Song Note Sunday #3: Cardboard Heroes

Last week's Song Note Sunday was cancelled due to illness.

Cardboard Heroes goes back a long way. It was the title track of an album I made in 1996, that was released only on cassette.

1996 cassette release of Cardboard Heroes

I think I wrote the song in 1995. I was living in a basement apartment on Beatrice Street in Toronto. I was getting over the breakup of my first true love and feeling really dark about a lot of things. I felt like the way I had grown up made me unfit to have a successful relationship. 

Close by my apartment, at the corner of Harbord and Grace, there was a hockey card store called "Cardboard Heroes". The phrase ricocheted around my brain and developed into the basis for a song. The name of the store, and the idea that people were so invested in the 2-dimensional heroes they found on hockey cards, resonated with me. 

I had known the Malvina Reynolds song, "Little Boxes", since childhood. I felt like my generation was living in the fallout from that generation of hollow, middle class expectations. Cardboard Heroes is like the bastard child of Little Boxes.