Conversations in cars

I had a great impromtu conversation with my new friend Dave, parked in front of his hotel on the Lakeshore, unwilling to send him off into the night before I got some things off my chest. We talked about songs and about being Canadian and about being Canadian in songs. He said that Stan Rogers' songs about Nova Scotia gave people in the small towns of his youth something to be proud of, something with which they could identify during the day to day grind of living in towns where the fisheries died and nothing replaced them. I love that idea, that a song can ground people in the place they're from, make them proud to be from a place that's mentioned in a song.

Incidentally, I feel the same way about Stan Rogers, who was from Dundas, which is a small town about 20 kilometres from where I grew up. He has songs that are about his Ontario roots too, songs that I used to listen to on the bus on the way to Hamilton, travelling over waterways he sings about in "Billy Green the Scout" and past monuments he deconstructs in "MacDonnell on the Heights." It meant more to me than I can say to literally be looking at the landscape he describes in such vivid historical detail, imagining what it looked like then and the desperation, hope, triumph, and defeat it saw.

When I was growing up on a small street in Burlington, there was a garden in our backyard that doubled as an ice rink in the winter. In that garden, on scorching summer days when all we had to do was nap in the shade of a giant maple and explore our world, we found arrowheads by the dozen. I never kept any of them because there were so many to find. I think I thought they'd always be there and didn't think of the lives they took or the wars they saw.

History is all around us. I have studied it my whole life and continue to study it in the faces of the living and the stories of the dead. But I sometimes forget that it is also physically here, if only I can slow things down enough to really look. Songs about Canada (ah yes, that's what I was getting to) remind me that there's history out there, and that it is my history as a Canadian.

I guess I just want to write a thank you to those who write it down, who allow themselves to be so moved by landscape and time that they commit it to a recording I can carry with me and play on a portable CD player while I walk on the beach that Billy Green the Scout saved for me...

Is there anything better than that?

Winterfolkiness

Well, I'm back from Winterfolk with only a few hours until I have to reenter the world of grownups and working for a living. I had a great time at Winterfolk this year, nestled in the protective arms of the friendly Danforth pubs. Several people asked me over the weekend if I'd seen anything new at the festival; my only reply was that I wasn't really there for that reason this year. I was there to see old friends and make some new ones and to hear a bunch of folk songs. I accomplished those goals and then some. It was a lovely weekend of mid-winter folkiness, perfect to cure my mid-winter musical starvation.