Empty Sound

The summer hung like a fragrance
On the sweet air all around
Swore to God I would die
Before I left this town
Like the vandals, and the vagrants
And the Indian boy who drowned
Last thing you're gonna hear from me
Is bound
To be just another...

Huckleberry Island, you're still always on my mind
Can't believe I ever left this place behind
I hid my heart in the Hole in the Wall
And I still hear it pound
A never ending echo of that empty sound

Sun sank like an anchor
Rope slipped through my hand
God knows if I should drown
Or try to make a stand
If you see my girl please thank her
She was only trying to bring me around
God knows how I ever got so unwound
Tried to walk on water over...

(chorus)

Behind the big red boat shed
I took a notion I should wake the dead
I couldn't think, I took another drink
I fell asleep behind the hockey rink
Woke up to my bottle clinkin'
Empty...

Bike wheels on the gravel
Moonlight on the bay
I swore there was nothing that could tear me away
I took off to travel
Now I never touch the ground
Pretty soon I'll be an old loon
Flapping around
And I'll sing another...

(chorus)

I wrote this one when I started putting together songs for a live recording in Parry Sound, Ontario - my hometown. The predominant geographic feature of my childhood was the Sound itself, also known as The Big Sound, and Huckleberry Island was what I saw out the window every morning.

This jumble of images comes mostly from the last summer I spent in Parry Sound at the age of 17. Every one is layered with a dozen associations for me, many of them deeply emotional.

It's about 5 years old now and I'm just starting to grow into it.

When the ship went down

The storm that sank the Edmond Fitzgerald shook the Great Lakes coastal area for hundreds of miles. That was 29 years ago tomorrow. I was only 6 at the time, but I remember it clearly.

I remember getting up the next morning to walk up to my school bus stop along highway 69 north of Parry Sound. I had to turn back on our gravel driveway because trees had fallen onto the powerlines. The cables were dancing around like live snakes, spewing sparks as they fell across the road.

I ran back to the house for help. My family was in the kitchen, listening to the bulletin on the radio about the Edmund Fitzgerald being lost with all hands.

It seems like it was only a moment later that the song came out, maybe on some other sunny, frosty morning after a November Great Lakes storm. As a kid I remember feeling that the water I grew up on, the radio that I listened to, the cool of the morning air, that lost freighter, and the haunting voice of Gordon Lightfoot were all part of the same thing.

It's woven so deeply into my mind and my memory now I don't know what to call it. But perhaps the moment 'folk music' really entered my consciousness was with the realization that songs could be one of the purest forms of truth.

Queer as Folkies

I love those moments when life hands you circumstances that are so ludicrous, they may as well have been authored by Monty Python.

A couple of weeks back, Aengus Finnan and I left my hometown of Parry Sound at about 12.30 at night for Toronto in a rented car. In a bizarre twist of fate, we had to drive north of town about 5 miles to gas up because everything in town was closed.

5 miles north of Parry Sound is an Esso with a Tim Horton's and a Wendy's. It's right across Highway 69 from Murray Pt. Road, where I grew up. I'd been to that Esso about a million times as a kid, when there was a Voyageur restaurant there with the only video game between Parry Sound and Sudbury. It was sort of neat to be back there, randomly, with a buddy from another life.

So there's me, with a giant puffball of curly hair and a black turtleneck. There's Aengus with his ponytail and corduroy jacket. We're both wearing dress shoes with neatly pressed trousers. There is a pair of white roses with baby's breath sprays on the dashboard of the car, beautiful tokens of thanks from the benefit we've just played. There are also little plates of squares and strawberries and cheese that some kind ladies have made up for us to munch on our late-night ride home.

We're headed to the OCFF conference in Guelph the next day. As Aengus starts to pay for the gas, I holler "don't you dare! It's my turn!" He turns around and says "no way, you're paying for our room tomorrow night, I've got it!" We do this kind of thing a lot.

Except normally, when we do it, we're not in the sticks north of Parry Sound, at a gas station where every one of the half-dozen other vehicles is a pickup truck full of hunters. I'm not kidding. The truck and trailer next to us was actually carrying an ATV and several large storage bins presumably full of deer meat. Men with orange hats were filling up with diesel everywhere, just staring at us and grinning.

And as we generously waved our credit cards at one another and nibbled our strawberries and laughed our damn fool heads off, it belatedly occurred to me that this is not how the men of Parry Sound usually behave.

Queer as folkies. If they don't get it, it's their problem.

I came back home

Stood on stage in my home town

Took a breath and looked around

Familiar eyes, friendly smiles

Across the years, across the miles

Here's my story, here's my song

My God, I've been away too long



Shook a hand, forgot a name

Friendly voice was still the same

How is Mister So and So?

Mom & Dad have moved, you know

Heard the summer wasn't much

Nice to see you, keep in touch



Heart is pounding, legs are week

Tears are rolling down my cheek

The audience is standing now

Smile and wave boy, take a bow

This is some kind of victory

I came back home, and home came back home with me.

In the Pink

I was once the mascot of the Parry Sound High School. I wore a Pink Panther suit, without shame I might add. I rode a skateboard, carried a megaphone, and made a lot of noise at basketball games.

Defying Anthropology

I said I would write about the highway up to Parry Sound and Sudbury sometime, so I will. I'll start by telling you that the old Highway 69 was the most dangerous highway in Ontario. I'm not exaggerating. The winding two-lane trail to cottage country and the north was the cause of so much carnage, I can't even begin to describe it. I personally knew at least a dozen people who died crashing into the rock cuts or over the embankments of that lovely, but deadly road. Whether it was overflowing with tourist traffic in the heat of the summer, or coated with black ice in the dead of winter, Highway 69 was a killer. But it's gone now...

The whole time I lived up in Parry Sound, various governments promised that the highway would be flattened, four-laned and fixed. Ironically, the last two people I knew who died on 69 were killed right where the old highway met the new Highway 400 coming north. But the progress continued, and now it's nearly done. Only the short stretch across the Native reserve south of town remains unchanged, and now that the band has reached agreement with the government, that will be renovated too.

Which means that when I drove up to Sudbury last month, I drove to my hometown along a brand-new highway 400, through a countryside I had never seen before. The little gas stations, camps and hotels that had lined the old road were somewhere through the forest. The winding little highway had given way to a vast, flat, fresh grey macadam through an apparent wilderness of trees and lakes and rock. It's a sublime road. Not beautiful, but sublime: a large, impersonal, modern, and perfectly executed freeway through an achingly ancient landscape. It was fascinating through the sleet on the way up north, and astonishing in the endless sunset on the way back to the City.

But the most incredible thing about this new road is not the new beauty of the old forest, recently revealed. And it's not the marvels of modern engineering that make it so fast and sleek. It's not even the apparent disappearance of that old highway I knew so well. It's the new rock cuts. They're going to defy anthropolgy.

There were always rock cuts, but they were small and narrow. Now, that four lane highway cuts through near-mountains of precambrian shield, leaving monuments the size of the Egyptian pyramids, already dotted with Inukshuks, towering over the road. This is some of the oldest rock in the world. It dates to the cooling of the earth's crust. Nothing has even marked it since the Ice Age, and even that just left a few scratches.

But long after cars have come and gone, long after roads have lost their meaning, long after our civilization has bloomed and faded and been forgotten, these rock cuts - brand new blasts out of the earth- will be standing still. They won't have moved. They won't have softened. They will still be there ten thousand, a hundred thousand, even a million years from now.

And the people of the future will know somebody made them. That much will be obvious. But they'll have no idea why, or what they were for. They will never be able to guess what led people to change the crust of the planet itself in this strange way. They won't know about all the deaths on the old road. They won't know about the politicians and the promises and the programs. They won't know about the cottagers, the traffic jams, the little hotels and camps that are almost forgotten already. They'll just know that something important happened here. And the rest will defy anthropology.

Made the home-town paper!

I made the hometown paper! It may not be the Globe and Mail but the Parry Sound North Star is prestigious enough for me. Intrepid reporter Blythe Fraser came out to my sound check at the recent "Mighty Grace" homecoming recording, and interviewed me sitting cross-legged on a hundred-year-old luggage trolley. Check it out!

I must admit I'm more pleased with this comparatively small measure of celebrity than with just about anything else I've done in quite a while. There is something about "doing right" by your hometown that has a real, old-fashioned appeal to me. I hope I can keep it up.

Guest Entry

Here's a guest entry to my diary: Alissa Vernon, longtime fan and incidentally the wife of percussion partner Scott Vernon, was so inspired by the Mighty Grace recording session that she wrote it up. Even though I'm techically her boss at work, I secretly suspect her of being sincere in her praise. But you can judge for yourself:

"Hey Newland fans, I'm just coming off a great weekend that involved a trip to Parry Sound to see David's latest live recording in a renovated turn-of-the-19th- century CP rail station. (You haven't lived until you've heard two guys jam with a roaring freight train passing by 15 feet away.) I gotta say it's a shame that at 28 I'm just getting introduced to Georgian Bay, it's gorgeous! But having spent most of my life as a Maritimer, the Canadian shield might as well have been a million miles away - I had Peggy's Cove and the Cabot Trail, after all.

Though a trip to Parry Sound from Toronto in cottage traffic may seem daunting, rest assured that it's totally worth it. We stayed at a fabulous B&B (Mariner's Rest with Julie and Edmond Lea), walked around the lakeside fitness trail, and took a jaunt to nearby Oastler Park — plus the concert! Rumor has it that David's planning on launching this third live CD (Mighty Grace) in Parry Sound once production is complete (sometime in early 2004). Even if it's the dead of January it would be a worthy adventure - the cross-country skiing is great (I'm told). Watch the website for details. And in the meantime, take a road trip to one of the other summer dates. What's the summer for if not travelling to see folk musicians?"

High enough to see...

Okay, this diary isn't daily yet. But two entries is a good start. The real trick is going to be keeping it condensed to readable blurb size. Once I get going it's pretty hard to stop.

I spent this past weekend in my hometown, Parry Sound, recording my third CD, "Mighty Grace." The old CPR station, now the Station Gallery, where the recording took place, was tremendous, acoustically and spiritually. At one point Scott and I actually jammed with a freight train rolling by about 30 feet from where we stood.

I'm sure I'll share more as it bubbles up, but other highlights of the weekend included climbing my boyhood climbing tree. Amazingly, I could still see the spots where I had placed my feet as a kid- and I could still get 50 feet up, high enough to see Hole in the Wall on Huckleberry Island. There's a song about that, but you'll have to wait for the CD. Or at least until I can post lyrics. Remind me, okay?