the Townehouse because of its atmosphere, the bands that played there, and the interesting people who congregated there. I kept going back because I liked the people and I liked the beer. Or, rather, I liked that the beer was very cheap. It is hard to give Northern a sincere recommendation. I always drank to excess whenever I had occasion to drink during high school, and first year while living in residence was both excessive and frequent, but in an everyone's-doing-it / it's-my-first-year-away-from-home kind of way. It was at the Townehouse that beer really became a part of my life, and it was not only the drink itself. It would take me years and years and years to recognize this experience as being very much a part of the way I look at the world; the things I romanticize; the aesthetics I'm drawn to; the people I like "intuitively."

My favourite people look awesome sitting on a bar stool. They usually smoke cigarettes, wear sloppy clothes, don't draw attention to themselves, are quietly cynical, quietly judgmental, good talkers, good listeners, not very concerned with status in a conventional way, creatures of habit, empathetic, sincere, and drunk.

My favourite barrooms are dark places that are rarely too crowded, equipped with tables in hiding places for secret sharing. Both amiable and grouchy bartenders are acceptable, but personality is a must.

The Granite Brewery in Halifax has these things in spades. Amazing people, atmosphere, and way better draft than Northern. The Granite Brewery is my really favourite bar ever, and it became so much a part of my life in Halifax that it almost was my experience of Halifax. It was the first thing I wanted to show any visitors from out of town.

Geoff Berner's "Clown & Bard" is the best song I have ever heard about having a really fun, really horrible substance abuse problem and an awesome place in which to indulge. I wanted so badly to visit the actual Clown & Bard in Prague. Prague's awfully beautiful, I hear and see in photographs. I bet it's the kind of city that feels the way to many people that Halifax feels to me. I am stunned sometimes, just stopped in my tracks by these beautiful buildings that surround me. I am hopelessly in love with my city, but I have taken it for granted, spending my nights - my time, energy, money - in this building on Barrington street that somehow became the centre of my universe.

It's hard to separate the good stuff like friendships and honest conversations and listening to good music from the alcohol that's been its constant companion. They've been so entwined for as long as I've been a serious drinker.

This isn't about how I quit drinking three months ago and how weird that is and how my life and perspectives are changing and being challenged while I still feel in this state of limbo, like I'm between a place of comfortable reassurance and some unknown future because I think hope would be a good thing to let into my life. This isn't about how I feel even more lonely than I did a few months ago even though I'm supposedly making all these positive changes. This isn't about how I know, know, know with everything in my being that I cannot drink in moderation and that that's something that makes me kind of bitter. But I guess, of course, it is.

I miss my friends, tonight. Not that I don't believe in the lot of them, because in many, I do. But I miss being up until last call, playing trivial pursuit, sharing gossip, giving and receiving kind words and support, laughing, telling stupid jokes.

I don't miss hangovers, saying too much, spilling secrets, being mean, getting hurt, fooling around with someone too soon or too wrong, feeling really shitty about my choices. Some of these nights get me down, but these mornings never do.

That nice clean train with comfortable seats is right there, across the street. I don't always have to take the bus, even though it is really fun to talk to other travelers, and it stops for frequent smoke breaks.

I don't know why I find the leaving so hard.

**I hope I don't need to state this so explicitly, but just in case: This entry, and this comparison to "Clown & Bard" is in no way about either The Townehouse Tavern or The Granite Brewery. They're wonderful establishments. This is just about me.

Clown & Bard - Geoff Berner

Her grandfather opened the trust fund in her Baltimore account,
But she was six months in the Paris of the Eastern Bloc by the time it ran out.
Oh, well I met her in that filthy basement where a fat man ran the bar.
She said, "If you're gonna drink that green stuff you've got to light it on fire."

I guess she knew me pretty well, despite the questions that I ducked.
She said, "You'll like it here, Prague's like a Disneyland for the terminally fucked."
But it don't fool me 'cause I can see all this beauty's just a trap set to kill.
And she grabbed my hand tight, said "Let me show you the lights from the top of the castle hill."

I don't know why I find the leaving so hard.
'Cause I'm so down, hangin' around at the Clown & Bard.

Well the water in that river's as dirty as the cops, but it shines so pretty at night.
But when I held her head as she puked absinthe off the Charles bridge it was a tender and a glamorous sight.
We kept up the charade just as long as we could until I had to get back in the van.
She said "I'd like to come with you but I'm saving up for Baltimore as soon as I can."

I don't know why I find the leaving so hard.
'Cause I'm so down, hangin' around at the Clown & Bard.

When I got back into town she wasn't hard to track down though they'd moved her down a couple of floors.
Cold and half dead on the unmade bed trying to squeeze the speed out through her pores.
I offered to buy her a one-way back stateside but I cried, they pleaded in vain.
She said "I don't think that I have got an urge to die, I really just can't explain."
I don't know why I find the leaving so hard.
Well I'm so down, hangin' around at the Clown & Bard.
I'm so down, hangin' around at the Clown & Bard.

Morning Glory / Alewives

2008-10-29T21:28:00.000-03:00

Andy was almost falling on the floor he was laughing so hard as he relayed the story of how his latest song title, "The Greatest Show on Earth" had come to him. He was thinking about the ridiculous claim our employer, Sam the Record Man was making in their use of "The Greatest Store on Earth" as their motto. The. Greatest. Store. On. Earth. It is pretty funny. It's fucking ridiculously, screamingly, fall on the floor funny if you are in the right mood for and are the right kind of person for that kind of funny.

It reminded me of the night Tim and I wandered around Richard's neighbourhood, in the midst of an evening spent drinking Jack Daniel's in the shed behind Kevin and Richard's house - the shed the two of them had built and decorated with empty pop cans, empty cartons of Marlboro's, and an enormous confederate flag poised above a sign in support of the local Reform party candidate, both intended as a joking affront to their liberal-minded friends. By the time I caught up to Tim, he was keeled over on the curb trying to intake oxygen amidst his laughter as he pointed at - unable to speak - the street sign declaring "Gaylord Avenue." It's just fucking stupid how funny that was.

The first time I heard Alewives, I thought: I bet this is what Morning Glory would sound like now if they were still a band. The first time I saw Andy on stage, his guitar hanging loosely over his shoulder, leaning into the amplifier, his back - probably intentionally - to the audience, I was reminded of Tim. They both carry themselves in this casual way that I suppose the term "indie rock" has kind of become synonymous with. They both look so free-spirited and authentic and like they don't care about anything except the rock and roll they're playing. But before there is the practicing, then the nervousness, the serious consideration of song order, and afterwards, "Did everyone notice where I messed up?" "Do you think that new song went over well?" "Do they like me?"

It was super fun being an Alewives fan with my friend and roommate Sydney. We're both music nerds, but our tastes often differ. Not entirely unreasonably, Sydney once said to me, "Not all pop songs have to sound like Brian Wilson could have written them, you know." She's way into Blondie and Tori Amos, and I guess I don't really get those guys. And yeah, she thinks my tastes are a bit too precious and predictable, I think. But we both really, really love The Replacements. And I knew that she would love The Alewives. Not that they're all derivative or anything, but they come from the same place. They have the same sound. And nothing says high school like that sound.

It was, oh so appropriately, Tim who first introduced me to The Replacements, when he put "Bastards of Young" on a mix tape he made for me when we were in grade twelve. He gets credit, too, for Pixies, The Lemonheads, NOFX, and for a bunch of local bands reserved for a future blog entry.

My friends Tim and John were the core of Morning Glory. They wrote the songs, and played guitar and bass. They had a couple of drummers - first Steve and then Dave. They had a band room in Tim's basement, where the drum kit was permanently set up, and I sat against the wall and listened to them rehearse for hours. I knew all the words to "Sadfish" and "Where Am I?" and "Here I'm" and "Spaceship of Life." Once they played a show there. They named the practice room "Potatoland" for the evening and bought a flat of beer that we all guzzled down, across the street at the vacant "White House" (a house used as a real estate office, where we would often go to smoke cigarettes) during intermission, and presumably unnoticed by his parents. Man, Tim's parents must have been pretty cool.

Morning Glory got to play some shows down-town, in all-ages venues like The Silver Shack and Classic Studios. Abby, Jackie, Paul, Brandon, Sean and I were the most hardcore Morning Glory groupies, and we'd take the subway down-town to cheer them on, to be in the midst of this scene that felt incredibly cool. We'd sing along and hoot and jump up and down and then help carry their amps and instruments.

Classic Studios was the venue they played most often, it seems to me. It was a dim, open room with low ceilings, below Ossington Avenue, a stone's throw from the Queen street Mental Institution, and it shared its address (it was something-and-a-half Ossington Ave.) with the fish and chips restaurant upstairs. The place was owned or managed by a conscientious, well-intentioned man who seemed genuinely concerned about the kids - such as myself - who over did it. He knew he wasn't serving us alcohol, but he didn't seem to be aware of the convenience store down the street where under-aged kids could buy bootlegged liquor.

Going into the city, to these shows, taking the subway home in the wee hours of the morning, drunk and exhausted, I always felt so grown up. I felt like I was looking at my future. My cool, hip, rock and roll future.

For my 29th birthday Sydney made me an Alewives t-shirt, and a matching one for herself. We talked about making an Alewives zine, but we got too busy with other stuff, or we got too lazy, and then she moved away to BC. I loved going to those shows with her, like I loved waiting at the bus stop and standing right up at the front of the stage with Abby.

The kind of authentic, energetic rock and roll that Alewives play makes me feel nostalgic, and not in some bullshit I'm-too-old-to-rock way, just as a reminder of how and why music matters. It reminds me of discovery. It reminds me of the way something so simple can be so awesome, so intoxicating, so fun. It's about the moments when I'm not asking, "Do they like me?" "Why does that work?" "What happened?" We pick ourselves up off the floor or the curb and we go back to work or back to our friends, and that old, sinking, other kind of reality sets in again.

Thank God for three-minute rock songs and sloppy boys with electric guitars.

Lik My Vacuum

2008-10-11T13:48:00.000-03:00

Perhaps the best present I've ever been given was the one I received for my eighteenth birthday, from my friend Aidyl. A year ahead of me, I missed her presence at Martingrove during my final year of high school while she was enjoying her first year at Ryerson, where she was studying Radio & Television Arts. Having access to a super cool studio and the equipment it housed, she made me a cassette tape that played like a radio program for my birthday.

Aidyl and I were friends for the duration of my time at Martingrove, first becoming acquainted when I was in the ninth grade, in a tiny room where members of the Auditorium Facilities Crew hung out during lunch hour. Our friendship varied in degrees of intensity. Both of us were social creatures who were comfortable and friendly with a number of diverse groups of people, but where her friendships often included the sportier set, mine eventually leaned towards the smokers who congregated outside of the cafeteria in an area commonly referred to as "the outback"; and particularly those smokers who were especially eccentric and determinedly unaligned with the extra-curricular activities that I (and Aidyl) also enjoyed, such as the Martingrove Stage Company and the aforementioned Auditorium Facilities Crew. Aidyl and I would go for long periods of time, immersed in our own, separate things, and then reconnect for a week or two of near constant companionship.

Aidyl and I both loved to sing, and this was one thing that definitely bound us. It was with her that I started my first "band." In actuality, we were a duo who performed once, on the stage in the auditorium at Martingrove Collegiate, during the annual "Martingrove Jam," a glorified open mic.

We called ourselves 12 Eagle Road, taking the name from the address of the "crazy lady" who lived on a side street near Bloor and Islington. Our friends and ourselves used to delight in driving slowly and repeatedly past the paranoid woman's house, and in watching her increasingly insane reactions to our presence there. She would yell, "Get off the road, you sons and bitches!" which would always put us into hysterics. She was always threatening to call - and actually did call - the police. She took our photographs and even brought out a video camera, for which my friends and I performed Monty Python sketches on one occasion.

For our debut - and final - performance as 12 Eagle Road, Aidyl and I had each written original songs. Here, I will boldly include the chorus from the first song I ever wrote with my guitar. Much of my high school existence having been defined by being painfully and unrequitedly in love with one of my best friends, Tim, it is of course appropriate that my first song would have been about him. The stupid, embarrassing chorus went, "Well it's hard to be your friend / When my feelings aren't correct." Aidyl's song was better, but I'll let her decide for herself whether or not she wants it exposed.

We listened to and sang along to so much music together. Particularly fond are my memories of singing along to the Les Miserables soundtrack. We collectively, particularly, dug then-popular CanCon fare like Blue Rodeo, The Waltons, Barenaked Ladies, and - yeah, really, ugh - Moxy Fruvous.

Lik My Vacuum is the name that Aidyl gave to the cassette she made me - a take-off on The Waltons' Lik My Traktor. It was a record of our high school experience together and a testament to the endurance of memories, if not location or musical taste or even enduring friendship. I don't even have Lik My Vacuum anymore. Along with all of the other cassettes I used to own - and many other valuable possessions of mine - they disappeared from the basement of a house I used to live in, which is another story altogether. I am almost over these things that I lost, but I still don't like to talk about it.

It was Aidyl's birthday yesterday, and I was reminded of all the birthdays that we shared together during high school. I thought about the surprise party Tamie and I hosted in my basement - the one that Charlie showed up drunk to, a short while before I really had friends who drank, or drank myself. I remember one year Aidyl gave me a diary for my birthday, and the good use I made of that over the following year. And most of all, I remembered how impressed and delighted I was to receive "Lik My Vacuum." I listened to it all the time. I couldn't believe someone had gone to so much work to show me that I meant something to them. It sucks that it's gone, but I can't imagine I'll ever forget the majority of the songs on Lik My Vacuum. In fact, I bet I could still sing along to every one of them.

*Aidyl and I did not look that old when we were in high school. That picture was taken last December.

Kids' Prayer

2008-10-06T21:47:00.000-03:00

Sean and I had only been dating for about four months when we decided to take the bus all the way from Toronto and across the provincial border to Manitoba for the Winnipeg Folk Festival. By the time we were out of Thunder Bay, I don't think either of us could have fathomed that we were to stick it out together for another three and a half years. It is trying to be on a bus for twenty-four hours, especially when all there is to look at is the endless expanse of trees. Northern Ontario is the most boring place on earth. I much prefer the hopeful, straight-forward horizon of the prairies, or the unexpected turns on slim mountain roads, to the succession of evergreens - the imposing forest through which you can never see the trees or the wildlife or any further evidence of the people who presumably utilise the ever-present power lines. Plus we were exhausted, and trying to combat this with the worst bus station coffee. I still maintain that the best cup of coffee I ever had was at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. I may have just uncovered a reason for this.

Whenever we got upset with one another, Sean would refuse to communicate. I think he reasons that he doesn't want to say anything regrettable when he's angry, but THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT I WANT TO DO! I don't mean that I want to say all kinds of horrible things, but that I want to address things immediately, and immediately also means emotionally, and of course I am either crying or yelling. The wall he would put up would just make me more incensed. And then we'd both get all defensive in the very same way and it would be just horrible. It was like that in Thunder Bay. I can't for the life of me remember what we said we were fighting about; I only remember how I felt, and that sensation of being so far from home with all of that time stretched out ahead of us.

But such were the recuperating powers of a grassy field, a lightning storm, and a beer tent, that we were making jokes about how we almost broke up there when our bus pulled into the Thunder Bay bus terminal on our trip home.

There wasn't anyone either of us were dying to see at the Winnipeg Folk Festival, though I was pretty excited about seeing Dan Bern and Dar Williams. Mostly, I wanted to go because I'd heard great things about the event, and because I wanted to sleep outside in a tent and stay up all night listening to or be woken up by music from within my temporary canvas home. I also wanted to hang out in Winnipeg and have a beer at the Royal Albert, because Rheostatics - my very favourite band - have such a connection to the city and that venue in particular. It was a bit of Canada I hadn't explored as a willing and alert participant and I wanted to see what is was like there. (When I was two, I stopped there with my parents on a cross-country train trip, and I used to maintain that my earliest memory was of zooming my batman hotwheels car across the floor at the train station in Winnipeg, but that seems way too specific to be an actual memory of an experience belonging to a two-year-old.)

A series of frustrations ensued after exiting the Greyhound bus. It took us ages to locate the spot where the shuttle bus would meet us to take us to the field the festival was being held at. Then it took us ages to assemble our borrowed tent. And finally, once we were inside our tent, a downpour that would wreak havoc on the grounds began. A lightning storm on the prairies is a terrifying and mesmerising thing. Watching lightning hit the earth like that - and so close by! - is truly one of the most awesome things I have ever seen. I don't know what Sean was thinking, telling me that story about the time he was camping with his family, as a kid, and lightning hit the metal pole supporting their tent. It was another sleepless night.

The sun was out in the morning. The best cups of coffee EVER in hands, Sean and I went to see some workshops. All of our clothes were soaked, and every step we took was into the slimy, unavoidable mud that the ground had become overnight. But we really didn't seem bothered by that.

Knowing we'd have other opportunities to see Dan Bern, we seriously debated checking out Hawksley Workman instead. We didn't know his music, but had been hearing good things. The eventual deterrent was the press photograph that we thought made him look like an asshole, and thank goodness for that photograph.

In a small tent along with maybe fifty other audience members, Sean and I got to be a part of what remains one of the most moving live music experiences of my life. Expecting "Tiger Woods" or even "Wasteland," Dan Bern blew my mind with his take on the Columbine shootings. There's nothing I can say about what he says in this song. It's explicit. It's perfect. Read the lyrics provided here, if you will. After the storm and the bus ride from hell and the sunny reprieve, the song just stunned me with its immediacy and honesty.

The rest of the week-end was great. We ran into an old friend of mine from Halifax. We got to hear Dar Williams. We were impressed by Martin Sexton. We got drunk but not too drunk. We took pictures of our mud-caked feet and legs. We laughed at our discomfort. We slept in a tent.

But the best part of the whole week-end was hearing Kids' Prayer - this thoughtful and extraordinarily moving song inspired by this very big and terrible thing that happened to a bunch of ordinary kids at an ordinary high school. It made everyone think and feel be glad they got to be there for that performance. It's kind of what I was hoping a folk festival would be like.

Kids' Prayer - Dan Bern

So sad, so sad, the news come our way this morning

Like a bad dream, a dream you never even talk about

In a school, a school, where they send our precious children

The one place of innocence the world might ever let them know

And barely aware of the odds against existence in the first place

Of love and fertility, of risk of a baby being born

And of food and clothes and fear and maybe relocation

Of sickness, recovery, of music lessons, painting the garage

And lingering over eggs and thoughts and sleepy conversations

And plans for the weekend, and one last pause to pet the dog

And a glance at the clock and the grabbing of the sandwich and the notebook

Confident of nothing but the unbroken days that they've been granted

But comes a child, a child so full of anger and hatred

Barely aware of the genesis coursing through his veins

With a gun, a gun, deaf and blind deliverer of madness

Skilled in its efficiency beyond his own unformulated brain

And with his hand in a fist, and his soul in a knot and his heart racing

And his mind sick with images, his slim shoulders finally feeling tall

And his fellow creatures, school kids in their crushes and their daydreams

Struggling to unwrap the ancient secrets of geometry

And he pulls from his coat the instrument to shatter all forevers

In a random blaze of insides and blood and endless now

And boom and flash and more and not even when it's over

Can any of them so much as summon up the sanity to scream

And on the floor his classmates blown down, and choking

As he lays his weapon on his desk, partly sure he isn't dreaming

And all the world descends, and offers up their condolence

And offers up their theories what went wrong and who and why and when and how

It's all the killing day and night on television

It's all the movies where violence is as natural as breathing

It's guns and bullets as easily obtainable as candy

It's video games where you kill and begin to think it's real

It's people not having God in their lives anymore

Or it's all of it, or none of it, or some of it, in various combinations

Now all these theories, sound pretty logical I guess

Though I ain't no scientist, I ain't no dissector of statistics

I ain't no theologist, I ain’t no psychologist or biologist

All I can do is offer up a prayer of my own

Talk to your kids, play with your kids

Tell them your dreams, and your disappointments

Listen with your kids, and listen to your kids

Watch your kids, let your kids watch you

Tell your kids the truth, best as you can tell it

No use telling lies, your kids can always smell it

Cook for your kids, let your kids cook for you

Sing with your kids, teach your kids the blues

Learn their games, teach them yours

Touch your kids, find out what they know

Be sad with your kids, be stupid with your kids

Embarrass your kids, let them embarrass you

Be strong with your kids, be tough with your kids

Be firm with your kids, say no to your kids,

Say yes to your kids, take it easy on your kids

You were a kid not so long ago

There’s things you know, your kids will never know

There’s places they live where you will never go

So dance with your kids, paint with your kids

Walk with your kids, tell stories to your kids

One day your kids, won’t be kids

And maybe they'll have kids of their own

Let's hope they talk to their kids,

play with their kids

Tell them their dreams, and their disappointments….

Moondance (the album)

2008-10-05T17:23:00.000-03:00

I discovered Van Morrison's "Moondance" while working at Sam the Record Man on Barrington street. So I was pretty late arriving there. My co-workers/bosses/friends Sean and Andy in particular made fun of my enthusiasm with responses like, "Yeah, we know, good record. It came out in 1970." Across from the front desk at Sam's there was always a collection of budget cd's. We referred to this area as the "Wow Wall" for the enormous letters spelling "WOW" that were attached to the flat board above the cd's to indicate the wow-worthy bargains to be had. A perennial Wow wall title was "Moondance" and it was Jonathan Andrews who properly introduced me to this album. The two of us certainly played it to death for those co-workers with less approving ears.

Jonathan's picks were all over the place, and he turned me onto and off of all kinds of artists. Working cash by his side was always a bit of a crap shoot. While his temperament was not as eclectic as his musical taste there were certainly days that I loved working with him and days that I hated it. Of all of the friends I made and relationships that developed while working at Sam's, none feels more honest or more familiar than my relationship with Jonathan (I am excluding Sean from this assessment altogether, for the long and intense and complicated relationship we had before he ever hired me). And when I say "familiar," I really do mean that quite literally. He felt like family, like a brother, and that's the only reason I didn't let his indifference and dark moods get the better of my over-sensitive nature.

When Jonathan was in a good mood, and seemed glad for my company, he was so much fun to work with. He can be remarkably easy-going, and I can see how he might make a pretty crappy tenant or nerve-wracking roommate because of this, but not being in either of those positions, it's something that always amazed and impressed me about his character. He has given me his very last cigarette without having funds for more, when asked for one, on more occasions than I can count, despite my astonishment and attempts at refusing his gesture. He has quit jobs that made him unhappy without having back-up plans. He has a lot of faith in the people in this world; in things always working out.

But back to music.

Jonathan would listen to everything. Artists whose cd's he loved to play included Guided by Voices, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Stephen Malkmus, LCD Soundsystem, and Huey Lewis & the News. Myself and Scotty kept conspiring to hide the Back to the Future soundtrack on Jonathan (he always found it, don't ask me how), which of course he eventually only played to piss us off, but I really believe he actually did like Huey Lewis a lot.

He would play Stan Rogers' Fogarty's Cove all the time. That's a great album, but it's a bold move for anyone working in the coolest record store in town, just minutes away from pubs who make their bread and butter by being host to Celtic rock bands playing endless covers of "Barrett's Privateers" to university students who don't give a shit about music but know all the words to that famous song about the Halifax pier.

While Jonathan's friends and peers played in weird indie rock bands, he was championing and eventually playing music with Halifax legends like Al Tuck and the all-but-forgotten Matthew Grimson. While always staying in touch and engaged with new releases, he was also investigating everything that came before, without any agenda except for hearing something great that he had never heard before and finding some musical mentors. He was always learning. And he was always so enthusiastic about sharing what he had learned. Jonathan's first solo album "Halifax Indie Rock" is a self-conscious and earnest homage to just that mentality. I love the name. And I loved how he stood behind the display of his cd's - the face on the cover clearly identifiable as his own - that stood in front of the counter at which he rang in customers' purchases. There's not a hipster bone in Jonathan's body. I'd say he was wise beyond his years in some respects, but he doesn't carry it like wisdom. He's too playful. Maybe it's just so rare to come across a really genuine person who is so difficult to pigeon-hole.

Every now and then I run into someone who knows about and likes to talk about music in that geeky way we had at Sam's. I never realise how much I miss these conversations until I leave one feeling so refreshed and excited. I miss working at Sam's. I miss poring over release sheets and being excited about new release Tuesday, and I miss hearing classic albums like "Moondance" for the very the very first time, courtesy of people who just have to show me why they're such classics. I miss my friends.

Moondance - Van Morrison

(the album)

Anchorage

2008-09-21T14:07:00.000-03:00

I think I probably started included Michelle Shocked's "Anchorage" on every mix tape I made for anybody shortly after I first moved to Halifax. It's a very "Amelia song," as my dear friend and ex-boyfriend Sean would say. He really would say this, rolling his eyes, because by the time I met him, this song's inclusion on the countless mix tapes I made for other people was already a cliche. But aside from that, it is an "Amelia song" because I am sentimental like that about old friends, and I am also in love with faraway, cold places like Alaska. Or at least with the idea of them.

In Sean's basement apartment on Woodbine avenue, we began a tradition of playing DJ for one another, drinking Lakers or cheap red wine, sharing our favourites with one another and eventually compiling them on mixes for our friends, usually yet unknown to one party, and as we, at this beginning stage of our relationship, were fairly unknown to one another too, we learned about each other through the way we related to our friends and how and why we would make the selections that were made.

There are a few old friends that I think about when I listen to "Anchorage," mostly people who have both settled into family life, and who are also far removed from being involved in any kind of artistic or musical community the way that I am. It's a lifestyle difference that is clearly articulated here in the way this song contrasts Anchorage, Alaska with New York City. I feel a real fondness for these old friends, but I also feel the miles in between us and like it's impossible to ever recover what we had in high school or in our first few years of "adulthood."

Last year, my old friends Kim and Anne, with whom I was reunited through facebook (of course) concocted a crazy scheme, wherein Anne and I would, over the Christmas holidays, make the five hour drive from southern Ontario to visit Kim in Sudbury where she now owns a home with her police officer partner and her children, and where the three of us - a lifetime ago it often seems - attended university immediately following high school. I hadn't seen either of them in close to a decade, but our facebook correspondences were excited and optimistic, and I guess I am generally of the opinion that people don't really change that much, and that the often inexplicable reasons we all have for liking who we like are usually enduring.

Kim and I never had any illusions about the unlikeliness of our friendship. We both really hated living in residence, and we hid in our tiny shared dorm room together, but that confined space and the people who surrounded us were all that really seemed to bind us. She dragged me out to Ralph's Sports Bar where I was forced to put up with godawful dance music and the succession of bland, jockey guys who took a shine to her. I dragged her to the Townehouse Tavern where she was forced to listen to punk bands and drink disgusting northern draught in a smokey room full of weirdos. Anne, who lived a few floors below us, was kind of in the middle. Which is not to say that she was easy. On the contrary, Anne is one of the most sensitive people I have ever met, and I bet she sucked up all kinds of things and situations she probably didn't want to be a part of. Looking back, I don't know how I wasn't constantly and openly amazed by how much alike we were in our temperaments.

The last time I saw Anne, prior to our reunion this past December, I was visiting my friend Andrea - also a friend from Sudbury, who I had met my second year there - in their mutual home town of Guelph, Ontario. It was weird, because I was definitely there to see (and I stayed with) Andrea, but I made a point of meeting up with Anne one evening. When I'd visited Guelph in the past it had been to see Anne. This time there was an awkward tension between us. I really felt that we had "grown apart" and it made me feel sad and uncomfortable. If I honestly analyze these kinds of situations I know that it is probably more about me than about the other person. There was an over-riding sense of shame. I could see that Anne was happily back in school, in a serious relationship (with the man she would eventually marry), and was acting, well, like the adult that she was. Me: I still felt and acted like a kid. I was a university drop-out, still getting wasted all the time, living rent-free at my mom's, working at Chapters, and making plans to travel across Canada. I was openly self-righteous, insisting that I was being authentically myself. But I was lazy and selfish and aimless and incredibly worried about how apparent all of that might be to other people.

And because aside from being nearly, finally, finished an undergraduate degree, I didn't actually feel that my life or lifestyle had changed all that much in the interim, I was nervous about our 2007 reunion.

It was good. I think Anne and I approached one another with an appropriate amount of reserve, but we talked about quite a lot of weighty stuff during the ten hours total that we spent in her car together. I won't get into details, because a lot of it was pretty personal. There was reminiscing of course, and at the same time it was like we were taking stock of and comparing the people we were to the people we are. I was really impressed with Anne's self-awareness, and it was absolutely heartening to see how comfortable she eventually became - or, at least, so it seemed - with herself.

Kim was exactly as I'd remembered her and completely easy to be with. But I don't see any of myself in her.

I think one of the best things about "Anchorage" is Leroy. He's exactly the kind of guy you want your dear friend to end up with.

I think Anne and I were really glad to see one another, and glad to get back to our own lives, and that we will be glad to see one another again.

Anchorage - Michelle Shocked

I took time out to write to my old friend

I walked across that burning bridge

Mailed my letter off to Dallas

But her reply came from Anchorage, Alaska

She said:"Hey girl, it's about time you wrote

It's been over two years you know, my old friend

Take me back to the days of the foreign telegrams

And the all-night rock and rollin'...

We was wild then

Hey Shell, you know it's kind of funny

Texas always seemed so big

But you know you're in the largest state in the union

When you're anchored down in Anchorage

Hey Girl, I think the last time I saw you

Was on me and Leroy's wedding day

What was the name of that love song they played?

I forgot how it goes

I don't recall how it goes

Anchorage

Anchored down in Anchorage

Leroy got a better job so we moved

Kevin lost a tooth now he's started school

I got a brand new eight month old baby girl

I sound like a housewife

I think I'm a housewife

Hey Girl, what's it like to be in New York?

New York City - imagine that!

Tell me, what's it like to be a skateboard punk rocker?

Leroy says "Send a picture"

Leroy says "Hello"

Leroy says "Oh, keep on rocking, girl"

"yeah, keep on rocking"

Hey Shell, you know it's kind of funny

Texas always seemed so big

But you know you're in the largest state in the union

When you're anchored down in Anchorage

Oh, Anchorage

Anchored down in Anchorage

Oh, Anchorage

Icarus

2008-09-05T00:13:00.000-03:00

I first came across this song several years ago. It was included on a compilation CD called "British Folk Troubadours" that Sean received as a promo when he was managing Sam the Record Man on Barrington street, and which he thoughtfully passed on to me. This version was recorded by Martin Simpson, but the song was written by a woman called Ann Lister, who I know nothing at all about. (I'd love to know something about her!) I played it for everyone I could, and their responses were always along the lines of, "Yeah, it's nice." I could not for the life of me understand why it wasn't blowing their minds. It is like how I was always stunned to learn that I could still register for classes called things like "Critical Theory" and "Feminism and Composition" at such a late date. Doesn't everyone dig this stuff? I never really think I'm that weird until I find out that I am.

The only other version I've heard was performed by Garnet Rogers when he played at Ginger's probably about a year ago. After the show I enthused about how thrilling it was to have heard him play that song live, explaining how no one I knew seemed to know anything about it, and how it was one of my favourite songs in the world. Then I told him how I also loved it that he played a Greg Brown cover, and I didn't say a word about his own stuff which was, you know, alright, but nothing to write home about. Garnet Rogers has a reputation for being kind of a jerk, but he was absolutely kind and forthcoming when I spoke to him after the show, despite my dis-by-omission.

It's kind of funny that a song about the purest, truest kind of love that one can have for another human being is one that reminds me so much of my own singularity and isolation. A carrier of heavy wings is way more than anyone should ever expect.

Oh, and when I said that thing about love songs a couple of entries ago, I forgot to say that almost all my favourite songs are love songs.

Icarus - Ann Lister (Martin Simpson, Garnet Rogers)

I never wanted to fly high

I was too fond of walking

And when you said you'd touch the sky

I thought it was your way of talking

And then you said you'd build some wings

And find out how it could be done

But I was doubtful of everything

I never thought you'd reach the sun

You were so clever with your hands

I'd watch you for hours

With the glue and the rubber bands

Feathers and lace and flowers

And the finished wings they glowed so bright

Like some bird of glory

I began to envy you your flight

Like some old hero's story

You tried to get me to go with you

You tried always to dare me

But I looked at the sky so blue

I thought the height would scare me

But I carried your wings for you

Up the path to the cliff face

Kissed you goodbye and watched your eyes

Already bright with sunlight

Oh it was grand at the start

To watch you soaring higher

There was a pain deep in my heart

The wings seemed tipped with fire

Like a seagull or a lark

Rising up forever

Like some ember or some spark

Rising from earth to heaven

Then I believed you'd touch the sun

I believed all you told me

Do a thing no man has ever done

You'd touch the stars to please me

But then I saw the white wings fail

Then I saw the feathers falter

Watched you drop like a bowl of gold

Into the wide green water

Now some are born to fly high

And some are born to follow

Some are born to touch the sky

While some walk in the hollow

And as I watched your body fall

I knew that really you had won

For your grave was not the earth

But the reflection of the sun

The Swimming Song

2008-09-01T22:48:00.000-03:00

Yesterday afternoon, as Jonathan returned to the apartment we shared for the last sixteen months, to pick up a couple of remaining items and to drop off his keys, I jokingly remarked, "So I guess we can go back to being friends now that we aren't roommates anymore," after offering him my new phone number. He laughed.

It wasn't really that bad, living with Jonathan. It's been way, way worse with other roommates, but we certainly let sharing space issues interfere with what was once a pretty fun and very honest and close friendship.

The end of summer, three summers ago, "The Swimming Song" was our soundtrack, whether we were driving through the Annapolis Valley or getting merrily stoned and drunk in someones apartment, raising our voices like a choir to hear it. And boy, did we hear it! Jonathan would repeat the song as many as ten times in a row, I am sure, fiddling with the MP3 player attached to his stereo as we sat outside in his beat-up car smoking cigarettes there to avoid the rain. I liked his car, I liked smoking there. I liked the imposed physical intimacy that such a small space offered.

Most of that summer revolved around the Granite Brewery. It is where we met one another, and where we met Jen, who for much of that summer completed our hedonistic trio. We consumed so much alcohol, the three of us, and we stayed up so late. We thought we were the best of friends but we were really just as immediate as Loudon Wainwright's song, which is not to belittle that time. It is something to talk so closely, to be so abandoned and in the moment. And it was nice to feel like we were in a kind of a club, the three of us. I know that I felt free, and I know that it was because of these late nights and this feeling of belonging and this speedy, motorized vehicle that brought us to the beach on sunny days. I would go so far as to say that it was the comfort and confidence that Jonathan and Jen unknowingly afforded me that allowed me to be receptive to other people, too. I belonged in that pub on Barrington street. I could walk into the building by myself and be recognized and welcomed and known. Katie, and Lisa, and Joe, and many other dear friendships came of this. I cried and laughed and danced with these people, and I was every single version of my messy, uninhibited, insecure, honest, sad self that warm and receptive hearts and several pints of Peculiar can unleash.

Time will tell, it always does, what is forever and what was for then, but it was all real, whatever kind of spin I'm inclined to put on it.

I am so glad that Jonathan laughed.

The Swimming Song - Loudon Wainwright III

This summer I went swimming,

This summer I might have drowned

But I held my breath and I kicked my feet

And I moved my arms around,

I moved my arms around.

This summer I swam in the ocean,

And I swam in a swimming pool,

Salt my wounds, chlorine my eyes,

I'm a self-destructive fool,

a self-destructive fool.

This summer I swam in a public place

And a reservoir, to boot,

At the latter I was informal,

At the former I wore my suit,

I wore my swimming suit.

This summer I did the backstroke

And you know that's not all

I did the breast stroke and the butterfly

And the old Australian crawl,

the old Australian crawl.

This summer I did swan dives

And jackknifes for you all

And once when you weren't looking

I did a cannonball,

I did a cannonball.

Here We Go

2008-08-31T22:00:00.000-03:00

This summer I went to two weddings.

The first one occurred in June. My father married Susan Kent, a wonderful woman he had been involved with for the preceding five years. They both, I think, had kind of given up on finding someone so late in life. My father arrived in Nova Scotia with a suitcase and a guitar, having purged himself of all physical reminders of his earlier life, travelling light and, I believe, without a real destination in mind. Susan, alternately, kept everything she had ever owned in boxes that surrounded her in her impossibly cluttered apartment, but which she never opened. Having seen this apartment myself, it amazes me that there was room for my father within it, but he happily found his space. They balanced each other out, matching one another's quirks and personalities in a magical way. They are so obviously into one another, but rather than alienating the people around them by being too insular, their affection for one another manages to infect everyone in their vicinity. They glow, in the healthiest, most inviting way. I think that much of it comes from being so surprised to have found one another.

Most of my favourite love songs aren't really about being in love, and I don't want to extrapolate on that much further lest I ruin potential future entries. I'll just say that most of my favourites are about looking back on a relationship with a certain nostalgic fondness and self-awareness that is very much grounded in and by the speaker's present state of mind. Songs about being in love usually seem kind of sucky, all caught up in sentiment and flowers, with a very few notable exceptions like Fountains of Wayne's innocently joyful "Hey Julie," for example.

I like "Here We Go" so much because it's both hopeful and realistic, and also because it puts so much onus on the speaker himself, rather than being concerned with a love interest who is little more than a one-dimensional ideal, or/and, as in many love-lost songs, the cause of the speaker's downfall and misery. This is a getting-ready-for-love song, and I don't think there are too many of 'em.

"You've gotta hope that there's someone for you, as strange as you are / Who can cope with the things that you do without trying too hard." That's it, isn't it?

My friends Ian and Kate got married last week-end, and my favourite part of everything was watching Kate pronounce her vows with such earnestness and devotion, on the verge of tears the entire time. These are two remarkable people on their own, and people who are optimistic but realistic enough to, I think, know that they don't need one another, and would be okay anyway, and almost pleasantly surprised to have found one another. Amazed, even. Because, of course, love is amazing.

Dad and Susan got married at Susan's sister's house because there was no electricity in their own home, where they had planned to have their very small and modest ceremony, and many of their neighbours were in fact in danger of losing their lives and property to the forest fires that were raging through Porter's Lake. I couldn't believe it when Dad called to tell me that the ceremony was going to happen as planned, just at another venue.

Love is not all I'll-be-there-until-the-end-of-time. It is way more specific than that. It is forest fires and towering boxes that could fall on your head if just one thing is shifted the wrong way. It is amazing that any thinking person ever walks down that aisle. Good for them!

Here We Go - Jon Brion

You've gotta hope that there's someone for you

As strange as you are

Who can cope with the things that you do

Without trying too hard

Because you can bend the truth

Until it's suiting you

These things that you're wrapping all around you

You never know what they will amount to

And your life is just going on without you

It's the end of the things you know

Here we go

You've gotta know that there's more to this world

Than what you have seen

Because we all have a limited view

Of what we can be

As we move along with our blinders on

Each one of us feels a little stranded

And you can't explain or understand it

Each one of us on a different planet

And amidst all the to and fro

Someone can say hello

Here we go

The feeling that someone really gets you

It's something that no one should object to

It could happen today so I suggest you

Skip your habit of laying low

It's the end of the things you know

Here we go

Annabel

2008-08-16T01:42:00.000-03:00

When Tom Glenne hosted the open mic. at the Free Times Cafe on College st., in Toronto, he would often give this spiel that went something like [serious paraphrasing], "You could all be sitting at home watching the hockey game on television, but instead you came out here to listen to live music." And it would make me think about how amazing it was - this tiny gesture - this going outside, to experience music and community, whether I was performing or just taking it in. And of course I would have to suffer through some whiny or boring or even embarrassing performances, but these amazing things happened there, too. I think above and beyond the individual songs and songwriters I discovered was this sense of community that was created in this very organic way. People met future band mates and friends on these Monday nights, arriving as early as six o'clock in the evening to ensure themselves a spot on the list that was almost always filled by the time the evening started at eight. For several months I was in attendance almost every Monday, lugging my guitar home to Etobicoke at the end of the night in time to get barely enough sleep to face Tuesday. Showcases were also held there, one evening a month, featuring four open mic. performers in what was often their first real gig. It was something that the open mic. hosts organized. Musicians waited for their own turns attentively and quietly. It was such a welcoming environment for songwriters, like myself, who were fairly new at performing in front of an audience and even at playing their instruments. More experienced musicians often used Monday nights to try out new material in front of an attentive audience.

Despite my long and comfortable relationship with the Granite Brewery and Ginger's Tavern, in Halifax, I have only ever been a kinda sorta regular at their own Monday night open mic., "Stage Fright," mostly just because Monday has historically been the one evening I have wanted very much to just go home after work. I am not someone who goes home and comes back. I stick it out or I go to bed, and the hours between six and ten seem like a lot and Monday is usually my most sensible day for thinking that way.

But there is clearly a community of musicians who have come together and out of "Stage Fright."

Tonight, Bend the River released their first CD, Revolt of Angels, which they actually recorded in the venue over the winter. The songs on this album were all written by Ronok Sarkar, with the exception of one song co-written by Ronok and the band's drummer and "Stage Fright" host RJ Donovan. The band also includes Adam Fine, Jonathan Andrews, and Matt Myer, with assistance from Evan Kolvoord, Bill Travis, Erin Costelo, and Kevin Corbett. Opening for Bend the River were Erin Costello and former open mic. regular, Jon McKiel. It's unclear to me exactly how all of these musicians found one another, but it seems that Monday nights at Ginger's was indeed the springboard for these friendships and collaborations.

It was an amazing show, let me please state that for the record, even though that's not really what this blog entry is about. I can't wait until these guys are so fucking HUGE, and I can be all "I told you so," 'cause the world is just a terrible, unfair, stupid place if that doesn't happen.

I made some friends at the Free Times, I found some people to sing with, to share gigs with. I appreciated the camaraderie and the recognition. It is some thing to be known, to be "regular."

And the musicians themselves. There is something so intimate and lucky about being in that room, being so close to someone so earnestly, and of course in the best instances, so masterfully, playing their songs like that. Live! You never know what will get lost or altered on the recording. You never know that they'll even make a recording. An original song is a magical, unique piece of work that changes every time it gets played.

Kat Goldman, when she was Kathy Goldman, used to play at the Free Times. She was my favourite. Her lyrics aren't on the internet and thus not so easily paste-able, and so I promise to painstakingly type them all out when I get the chance. But not tonight.

Annabel - Kat Goldman

Wes Anderson

2008-08-12T22:58:00.000-03:00

I couldn't find the other best ones. Pretend I didn't just say that. I wanted this to be a silent blog.

Too much Tenenbaums I know, I know. Blame google image search.

The Wind / Don't Be Shy

2008-08-11T22:46:00.000-03:00

Well, I just feel so fantastic this evening. After a rather not-fantastic day, I managed to take stock of and remember the things that I am proud to be doing and the things that I am grateful for. Walking home, feeling pretty serene as I watched the last light of day disappear, I thought it was pretty stupid of me to be trying so desperately to recover a favourite wallowing song of mine from the depths of my memory - this was my intended project - when, as it turned out, I no longer felt at all like wallowing.

It's hard to pick a favourite Cat Stevens song. (So I won't.) All of his songs feel like things that have always been there, comforting like pajamas fresh out of the dryer - sweatshops (pajamas) and fatwas (Stevens/Rushdie) aside. My hippie friend Jill once said, "Cat Stevens is the best driving music" and - environmental damage (cars) aside - I couldn't agree more. Listening to Cat Stevens is like being reminded of the journey while you're in it. It's free and alert and absolutely - literally - wonderful.

We used to sing "Wild World," didn't we? Liz & Steph & whoever else & I, sitting outside in Markland Woods by Liz's pool or at Centennial Park with guitars.

This is a short one - no more explanations and no more fucking brackets.

This song is just so good. And it is almost always so hard for me to relax.

I'm going to go watch Rushmore.

**Photo is a screenshot from Harold & Maude, retrieved by google. How do I credit this? Am I being criminal? Um, I got it here: http://4thwall.de/uploads/maude.jpg

The Wind - Cat Stevens

I listen to the wind to the wind of my soul

Where I'll end up well I think, only God really knows

I've sat upon the setting sun

But never, never never never

I never wanted water once

No, never, never, never

I listen to my words but they fall far below

I let my music take me where my heart wants to go

I swam upon the devil's lake

But never, never never never

I'll never make the same mistake

No, never, never, never

Don't Be Shy - Cat Stevens

Don't be shy just let your feelings roll on by

Don't wear fear or nobody will know you're there

Just lift your head, and let your feelings out instead

And don't be shy, just let your feeling roll on by

On by...

You know love is better than a song

Love is where all of us belong

So don't be shy just let your feelings roll on by

Don't wear fear or nobody will know you're there

You're there...

Don't be shy just let your feelings roll on by

Don't wear fear or nobody will know you're there

Just lift your head, and let your feelings out instead

And don't be shy, just let your feeling roll on by

On by, on by, on by, on by...

Last Waltz at the El Strato

2008-08-10T13:17:00.000-03:00

Speaking of rude awakenings, and the CBC's role therein, I really should have known something fishy was going on as soon as I was woken up to an Al Tuck song. On the radio!

The El Strato lounge and Al Tuck were and are Halifax fixtures that are forever tied to my earliest impressions of this city. They appropriately exemplify the romanticised relationship between creativity and authenticity that is expressed in this city in a myriad of ways, as in the often dilapidated buildings that are nevertheless painted brilliant reds and blues.

The radio played "Last Waltz at the El Strato" when it was too late for a last waltz, on the morning following a fire that burned the building to the ground.

I used to go there with roommates and new friends, to enjoy tiny $1.35 drafts and conversation and the experience of bearing witness to the cross-section of art school students and VLT addicts and alcoholics who made up the seedier side of the north end. The bartender showed me an old photo album that was kept behind the bar, and which declared the owners' earnest and optimistic intention of creating a western-themed venue on Gottingen street. The decor still included a western-themed mural on the back wall, and large wagon wheels affixed to wooden posts. Beside the entrance there was a display case that was always lit up and showcased a blank piece of paper that never, in my recollection, was removed or adjusted to advertise the events that actually did - rarely - occur within the venue. Blinking lights that proclaimed nothing at all.

My day job then was selling pocketbooks, cigarettes and pornography at United Bookstore on Barrington street, and my boss Dave turned me on to Al Tuck's music almost immediately after I began working there. I listened to "Brave Last Days" all the time, without ever recognising that Al Tuck was that cute, tall guy from Sam's who came in to buy cigarettes almost every day. I didn't make the connection until I went to see Al play a show at Oasis, during an East Coast Music Awards No-Case, or whatever they were called at the time; those supplementary events not supported by the music awards themselves, because the musicians were too weird or unpopular or interesting to be sold as being representative of the kind of "culture" the tourist bureau and its affiliates are intent on promoting to the rest of the country.

I'm still hard pressed to locate many other musicians with as much integrity as Al Tuck. This largely unsung hero of Atlantic Canadian music continues to (barely, I imagine) eke out a living by writing and performing songs at such venues as Gus' pub and Bearley's, and every time I see him perform I am so aware of the fact that it is only the good fortune of my geography that allows me the incredible opportunity.

When I think about Halifax, I think about music, and when I think about Halifax music, Al Tuck is one of the first musicians to come to mind. He so exemplifies the spirit of this place, and all of the contradictions and grittiness and beauty that keep me in this tourist town.

**Quintessentially Halifax blue house photographed by Andrew MacDonald. I wish it looked more dilapidated, but maybe it's in a sketchy neighbourhood!

Last Waltz at the El Strato - Al Tuck

(instrumental)

Apple Scruffs

2008-08-06T21:28:00.001-03:00

I don't think there is another song in the world that makes me happier than George Harrison's "Apple Scruffs." It just begs to be danced around to, in that boppy, up & down way that I "dance" when so moved. I remember dancing to this song in the front room on Hunter street, in the apartment that I shared with Sean and a slew of other roommates when we first moved here, together, from Toronto. It offered some levity to the otherwise sad event of George Harrison's passing, the news of which Sean and I awoke to, courtesy of CBC Radio 1. It was an unfortunate way to start the day but it was a good day, if the best days are - and they are - the ones that are made significant for and by their honest interactions.

The sheer length of George Harrison's first solo release, "All Things Must Pass," is enough to indicate that he felt there were things he had to say that he couldn't or had not been permitted to say as one-fourth of The Beatles; and one far less considered and revered than the Lennon-McCartney songwriting team.

I would hate to suggest that that I felt I was in Sean's shadow throughout our relationship because this is simply not the case. I am in fact less comfortable with this parallel than I am with the comparison of our partnership to the relationship of the four people who comprised what is arguably the best band of all time. What I believe is apt is the acknowledgement that there are some things you can't take stock of properly when you're in the thick of it, and also that, despite the best of intentions, you necessarily lose a bit of your agency when you are involved in a relationship. That is the nature of compromise, and compromise, to some degree, is imperative for the success of a relationship.

When things don't work out, one understandable response is to consider how this loss of someone else can be a sort of stand-in for the things you have lost of yourself. What was it for? I could have gone to Europe! I'd be living in Whitehorse! I could have been with so-and-so! All of these possible lives are considered with a bitterness to match the lost, could-have-been enthusiasm that would have greeted these adventures.

If you get a best friend out of that mess, you are so far ahead of the game you're on, like, the super-all-stars best team in the universe or something. If you get a sweet, nostalgic song like "Apple Scruffs," it was definitely worth it, that sticking it out.

When Sean and I danced to slower, sadder Harrison songs in that front room, we cried and held each other not because this death was tragic or unexpected, but just because it was a really, really sad inevitability, and we weren't quite ready to say good-bye.

I miss my best friend Sean very much, but not because he isn't. It's only geography.

Apple Scruffs - George Harrison

Now I've watched you sitting there

Seen the passers-by all stare

Like you have no place to go

But theres so much they dont know

about apple scruffs

You've been stood around for years

Seen my smiles and touched my tears

How it's been a long, long time

And how you've been on my mind,

my apple scruffs

Apple scruffs, apple scruffs

How I love you, how I love you

In the fog and in the rain

Through the pleasures and the pain

On the step outside you stand

With your flowers in your hand,

my apple scruffs

While the years they come and go

Now, your love must surely show me

That beyond all time and space

Were together face to face,

my apple scruffs

Apple scruffs, apple scruffs

How I love you, how I love you

While My Guitar Gently Weeps

2008-08-03T13:41:00.000-03:00

I can't remember ever being unfamiliar with The Beatles' self-titled double album, popularly referred to as The White Album. In a small way, it's a shame, because I'd love to have a recollection of that moment of discovery.

By the time we moved into our home on Edgevalley Drive, when I was nine years old, the album was already well known to me, but it is that basement I am always taken back to when I listen to The White Album. The bar that took up a significant portion of our rec. room, instead of being stocked with various bottles of spirits was stocked with the records that my parents had collected when they were children, teenagers, and young adults. There were stacks and stacks of these records piled on the shelves behind the bar out of sight from where we were usually positioned in the room. It was an effort to dig through these, and to finally select what I wanted to hear, and place the chosen album on the turntable that sat on top of the bar. It's weird that my brothers never did this. I have asked them which albums or songs remind them of their childhood, and they always recall what was popular at the time, completely disinterested in or unaware of this musical history our parents brought with them, before there was us, in boxes they packed and unpacked in a series of moves that coincided with the landmark events in their lives. I wonder about my father listening to this music in his residence room when he was going to the University of Toronto; in the first apartment he shared with my mother as a newlywed; and finally, how he felt hearing his nine-year-old daughter belt out the words to "Happiness is a Warm Gun" with such unrestrained enthusiasm.

It was easy to distinguish my father's records from the ones that had belonged to my mother because he had signed his name to the cover of his, something my collector-brain, after years of working in second-hand bookstores, is fairly appalled by, but which I otherwise find endearing. For some reason, or for several reasons, my father had been concerned about losing his claim to these, and this signature in bold blue ink was evidence of their importance to him. I don't know where these records have ended up, and I'm inclined to doubt that my father does, either; I think it's true that stuff begins to lose its importance as we get older, and particularly as the not-stuff, like relationships with people and geography, is revealed to be inconstant and even fleeting. What you ultimately get to keep is your own picture in your own head. The Beatles didn't write these songs for me or my dad.

One of the records was scratched. In one chorus of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," George Harrison sings, "While my g-weeps." My mom always thought the lyric,"I look at the floor and I see it needs sweeping" was ridiculous; that it was only included because it rhymed. And maybe she's right, but I have looked at floors and spaces and felt immobilized by the amount of dust and dirt and clutter I am confronted by. It is too much, sometimes. But eventually, you pick up the broom, because you want to put something new over that mess, or you at least want your damage deposit back.

My very first apartment, which I shared with Kim and Andrea during my second year of university, that first time around, was at the corner of Bloor and College streets in Sudbury, Ontario. I thought it was funny, living at the corner of these two side-streets that shared their names with major streets in Toronto that ran parallel to one another, and which would never, ever, meet. I had copied onto cassettes a number of albums from home, and of course one of these was The White Album. I anticipated the skip, appreciated the scratched record sounds that had been transferred to this cassette and this city, and on those nights where I was feeling lonely and homesick, it made me feel a little less so.

While My Guitar Gently Weeps - The Beatles (Harrison)

I look at you all see the love there that's sleeping

While my guitar gently weeps

I look at the floor and I see it needs sweeping

Still my guitar gently weeps

I don't know why nobody told you how to unfold your love

I don't know how someone controlled you

They bought and sold you.

I look at the world and I notice it's turning

While my guitar gently weeps

With every mistake we must surely be learning

Still my guitar gently weeps

I don't know how you were diverted

You were perverted too

I don't know how you were inverted

No one alerted you.

I look at you all see the love there that's sleeping

While my guitar gently weeps

Look at you all...

Still my guitar gently weeps.

Closer to Fine

2008-08-01T10:36:00.000-03:00

I saw a wonderful show on Thursday evening. The Three Handsome Devils - Evan Kolvoord, Ronok Sarkar & Bill Travis - were reunited for the first time in at least a year, as Evan's been living in his home town of Austin, Texas of late. I met his girlfriend Nicole that evening, and I was surprised to hear her express how exciting it was for her to be able to see him perform these shows the way that he has over the past month or so, during their Nova Scotia vacation. I guess he doesn't do much of this in Austin. She offered a vague explanation about him having done all of that there so many years ago, also alluding to how his creativity might be kind of stifled in the presence of all of these people he's known his whole life. I kind of get that. What she also said, though, and I think more significantly, was that Evan seemed to feel more inspired in Halifax. She recognized a very creative and collaborative community in this little city. It's so interesting how the spirit of a place can affect the way a person relates to even the things that are the most important to him- or herself. I think she's right about Halifax.

When I moved back to Toronto for a little while at the very, very end of the 1990's, I became acutely aware of the fact that no one ever danced at rock shows. They stood there maybe swaying, almost imperceptibly. It was notable because everyone danced at rock shows, in Halifax.

The show - The Handsome Devils show - was intentionally but earnestly like a lazy Sunday afternoon in a friend's kitchen. The three songwriters played one another's songs around a checkered tablecloth atop of a bar table that sat in the centre of the stage and held a fruit bowl from which audience members were invited to - and indeed did - help themselves.

It looked, for a bit, like the show might not happen. The small audience that finally arrived did so late. I guess these lazy late arrivals - a natural fit for this city after all - must be accommodated despite all of the tomorrow mornings that follow these evenings in much too rapid succession. Evan took to the street with his ukulele and improvised songs about his surroundings in an attempt to lure people into the venue. It was mostly unsuccessful that way, but people stopped and listened or at least offered warm smiles as they continued on to their own engagements or homes.

I remembered how when I was younger I used to find these spaces and people and moments even in great big, grey Toronto, and how songs on streets made the pavement and the commute something almost magical. Individuals connected by voices and music and being outside, in it with the world, which is really a very joyful place.

For two summers, my friend Justin and I used to busk outside of Futures Bakery at Bloor & Brunswick sts. I would play guitar while he did tricks with his devil sticks. There was a woman who worked at Futures who would give us free coffee everyday, which was my favourite thing about playing there - knowing how she appreciated hearing this through the open window enough to encourage our extended engagement by offering caffeinated beverages as incentive. Otherwise, we made a little bit of money - enough to share a package of Drum tobacco and get wasted at the Bistro every Wednesday night before heading down the street to watch One Step Beyond play their acid jazz to a roomful of hippies who did, indeed, dance freely.

At some point during every day we were out there, Justin would insist, "Play the mountain song!" And I would never ever tire of appeasing him by playing "Closer to Fine."

I imagine that "Closer to Fine" remains a song that is sung around campfires and in basements and on street corners like that one, though I don't think I've heard anyone play it in years. It's one of the first songs I ever learned how to play on guitar, courtesy of John Duncan IV (who also taught me how to play The Lemonheads' "Confetti" which is the second song I learned to play on guitar). Everyone I was friends with seemed to know and love this song, and because hardly anyone else knew how to actually play guitar, they all thought I was pretty awesome at it.

I've taken issue with the word "fine," rallied against its connotations even, sort of equating it with the settling sentiment. But I think I've reclaimed it of late. There is nothing wrong with fine. She's so Fine, "I'm in love with her and I feel fine." Fine I thought, was like an excellent meal, an ironed suit; Intentional, precise. Really, though, I don't think "fine" is that considered, and certainly not the way it's expressed in this song. Perhaps it's like happiness is this imagined higher level that hasn't been attained and maybe doesn't even exist. If fine and content are the best you can get, so what? I feel way better, fine and inexplicably easy than I do during most of the minutes of my life that are spent looking for what it is that I lack.

"Closer To Fine" - Indigo Girls

I'm trying to tell you something about my life

Maybe give me insight between black and white

The best thing you've ever done for me

Is to help me take my life less seriously, it's only life after all

Well darkness has a hunger that's insatiable

And lightness has a call that's hard to hear

I wrap my fear around me like a blanket

I sailed my ship of safety till I sank it,

I'm crawling on your shore.

I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains

I looked to the children, I drank from the fountain

There's more than one answer to these questions

pointing me in crooked line

The less I seek my source for some definitive

The closer I am to fine.

I went to see the doctor of philosophy

With a poster of Rasputin and a beard down to his knee

He never did marry or see a B-grade movie

He graded my performance, he said he could see through me

I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind, got my paper

And I was free.

I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains

I looked to the children, I drank from the fountain

There's more than one answer to these questions

pointing me in crooked line

The less I seek my source for some definitive

The closer I am to fine.

I stopped by the bar at 3 a.m.

To seek solace in a bottle or possibly a friend

I woke up with a headache like my head against a board

Twice as cloudy as I'd been the night before

I went in seeking clarity.

I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains

I looked to the children, I drank from the fountain

There's more than one answer to these questions

pointing me in crooked line

The less I seek my source for some definitive

The closer I am to fine.

I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains

I looked to the children, I drank from the fountain

There's more than one answer to these questions

pointing me in crooked line

The less I seek my source for some definitive

The closer I am to fine.

We go to the bible, we go through the workout

We read up on revival and we stand up for the lookout

There's more than one answer to these questions

pointing me in a crooked line

The less I seek my source for some definitive

The closer I am to fine

Nightswimming

2008-07-30T23:04:00.000-03:00

When I was in grade thirteen, which is something they had, in Ontario, in 1993-94, I went to this weirdo public school called SEE. This converted elementary school with its too-small toilets and coat hangers offered me a lot of things my more conventional and teenager-sized high school, Martingrove, had not. Not the least of which were the mornings I spent luxuriously indulging my newly acquired bad habit - smoking cigarettes - whilst intentionally creating an authentic and romantic space for myself and myself alone within my great big world of friendships and crushes and pining and feelings of unworthiness. Amidst the soundtrack of these years that screamed significantly and appropriately and synchronously from car stereos and ghetto blasters and not-yet-mastered guitars in friends basements, I found this one song or else it found me, and I made it my own through this repetitive, ritualistic process that I kept for myself.

Mom and Dad and Geoff and Ted would leave for work and school like regular people at least an hour before I rolled out of my bed, the house and the hours before my twelve o'clock class to myself. I would sit in the living room with my coffee and my cigarettes, which I could smoke secretly because my dad smoked there too, and the lingering smoke would certainly be attributed to him. I would place Automatic for the People in the stereo, skip ahead to track 11, and press play as I smoked my cigarette on the comfortable armchair in the corner, blinds closed, lest I expose myself and my secret habit to my neighbours. It is the best personal indulgence I have ever had, and maybe that is something I could use now - a secret ritual that no one else knows about, that I enjoy so wholly and repeatedly. For years I refused to tell anyone how much I loved this song. I would leave the room if someone else played this album in some other room, as soon as I heard it begin. I did not want to associate this with any other person in the world. I greedily hoarded this song.

Automatic for the People had come out the previous year, when I was in grade twelve, and I listened to it in its entirely a lot that year. I had a part-time job working at one of my dad's stores, and after school I would ride the Martingrove bus all the way up to Steeles Avenue. "Everybody Hurts" killed me. It made me think about the friends I felt I was losing, growing distances and little betrayals. I suffered a minor depression I think, maybe it's a high school thing.

I did not feel amazing in grade thirteen, but I felt a little more sure of myself, like I was on the cusp of something. I had this awareness of going new places and leaving some old things behind, and I had no idea how I would reconcile the two. But really, I don't think I thought about it too much. I was pretty optimistic, despite being so easily hurt, when I was eighteen.

I played "Nightswimming" for myself and I loved the strings and the piano and I loved that part about the photograph on the dashboard, driving somewhere with something from before right there in front of me. Nightswimming seemed like the perfect solitary event, and so I played this song in the morning, in my dry living room, and I felt a lot of things that I couldn't and can't explain.

Nightswimming - REM (Berry/Buck/Mills/Stipe)

Nightswimming deserves a quiet night

The photograph on the dashboard, taken years ago,

Turned around backwards so the windshield shows

Every streetlight reveals the picture in reverse

Still, it's so much clearer

I forgot my shirt at the water's edge

The moon is low tonight

Nightswimming deserves a quiet night

I'm not sure all these people understand

It's not like years ago,

The fear of getting caught,

Of recklessness and water

They cannot see me naked

These things, they go away,

Replaced by everyday

Nightswimming, remembering that night

September's coming soon

I'm pining for the moon

And what if there were two

Side by side in orbit

Around the fairest sun?

That bright, tight forever drum

Could not describe nightswimming

You, I thought I knew you

You, I cannot judge

You, I thought you knew me,

This one laughing quietly underneath my breath

Nightswimming

The photograph reflects,

Every streetlight a reminder

Nightswimming deserves a quiet night, deserves a quiet night