This is a pretty old song which I wrote in my early 20s when I lived in Toronto.
This song was composed on my back back when I was an avid cycle commuter.
It's essentially about a "relationship hangover", the experience of one relationship hanging on and overshadowing the beginning of the next relationship.
I am often a vivid dreamer and this song describes the experience of my unconscious mind holding on to longing after a person even after my conscious mind has moved on.
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.
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.
I'm going to post a previously-unrecorded song to YouTube every Sunday for a year and some of the songs will have corresponding blog posts telling a little something about the origin of the song.
I invite you to subscribe to my YouTube channel and request that you please comment or give thumbs up to the songs you particularly like. I'm going to use feedback I receive to decide what to record on my next album, which I'll hopefully record toward the end of 2015 or in 2016.
I will be including some new songs and some songs from my archives. It seems only right to kick off with one of my most-recently written songs, so here goes.
Song #1: Weather Hold
I wrote this song in November 2014 while I was in Happy Valley-Goose Bay for the Labrador Creative Arts Festival. On the first day of the festival, I was scheduled to fly up to Nain to do some workshops with the kids there. But everything in Labrador is weather dependent and the wind did not co-operate. So, I sat in the airport, along with a number of other LCAF visiting artists, for about seven-eight hours, each hour bringing another update saying that we were on weather hold and there would be another update in an hour or an hour and a half or an hour and 15 minutes.
While having fun getting to know the other artists, my mind was also thinking about waiting, and ceasing to wait (taking the bull by the horns, as we say in my family). The next morning I had nothing scheduled (because I was supposed to still be in Nain) so I sat down at wrote this song. It was a wonderful way to transform my disappointment about not being able to travel up the coast into something positive.
I hope you enjoy it.
(If you'd like to read the lyrics, they are posted on You Tube with 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.
