The Geography of Songs, up to and including Star Wars

So it is April in Winnipeg, a season where you truly have no idea what you are going to get. When winter and spring battle for supremacy. When our obsessive focus on hockey playoffs commands full control of our primary emotions. On the good side, the Jets took game 1 of their playoff series against one of the top teams. On the bad side, it snowed for two days. In April. Not okay. But not really that shocking in Winnipeg either.

This week I watched a video on songwriting where the instructor talked about the effect of dropping specific geographic details into a song:

All the vampires walking through the valley move west down Ventura Boulevard (link)

Almost heaven, West Virginia, Bluegrass mountains, Shenandoah river (link)

All the gold in California is in a bank in the middle of Beverley Hills (link)

Come to think of it, the Red Hot Chili Peppers even added fictional galactic locations:

And Alderaan's not far away it's Californication (link)

As I try to bring geographical song references to mind, so many are from California. I remember the first time I was in L.A. thinking that every time I turned a corner there was another location that I was already familiar with from a song or a movie. I guess that speaks to California's success in making itself the Mecca of popular music. However, as I get older, and country music suddenly sounds better and better, Nashville place names are taking over.

I once tried writing the name of the town where I grew up in to a song, but gave up because I figured no one beyond the southwest corner of our province would understand that I was writing about Killarney, MANITOBA.

Winnipeg has a bit of a reputation for turning out solid songwriters. It's usually attributed to being locked in our basements month after month during the long winter. In fact, some of the best "geographic location songs" that I have heard were written by Winnipeg's best.

Exhibit A is from Del Barber. It's called "62 Richmond" which is literally one of the busses we all rode to get to the university in our college days. It includes this "insider" lyric:

In the morning light he was exposed

At a bus stop

Confusion's got him cornered

Any Winnipegger (but probably few who aren't from here) will get the "confusion" reference. We have, in the middle of our city an intersection that has informally, but famously, been nicknamed “Confusion Corner." It is so well-known that it has its own symbol, baseball cap, and t-shirts. And with good reason too. I mean look at it – when you first arrive and start to navigate the city it takes a while before Confusion Corner makes sense.

Probably Winnipeg's most famous song mention comes right there in the title of the song " I Hate Winnipeg." I know there are some who find this unfortunate but I think if you know the song and the story behind it, it actually achieves a sort of profundity that, in my mind, should be the goal of a good songwriter. And John K. Samson from the Weakerthans is one of our best.

Because here's the thing - so many call that song "I Hate Winnipeg" but that's not actually its title. It's really called "One Great City" which is a reference to an ad campaign that the city launched a couple of decades ago. There were billboards up all over doing their best to convince us of all the advantages of living in Winnipeg. But I think John K. felt that it was a "the lady doth protest too much" moment. And so he wrote a love song, somewhat in the tradition of Shakespeare's Sonnet 130, (the focus of a previous email) where sometimes the best love song is the most honest one. 

He captures, I think, the feel of a moment in Winnipeg back at the turn of the millennium, when it often felt like "A darker grey was breaking through a lighter one." The line about the Dollar Store clerk in the underground evokes such a specific mid-February Winnipeg vibe, where you don't have the money to fly south and you can't well remember what life without snow feels like. It’s when the deepest depressions hit hard.

I mean there is even a reference to the fact that we had lost our hockey team. What could be worse for a cold Canadian city?! It's ok. They came back. And they are in the playoffs.

I wrote a song once called Back to Winnipeg. It might be a stretch though to call it a “Winnipeg song.” It’s more of a living-in-Japan-and-missing-home song. In fact, the entire first verse was written using bad English from t-shirts I saw around town. We’re working on a Janzen Boys remake. 

Got some favourite geographic song mentions? Let me know, and I will make an Instagram story out of it.

And this week I started writing a country song. The first line is:

She said " You don't really listen you only hear what you want to hear "

I said, “Absolutely baby I would love to have a beer! "

Thought I would include that so that you can keep me honest and make sure I finish it. :-)

Have a great week.