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. 

Song Note Sunday #2: The Minnie Pearl (or How Art Breeds Art)

The story behind this song is a story about how art cross-pollinates.

Lunch in Hall's Harbour, NS

One summer's day more than 17 years ago, when I was just beginning to write songs, my mom, my nana and I went to Hall's Harbour to get lobsters for lunch. Hall's Harbour is just a hop, skip and a jump from my nana's cottage in Harbourville* (sense a theme here with the harbour thing? We have a lot of harbours in Nova Scotia.)

It was a beautiful day, perfect for driving across the North Mountain of the Annapolis Valley and seeing the sights. Hall's Harbour has been more tourist-y than Harbourville (at least for the past 20 years or so). In addition to the lobsters, we knew there would be a couple of shops to go into. It would be the perfect outing for a fine day.

While our lobsters boiled and the seagulls wheeled and cried overhead (looking forward to the lobster shells, no doubt), we went into John Neville's studio**. The studio was full of amazing wood block prints. John Neville's wife was there and she avidly told us the stories behind the prints in her authoritative British accent.

Art breeds art

I remember one print showing a bunch of local women pushing a rum-runner's shack off a cliff in retribution for providing their sons and husbands with liquor. But the print that really caught my eye told the story of a man who bought a boat that sank. He raised her up and fixed her up and took her out fishing again. She sank again. So, he raised her up, dragged her up on the beach, doused her with gasoline and set her on fire.

The print was entitled, So I Burned the Bitch.

I loved the story. The bloody-mindedness of that fisherman caught at my heart. I loved him. I loved that he would go to all that trouble to destroy something that had broken his heart. (I am prone to doing those sorts of vindictive things myself – or at least fantasizing about doing them.)

The story haunted me, but I didn't even try to write the song for another 8 or 9 years. When I did try, the lyrics came fairly easily, but the tune and accompaniment bogged it down. About 5 years ago, I workshopped it with my voice coach, Deanna Yerichuk, who told me to sing it as if I felt each emotion as it came up in the song: ambition, pride, devastation, triumph, despair and vindication. That helped a lot. It brought my passion for the song's subject to the fore. But it wasn't until I ditched the guitar and sang the song a cappella that it truly came to life.

There is was: bare and sparse. The sort of song you might sing into the wind while something that has betrayed you burns to wreckage behind you on the beach.

You can listen to The Minnie Pearl here.

*My nana's cottage is still in the family and I still spend time there every summer. For more information about Harbourville, visit the Harbourville Restoration Society Web site.
**John Neville no longer has a studio in Hall's Harbour. The last I heard, he was living and working in Maine.

Song Note Sundays #1: Jimmy Dean

Written: ~2007

Recorded: 2012, Blackbirds
Click here to listen to Jimmy Dean

Back in 2006, I went on a road trip from Toronto to Tennessee with my good friend, Momo. 

At the time, and unbeknownst to Momo, the 12-year relationship I was in was secretly staggering to its slow and painful death. And that's what I saw as we drove through the American mid-west, too. Crumbling infrastructure, depression and hopelessness. (And Waffle Houses. Lots and lots of delicious, delicious Waffle Houses.)

Mmmm, Waffle House...

Momo, a phenomenal photographer, particularly likes to stop and shoot pictures of roadside attractions (among many other things). She is the perfect travel companion: she researches and plans cool things on every leg of a trip. I just go along for the ride. I've seen a lot of interesting things with Momo.

Another Roadside Attraction, Photo credit: heymomo

This song, though, is about something we didn't see

Partway through Indiana, Momo's itinerary informed us that we were passing close to the birthplace of actor and American icon, James Dean. We veered off the main drag, hot on the trail, but we couldn't find it. 

We wound up in the downtown of a mid-sized town whose main feature seemed to be a couple of giant (at least for the size of town) warehouses, boarded up and abandoned. I guess because Canada doesn't have the same kind of commercial past as the U.S., it isn't very common to see abandoned warehouses in small towns up here. The only place I'd ever seen something similar was in London, Ontario, and that's a much bigger city where the abandoned warehouses didn't seem as out of place. 

The downtown was deserted

Maybe because it was Labour Day, or maybe because it was always deserted, I don't know. We headed out of town, continuing to search for a sign or any indication of James Dean's birthplace. No luck. All we found was a trailer park and a busy big box mall. 

A few miles down the road in Gas City we stopped at the historical museum. I went in to ask for directions and got a beautiful, long-winded and extremely friendly response from the local history buffs. We had totally missed James Dean's birthplace, but all we had to do to see his family's homestead and his grave was to go back a couple of miles and hang a left. 

Momo and I thought about it. But somehow, there was no going back.

Expand This Blog

A week and a half ago, I took a blog-writing workshop facilitated by Chris Fraser of Firefly Creative Writing. It was two days of writing, sharing, supporting and growing with thirty-some-odd delightful, creative bloggers and soon-to-be bloggers.

It expanded my horizons and made me think bigger about what I could do with this blog. It made me see that I could make my blog more fun and interesting than just the occasional update about where I'm at.

A Brave New World of Posts

So, starting this month, there are going to be some new kinds of posts around here as well as some regular features. Expect to see:

Song Note Sundays

Every Sunday, I'll write a post about a song that I've written – possibly from one of my three CDs, or one that's currently unrecorded. I'll talk about what inspired me and what challenges I encountered during the songwriting process.

The End of Month Album Review

On the last day of each month, I'll post a review of one of my favourite records – expect lots of East Coasters, lots of Canadians, as well as a few artists from farther afield, some recent albums and some a little longer in the tooth.

Experiments

I'm going to experiment with vlogging, and with occasional shorter posts – sometimes posting just an image or a link.

Gig Reports

I'm going to report on every live show I play.

No Bull

Let's face it, there's a temptation with a "career blog" to focus on the positive, to the exclusion of everything else. Life is not like that. There are bad gigs. There are bad experiences. I'm usually pretty good about being authentic, because that's just how I like to live my life. But I admit, I have been leaving some stuff out. From now on, it's balls to the wall. If I tank a show, I'll tell you about it. If I make a dreadful foul-up, you'll read about it here. (Just writing that scares me. Oh, I hope I don't ever make another mistake again for the rest of my life...)

What would you like to see?

Is there anything you'd like to see me write about? Are you curious about my take on something or some aspect of this songwriter's life? Let me know!