It's part love song for my house and cat and part break-up song for a relationship that had ended shortly before my move. The references in the song are to off-grid living in a converted trailer. No electricity. No running water.
My Tiny Home c. March 2014
I added a third verse to the song in the fall of 2014.
It's inspired jointly by a Garnet Roger's house concert I attended last June and also Tannis Slimmon's song There's a Lift.
I feel bad that this failed to post March 8 – I had some major tech problems and while I thought this had uploaded, it had not. Better late than never, eh?
I wrote this song in 1996. It doesn't have an exact date on it, but judging from the dates of other entries in this journal, it was written at some time between March 9 and March 31.
I wrote the song on my bicycle, bombing around the city of Toronto. I was an avid cycle-commuter there for many years – even in March.
That's why there are no edits on this page where I first wrote the lyrics down – I had already worked all the words out in my head before I ever put it on paper.
I'm quite fond of this song, though it feels like it belongs to another time in my life – but perhaps I'll be a cycle-commuter again at some point...
On the video, I misidentify this song as having been written around 2005 or 2006 – I think because that's the first time I can remember performing it – it took me a long time to develop the guitar skills to play this song the way I wanted to.
This is a simple little song – one of many I wrote for a doomed relationship I tried to have in the late naughts.
Some of the lyrics and imagery are direct lifts from the old folk song "She'll be Comin' Round the Mountain When She Comes". The third verse is based on the idea of a dream in which all of one's past lovers come back to show you how what goes around comes around and your deserve every ounce of misery and failure that you're experiencing.
At its inception, this song had a completely different chorus (which really feels more like "B part" than a chorus) which I can't remember now. I obviously didn't like it very much because I didn't play this song very often until I wrote the current B part sometime in late 2013 or early 2014.
Most of the songs I've posted in this project so far have been fairly fun and positive. In eight songs I've only done ONE break-up song. Those of you who know my music will know that this is not really representative.
I guess I've been trying to cheer myself up and it seems to have worked. Which means that I think I can risk a downer today, especially since it is so beautifully sunny:
This is a very simple little song that I began in August 2004 and finished in September/October of the same year. Going through my 2004 journals, I'm a bit shocked by how many great songs I wrote that year, many of them never recorded. This is not a song I play often in public performance. I've tried it, but it doesn't go over that well, frankly. It's a bit slow and depressing.
It is, however, heartfelt and very meaningful to me. Putting it up on
YouTube is kind of perfect, actually, because if you get bored you can
just go do something else. In a live situation, that would hurt my
feelings – but in the virtual world, I'll never know unless you tell me
(and please don't).
This is another song with a reference to Paul Simon, though I wouldn't have thought he was that big an influence in my musical life. The line "I've crapped out" in this song is defintely a reference to the line "4 in the morning, crapped-out, yawning, longing my life away / I never worry, why should I? / It's all gonna fade" in the bridge of the title track of Paul Simon's album, Still Crazy After All These Years, which was one of my favourite records in my stepdad's collection when I was a kid.
*As usual, view the song in YouTube to see the typed final lyrics.
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.
