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.
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.
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.
