Progress, and its heady lyrics

Note: rather than keep adding links, I compiled the videos for all the “big questions” songs that I mention here: [link]

(originally sent out May 27, 2023)

The third release of what will eventually be a full album, Progress, came out yesterday.

Mick had this idea of providing “annotated lyrics” (a lyric sheet wherein we add some tidbits that tell about the song meaning, writing process, useless facts… kind of reminds me of a text version of VH1’s Pop-Up video from the 90s [link]… oh that would be a great idea too, I think we have to make a pop-up video for this song…).

The annotated versions of the first two are here [link], but I have not yet completed a version for Progress. I’ll get on that, but for now, you can find the bare-bones lyrics here [link].

When we are on stage introducing the song, I often refer to it as probably the headiest song we have written. Some songs are all heart and emotion, but that’s not this one. I’ve had songs seemingly come out of nowhere, songs that are heavy on feelings and get written in a single sitting. But that wasn’t Progress.

This song was more like an essay. I think I wrote it over 5 or 6 months, with multiple revisions, lots of staring at paper for hours.

I know it is perhaps an acquired taste, for a rare grouping of nerds, but I have always liked songs that take on the heftiest themes, the biggest questions. I remember when Winnipeg’s own Crash Test Dummies first came on the scene. That was one thing that made them peculiar (and I tend to love peculiar).

It showed up right away on their first album. Take the song, At My Funeral:

Won't you come

To my funeral when my days are done

Life's not long

And so I hope when I am finally dead and gone

That you'll gather round

when I am lowered into the ground

I mean who writes a song like that!? And then not only did they keep writing them, but on their next album those sorts of songs took them to a place of global fame. So weird. My favourite was How Does a Duck Know:

How come I just smoke and smoke and smoke and curse every butt I spit out?

All night long I grind my teeth and I wake up when I cough

Delving into will vs. desire in a mass-marketed song? Philosophy and depth in pop culture? Who does that? (and even moreso, how did they pull it off? I can imagine the looks on the faces of the record execs at first listen).

Well, more writers than the Crash Test Dummies did, and I am glad they did, because it made for some of my lifetime favourite songs.

Emmylou Harris went there more than once, and in my opinion created something truly profound on her Red Dirt Girl album in the song The Pearl:

We are aging soldiers in an ancient war
Seeking out some half-remembered shore
We drink our fill and still we thirst for more
Asking if there's no heaven what is this hunger for?

Our path is worn our feet are poorly shod
We lift up our prayer against the odds
And fear the silence is the voice of God.
And we cry allelujah, allelujah

Leonard Cohen provided so many good examples. For this letter I’ll narrow in on the last song he released, because there is a personal connection. It was released 17 days before he died, in 2016, the same year that my mom passed away, which was of course an earthquake. The release date was the same day as what would have been her birthday. It was a dark year for me (and then the marriage collapsed at the start of 2017, so…).

I’d listened to Cohen for so long already – there was always such an obvious quest-for-truth sort of spirit that showed up in his songwriting. He seemed to want the truth as it is, with no lies, no illusions, no sugar-coating. On my best days, I aspire to that same ideal, and I tend to land in an optimistic place, hoping that at the bottom of it all there is Love and Goodness that you can bank on.

But it seemed as though in his last song Cohen might have reached the opposite conclusion, and expressed it in a song that leaves one to shudder. Invoking as a chorus the response that Abraham gave to God when God asked him to sacrifice his son, Cohen created a work of art that goes way beyond the bounds of your regular pop song:

They're lining up to prisoners
And the guards are taking aim
I struggle with some demons
They were middle class and tame
I didn't know I had permission
To murder and to maim
You want it darker

Hineni, hineni
I'm ready, my Lord

Mick tends to be the one in our crew who is bugged the most by things like horror movies and dark ideas. Well, Naomi too – if Simon and I want to go see something scary, it’s always just the two of us. And when this song came out I had it on a playlist that was often on in the car. Whenever it reached this song, Mick reached over and clicked skip. “I hate that song, I hate what it says,” he’d say.

It always weirdly impressed me that a song could do that. I mean, who even knows, really, “what it says”? But plainly it was saying something that made no small impact. It demands a reaction.

_______________________________

So there you go, though I don’t expect it to be hallowed like any of the aforementioned songs, Progress was an attempt at reflecting on some of the “bigger” ideas. Often when we perform it some older-than-me listener will ask, “Was this influenced by Bruce Cockburn’s Burden of the Angel/Beast?

Could be the famine
Could be the feast
Could be the pusher
Could be the priest
Always ourselves we love the least
That's the burden of the angel/beast

The answer is no, I didn’t know about this one before these mentions turned it into another one of my favourites, but I see what they are saying. “He’s a god and he’s an animal.”