Well, well, well! Song 8 falls on my birthday. The numbers, if you like that sort of thing are all lined up. I'm 44 on the 22nd and this is Song 8. I love 2s, 4s and especially 8s! So this song feels particularly auspicious.
My first birthday phone conversation this morning travelled from many things through Moby Dick to Ahab and naturally to Jezebel.
And that made me think of this song.
This is an oldie. It's about the kinds of relationship dilemmas we face when we are in our early 20s – offers often abound while maturity and empathy often do not. The choices we make help us figure out who we are and/or who we want to be.
Those sorts of situations (and listening to a lot of Ani DiFranco) lead to these sorts of songs:
As usual, you can click on the YouTube icon to see the lyrics.
I was tempted to post a break-up song today, but I have decided on a love song instead. If you were hoping for a break-up song, I recorded an entire album of them in 2008, called Love Bites (available on iTunes, CDBaby and Bandcamp). That album could have been a double album – I had the material, just not the resources to make Love Bites bigger. And sadly, I've written more break-up songs since 2008. I'm sure many of those songs will no doubt be included in this project at some point. But not today. No, today will be an old, sweet love-song of mine, Golden.
This song is not dated in my journal, but I know I wrote it in late July 1996. I was camping at Agawa Bay on the shores of Lake Superior with my then-partner. He and I were both in our early 20s and probably like a lot of smart, high-achieving young people we both tended toward perfectionism. Neither of us liked making mistakes.
It was a difficult trip – it was my first real camping trip (not counting a couple of nights with the Girl Guides and a couple of nights in the Sierra Nevadas with my dad and sister when I was 10). I was in a place that was very precious to my partner from his childhood. We had terrible (wet, cold) weather for the first three days, I felt sick and was very grumpy.
I felt bad about being so cranky. My then-partner made a mistake that he felt really bad about (which he asked me not to talk about ever again, so I won't). I wrote this song as a way to try to figure out and accept fallibility in our relationship. We do not always behave the way we want to behave, but that doesn't make us less worthy of love. (Sometimes our behaviour makes us impossible for another person to be in a relationship with us – but let us leave that for other songs.)
The title of the song was inspired by the way the sun would come out at sunset every day – even on the wettest, most miserable days. We would take a walk on the beach and a beam of light from the sun would seem to track us along our walk. I know this is just a function of the way human eyes perceive light, but it felt like magic, like grace.
Around the time I wrote this song, I took a songwriting course with
Peter Linseman through the Toronto Board of Education. The notes in
black ink above, were ideas that arose from that course that I added to
the song after I played it for that class.
Here is Golden:
As usual, the final lyrics are typed on on YouTube. Open the video in YouTube to read them.
This song used to be in heavy rotation in my repertoire. I wrote it in 2002 – as I was coming closer to the end of a ten year span of not performing my songs in public.
I found this song in one of my journals while looking for Black & Blue, as song that had been requested for this project that I couldn't remember how to sing.
While going through my journals, I found a track list for a proposed album that I was going to record, entitled "New Shoes". On that track list was the title Stage Fright. I looked at it and thought, "That looks so familiar! But what is that song? Stage Fright? Stage Fright..."
I kept flipping through my journals and soon found the entire song. Instantly it came back to me. I really, really like this song. I think I only stopped playing it all the time because it didn't feel as true for me as it once had. I stopped feeling mostly anxious both as a performer and in my life. And therefore, the song dropped out of frequent play.
A couple of notes on the lyrics
I'm pretty sure that when I borrowed the first part of the line: "Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned," I thought it was written by Shakespeare, though I realized subsequently that that line was written by William Congreve.
I still don't know where I heard the line "Freedom is picking your cage," but I did hear it somewhere. A google search has not given me any clues. Anyone have any insights about where I might have heard this (deeply cynical) line sometime prior to 2002?
I still think it's a really good song. It makes me want to feel anxious and cynical again just so I can feel more authentic when I play it. (Kidding. I kid.)
As usual, the lyrics are on YouTube. Click on the YouTube logo at the bottom right of the embedded video to visit the song on YouTube and see the typed, final lyrics.
I wrote this song for the Petite Riviere Community Park's opening ceremony held in October 2014. The park is a beautiful reclamation of former industrial land near the mouth of the river in Petite Riviere, Nova Scotia. The park has been gorgeously landscaped with indigenous plants by Rose-Marie Lohnes and her team at Helping Nature Heal.
I was invited to sing at the opening ceremony by my friend Leif Helmer, who was instrumental in the creation of the park and is also the founder of Little River Folk (where I've helped out and served on the board) and other community endeavours too numerous to mention here.
When Leif invited me, I figured I would sing River Road, a song about the neighbouring LaHave River which I know many people in our community appreciate. But, as I got closer to the ceremony, I decided that I really wanted to write a song specifically about the Petite River, if I could.
Just a couple of days before the ceremony, I put a call out on Facebook for people to share their stories about the river. Many of my friends and neighbours contributed their stories, thoughts and feelings, and I scrambled to write this song.
The Process
Here's the first draft:
You can see how I tried to squeeze in as many stories as I could: about the group of seven painting the Petite, about a child falling through the ice. There were many other things I would have liked to have included - about the artists, especially the painters and rug hookers who thrive on the banks of the Petite, about some of the stories of daredevil stunts that have involved the river and its many bridges.
But in the end, I knew that I couldn't fit everything into the song or it would be a 9-minute-long epic! It is only a little river, after all.
Here's the final version:
Because I wrote the song at the last minute, I didn't actually know it very well when I performed it at the ceremony in October. There were a few flubs for sure, but I made some people laugh and some cry. Any performance that does that is a success in my eyes.
Still, it's nice to present a more polished version now.
The Details (and the In-Joke)
This song contains several "insider" references on its lazy inner-tube ride down the Petite.
The reference to "whitefish" in the fourth verse is a tip of the hat to the Petite for being one of only two rivers that forms habitat for the endangered Atlantic Whitefish.
The otter in that same verse was desired for its rhyme with "water" obviously, but I did get a river resident to confirm that river otters have been spotted on the banks of the Petite.
The mention of "Sperry's" in verse six refers to Sperry's beach, a small beach on an outcrop of sand that faces the Petite River on one side and the Atlantic ocean on the other. It sits across from one end of Risser's Beach and is one of five amazing beaches within a ten-minute drive of the community of Petite Riviere. Sperry's is considered the "local" beach. It is accessed by an unmarked road and tourists are generally not told how to get in.
With thanks to Jennifer, Stephen, Bernadette, Susan, Rose-Marie, Dana,
Tara, Leif, Anne, Margaret, Scotty, Stacey, Angela, Stephanie, Sharon
and Annie for their contributions to the writing of the song.
Alex Hickey was born with a serious case of sass-mouth, and it appears to be incurable. She is a Nova Scotian songwriter who writes folk & country songs about the economy, the environment, love, poisonings, bicycles and much, much more. Armed only with her soaring voice & acoustic guitar, this gal can crack you up with one song and break you down into tears with the next.
