moons and junes and ferris wheels 1

What amazes me about many Canadian songwriters and vocalists is their attraction to the surreal, their blending of bizarre images with images of nature and their compilation of unrelated words – o solitude of longing, where love has been confined 2. Guess when you live in a country settled by Native tribes, opened by French explorers and conquered by British Redcoats you live in a strange land; guess when you live in vastness – 7,000 miles East/West, 3,000 miles North/South – there’s no way to avoid wilderness, to avoid nature. And when you live in the Great White North, you realize that dreams are critical to surviving winter’s darkness and that dreams make you comfortable with contradictory words, ideas, images.

 

tragically hip
Sundown in the Paris of the prairies wheat kings have all their treasures buried
And all you hear are the rusty breezes pushing
Around the weather vane Jesus

gordon lightfoot
The way I feel is like a robin
Whose babes have flown to come no more
A tall oak tree alone and cryin’
When the birds have flown and the nest is bare

joni mitchell
We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion year old carbon
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

loreena mckennitt
Take me with you on this journey
Where the boundaries of time are now tossed
In cathedrals of the forest
In the words of the tongues now lost>/p>

leonard cohen
I lit a thin green candle to make you jealous of me,
But the room just filled up with mosquitoes, they heard that my body was free
Then I took the dust of a long sleepless night and I put it in your little shoe
And then I confess that I tortured the dress that you wore for the world to look through

julie doiron
Let’s get out of the romance
The house that I walk home to is in flames in this wind
The wind is getting stronger
The emptiness shows
The breath that moves the branches saying words that I don’t know

k.d. lang
I was lying in a burned out basement
With the full moon in my eyes.
I was hoping for replacement
When the sun burst thru the sky.
 
 
 
 

There was a time when the Hosta flowers signaled the end of summer and the coming school year; am gland that time is passed.

 
1 Joni Mitchell – Both Sides Now
2 Leonard Cohen – Come Healing