About:
I read somewhere that the atoms that made up Genghis Khan have scattered around the world and are a part of the make-up of all of us. This song couples that thought with the image of the dust cloud over New York City on September 11, 2001. While there is comfort in the idea of continuity from ancestors to descendants, there is also sadness and frustration in the repetition of the behaviours. “Dust” is an insistent song and is first on the CD so that it can speak quickly and we can get onto other things.

Dust from earth, and to the earth returned
We are ashes that our ancestors have burned
Our time is brief, so it always seems so strange
When lives are spent as casually as change

Does what we learn and how we grow
What we feel and what we know
Return with us or linger as a gift?
We’re gone too soon, but once we lived

When the dust boiled in the sky
Like a warning that was twisted with a sigh
It hangs in time, yet was scattered to the wind
To touch the earth and be taken up again

With a touch of understanding, and a touch of hate
A new perspective, just a little bit too late
What would the fallen say if they could just live twice?
To live and learn and live... wouldn’t it be nice?


Roy Hickling - vocal & guitar
Douglas Romanow - keyboards

About:
Moon landing, eh?  If you must date yourself at least do it in a love song.
 

(for Sue)
Soon ... soon ... soon we’ll be walking on the moon
That’s what they said when I was just a kid
A few years later that’s just what they did
But first they had to even dream they could

I ... I ... I felt exposed beneath the sky
Another try and another start
Another chance to reveal my heart
And yet somehow I knew that it was right
I saw it in my dreams
Simple as it seems
It’s like I’d always been, with you

You ... you ... you like an ever changing view
A little push and a little pull
A little work to keep life full
A little time to open up my mind
I saw it in my dreams
Simple as it seems
I know I’ve always been, with you

Do ... do ... do do do do do do do do
Love is the answer to your dreams
Love’s the answer when you dream
I sensed it was but now I know it’s true
And I know that soon
I’ll be dancin’ on the moon
Dancin’ on the moon with you


Roy Hickling - vocal & guitar
Max Dyer - cello

About:
My grandfather was often late for dinner after being lured into completing one more round of the field before coming in. In this song I’m driving around the field in my old combine thinking about my life and heritage as a farmer as well as my new interests. Farming, art and music may not seem to fit together but they are similar in that they are all callings.
 

I pull up to the wheat field, it’s harvest time once more
What’s more bountiful than harvest songs, I’ve heard ‘em all before
But nature’s voice and engine noise, are spinning out the sound
So I add my voice to the din, one more round

There are patches on the patches of this combine that I drive
It’s duct taping and curses that are keeping it alive
I swear that I’ll be sitting on it, until it rusts into the ground
I hope that it can make it for one more round

If I’ve ever been more itchy, I’m not sure how I’d tell
Because the dust behind that combine’s blowin’ straight outta hell
And harvest songs can’t tell you how it feels on your neck
I guess I’m here to tell you that...it feels like heck

Some men dream of wealth or fame, some dream of Paris France
Some men dream of dancing girls in frilly underpants
I’m dreaming of the shower, I’ll just stand there until I drown
Hope that I can make it for one more round

The markets are diving down again, it’s really quite insane
How my life follows the day traders and their computer games
And other folks are making more because the price is down
And toasting their good fortunes with one more round

I’m sitting out here thinking ‘bout what keeps me on this mud
Is my life what I imagine it, or is it in my blood

‘Cause my father farmed before I did, his father too
And his, and his and his and his, I guess it’s what we do
It isn’t such a simple thing to go moving into town
I’ll be the last man in my line, one more round

Each round ends where it started in this combine that I drive
It’s like the cycles of the seasons, and the weather and our lives
Generations spinning down through time without a sound
Glad that you could join me for, one more, one more round

Roy Hickling - vocal & guitar
Don Cameron - mandolin
Ray Dillard - button accordion & percussion

About:
This song was triggered by looking out the window at a beautiful snow scene and thinking about loss. The “stretched out on the couch” line came from a childhood memory of our neighbour on the next farm, having his afternoon nap behind his wood fired cookstove on winter afternoons. Don passed a week after I finished this song and it is dedicated to his memory. Rebirth in the spring is a common metaphor - I’m back at the fact that you still have to deal with the loss.
 

(In memory of Don Giffen)

This ground is so damned hard
You’d think that I would know
That the frost was creepin’ in
Underneath the snow

It hardly rained all summer
In the fall it wouldn’t stop
I couldn’t get the plowing done
I barely got the crop

The tractor’s pulled up in the shed
The last place that I drove
And I am stretched out on the couch
Behind the kitchen stove
What else should I do?

Harvest left this farm in a mess
There’s a rut in every row
But it’s smoother than a wedding dress
Underneath the snow

Spring will be here soon enough
When winter sets her free
Another year, another crop
Another pot of tea

In the shadow of the fencerow
Where the snow has drifted through
The wind has carved an ocean
In a dozen shades of blue
What else should it do?

Every season has its turn
That’s just the way things go
And not everything will be coming up
From underneath the snow


Roy Hickling - vocal & guitar
Max Dyer - cello & bass
Don Cameron - mandolin

About:
Time for some fun. Pluto is off the list and he is ticked!

Say it ain’t so
I’m not a planet, dammit
How would you know?
It’s kinda arbitrary
You get to say who is out, who is in
You’re the masters of spin

People of Earth
Have an exaggerated
Sense of self worth
And I just don’t get it
For seventy years, you have all been so nice
Then suddenly, I’m just rock and ice?
I’m not a rock, I’m not a rock...I’m a star

You sing to the moon
Think you’re hotter than the sun
It’s the same inept tune
It’s utter lunacy
To put a spotlight on us and place us up high
Just to shoot for the sky
Bright light mars your view of the stars

Saturn gave me a ring
Mercury was boiling mad
When he heard of this thing
Venus agrees with me and Uranus and Jupiter
We all think that your list couldn’t be stupider
‘Cause I am not a rock, I’m not a rock...I’m a star

Say what you will
But I’ve been out here all along
I’m out here still
Why don’t you just leave me alone?
I’m not stuck in your orbit, give me my space
Don’t look at my face


Roy Hickling - vocal & archtop guitar
Douglas Romanow - keyboards

About:
I alternate between thinking that I need to be more informed about what’s going on in the world, to feeling that I should know a lot less. After all, the word newsbreak can be taken two ways.

There’s a little oasis that I know
Where the shrubs and flowers love to grow
Perfect demeanour, grass ain’t no greener
Behind any other house along this row
Straight out the back door it’s waiting there for me
And I’ll be laying down my load...
Not too far from the middle of the road...in my backyard

My yard is short and not too wide
Pressure treated lattice fortified
When I’m out there weeding, there’s no interceding
By the people walled in on the other side
The birds are calling, their fledglings to wing
I’ve seen em fall, I’ve seen em fly
Eventually the little peckers try...in my backyard

In the treetops the birdies are sweetly singing
That special song
And the roses are brightly blooming
What could go wrong?

Facing down the news is quite a chore
Politics, crime and the latest war
The sky is churning, forests are burning
And I don’t think I can take it any more
So I’m changing the channel and I’m dressing in flannel
I’ve got to ease a troubled mind
And I know exactly what I’ll find...in my backyard


Roy Hickling - vocal, whistling & guitar
Douglas Romanow - keyboards
Ray Dillard - percussion

About:
We recorded my tracks in a creaky, old Orange Lodge with a couple of jail cells and a bricked well in the basement. After completing a vocal track, I was in the habit of walking around with my guitar to practice the next song. One evening this chord progression popped out instead and as soon as I had a moment to work on it the lyrics followed very quickly. Half ghost song, half metaphor for the unconscious mind. Make sure to play this on great headphones or speakers and listen to the cello voices descending and ascending the well.
 

There is a well below this house, but we don’t know
The men who dug it there by lantern glow
Each pail of earth hauled up, each brick sent low
And laid beneath the earth, row on row on row
There are voices in the well

The water is dark and cold and stretches deep
Beyond the reaches of shovels and sleep
The men would tunnel down, the water seeps
Into the shadows of the secrets that it keeps
With the voices in the well

Bubbling echoes swallow the din
Casting a whisper of places they’ve been
The light reflecting up, sparkling begins
Betraying surfaces, while coming from within
Like the voices in the well


Roy Hickling - vocal & guitar
Max Dyer - cello & bass
Douglas Romanow - marxophone

About:
In 2003, our family vacationed in Scotland, took in its magnificent cold beauty and connected with some family history and ancestors. On the Culloden battlefield there are mass graves marked by standing natural stones with the name of each clan carved in. People were leaving wildflowers and thistles on the stones and appeared to be mourning a loss from last week – not 1746. There is something very powerful and very horrible about that.

The mist is marching down the glen from the highlands this morning
I can’t see inches from my eyes
The dew is hung on ancient trees like a warning
Blue peaks lie shrouded in the skies
They say to sit until it lifts, move ahead and you might risk
a fall... but I know these hills

Sun dappled high mountain gleams, woven with streams
Each ribbon has wandered and flown, carved into stone

The rolling moor and loch and stone have a cool clear beauty
Giant trees are standing fast
Anchored firm through centuries like a sense of duty
That will not yield to the last
So draw us into two straight lines of what is yours and what is mine...
and we’ll fight for a way of life.

Deep forest blankets of green spun in a dream
Faint echoes pipe in the dawn, where have you gone?

Five thousand men are on their feet
to face their foe through cold and sleet
The heather waves in wind and rain
Is trampled in to grow again
The earth is soft
The earth is soft the earth is warm
The earth is soft the earth is warm as blood
The earth is soft the earth is warm as our blood

Roy Hickling - vocal & guitar
Don Bray - baritone slide guitar
Douglas Romanow - keyboards
Ray Dillard - percussion

About:
This song is dedicated to my dad and to all the horses that he worked with growing up on the farm that his grandfather cleared. It’s taken from a few of his many stories of these powerful, gentle creatures that he obviously loved.

(For Harold Hickling)

Not so very long ago it used to really snow around here
You’d park your car until the spring and wait for it to clear
Because the roads were drifted in and the banks would climb
You could take the phone line in your teeth if you were so inclined
They’d pull the steeples from the posts and lay the fences down
Hook the horses to the sleigh and head it into town
Breaking trail out across the fields ... working like a charm
Gliding through the neighbours place, goin’ farm to farm

When my dad was just a kid he could work like any man
One day he took the team to town, he was headed home again
It was clear and cold and the stars were out, the snow was fast and deep
He’d made it half way up Kidd’s hill, when he fell asleep
...and the horses took him home

The years have slipped by since those days of harnesses and teams
The horses that have worked these farms have faded into dreams
But take some time to think of them, there are lessons to be found
Trust a little in the ride and lay your fences down
Trust a little in the ride...and lay your fences down


(Dedicated to and thinking of - Frank & Fan, King & Queen, Bess & Topsy, Fred & Ted, Frank & Minnie, Tom, June, Pat, Cyclone & Maude)

Roy Hickling - vocal & guitar
Don Bray - baritone slide guitar
Douglas Romanow - keyboards
Alyssa Wright - harmony vocal
Ray Dillard - sleigh bells

About:
I’ve carried the memory for years of Remembrance Day interviews at the Cenotaph with tearful, elderly ladies mourning the loss of their young loves from decades ago. Many of them never married in honour of their men. This song imagines the spirit of one of these men coming to greet his Jenny at the end of her life - did she hang on to his memory or did he haunt hers?

Jenny, go to sleep now, dry up all your tears
I can’t believe you’re crying after all these years
I said, "I’m glad I’m going", but that wasn’t what I meant
Did you forget your promise in the letter that you sent

We were both so young then, so much still to do
I could not imagine that I would not come back to you
We started up that damned hill, we were cut apart
Vimy holds my body, you still hold my heart

You’re such a foolish woman you said you’d live your life
You promised you would move on, be someone else’s wife
You are old and gray now, yet beautiful to see
I can’t believe you’ve waited your whole life for me
Jenny can you hear me

Go to sleep now Jenny, I’ll see you in your dreams
The time we spend there is more real than it seems
Lay your head down Jenny, I promise that I’ll stay
Can’t you feel me Jenny, I’m just one breath away


Roy Hickling - vocal & slide 7-string guitar
Max Dyer - cello
Douglas Romanow - keyboards
Don Cameron - mandolin

About:
Playing the guitar in open tunings requires completely different finger positions to form the chords. Within moments of my first attempt at open tuning, I began writing the elements that came together to make this instrumental song. I played it obsessively for hours, with new elements gradually finding my fingers until I completed the song over a period of several days. I then had to practice it for months until I could do it justice. The song remained untitled until I dedicated it to the memory of my friend Peter who had restored and tooled around on a motorcycle with a sidecar.

(Instrumental )
In memory of Peter Holler
Roy Hickling - guitar

About:
I met a steelworker who had survived a horrifying fall from fifty feet when an open steel structure he was working on collapsed. He was standing on the peak and when it started to fall he took off running along the ridge on a 6 inch wide I-beam with the intention of leaping off into a nearby tree. I interviewed him and learned of his difficult childhood, violent and hardscrabble youth and challenging, painful and somewhat alienated adult life. I wrote a ballad about Mick and was on the way to sing it for him and his family. As I was driving an image flashed into my mind of Mick falling but he was frozen in midair and the earth was spinning out from underneath him - another (and much better) song was born.

Sunrise
Gonna carve a lazy arc across the skies
Burning time to kill
‘Cause it’s the earth that moves - the sun is standing still
And to see it turning on and off the power
We’re spinning at a thousand miles an hour

The planet’s face
It should be spitting us off into outer space
And for what it’s worth
It’s not gravity that’s holding me on earth
Nor does duty, joy, destiny or fear
It`s the force of habit that keeps me here
Spinnin’ round

I’m hunkered in
Cause I swear that I can feel the damn thing spin
And it wobbles too
As the seasons flicker in and out of view
Is someone gently holding everything aloft?
Or did he spin it once and then just bugger off

I can feel it spin, feel it spinning, feel it spinning around
I can feel it spin, I can feel it spinnin’, feel it spinnin’ around

Calm it down
Feel my connection to the ground
Hold on more
Although I feel that my spirit wants to soar
If I could leap and pull my feet out of this clay
Then I would land about a million miles away


Roy Hickling - vocal & archtop guitar
Douglas Romanow - keyboards

About:
This is a slide guitar tune played on a very cool antique store find – an eighty year old, tiny, eastern European, bolt-on neck, cantilevered fret board, 7-string guitar. Wonky and challenging to tune and keep it tune, it’s fun to play and sounds great. Perfect for Lucid Dream, a mortality driving song. The last verse’s image of the long black line in the rear-view mirror arrived courtesy of a dream.

My car is tuned, the tank is full, I head out on the road
The light turns green, I still linger
So they`re waving me on with their middle fingers
Goin’ home, home, goin’ home

The road I’m on stretches back in time, it was beaten from a path
I fight the lull of ancient drums
In the hypnotizing tire thrum
Goin’ home, home, goin’ home
chorus
Driving in a lucid dream
Things are what they seem
In a lucid dream

This road‘s held many drivers before, I wonder where they’ve gone
I try to focus on my way
While the radio goads me on with clichés, clichés

I can drive to the rhythm of the broken line
And the windshield wipers can keep the time
As I travel fast and search for signs
Along the way
I can miss my baby and I don’t mean maybe
I can love my car it`ll take me far
I can drive to the sea and long to be free
‘Cause it’s so deep and blue and the sky is too
I gotta stay awake so I can make it home
Home, goin home
Chorus
The road is spreading out ahead, like a big sheet lightning fan
The rear-view mirror holds a long black line
Dark and narrow as a fearful mind
A fearful mind, goin’ home
Chorus


Roy Hickling - vocal & slide 7-string guitar

About:
I think this one had been cued up in my unconscious for a while.  The right conversation at breakfast one morning triggered a very quick delivery of this tune – just in time to make it on the CD.  The bridge describes an actual experience when I happened to be sitting at the perfect angle as sunlight refracted through rain drops suspended in a spruce tree.  Over a period of twenty minutes I saw every colour of the rainbow in the drops.  I love painting and I love trying to analyze paintings, but for some things it’s better to turn your brain off and just experience it.   
 

Staring at a canvas, it’s accusatory white
Waiting for the colours to come bending from the light
I am dabbling at the edges of the things I know are true
Red, orange, yellow, green, indigo, violet, blue
Blue
Motion in the colours, harmony and rhyme
Carving through each layer is like going back in time
I’m trying to make sense of all the things that I have seen
If a tree falls in the forest is it necessarily green?
Green
Once I saw a tree of raindrops and with the sun just right
All the colours of the rainbow were harnessing the light
Light
Questions on the canvas, but no answers in the paint
Brushes keeping rhythm while they’re stretching at constraints
And it really makes me wonder at this life that I have led
Would I be getting any wiser doing something else instead...
Instead of red
Red


Roy Hickling - vocal & archtop guitar
Max Dyer - cello

Ray Dillard – recording, editing and mixing
Ray Dillard- producer
Roy Hickling –assistant producer
Douglas Romanow, Fire Escape Recording – mastering
Roy Hickling – words & music

Christianne Williams – design & layout
Roy Hickling – original paintings & sculpture
Christianne Williams, Roy Hickling, Ray Dillard – photography

Portions of this CD were recorded at the homes and/or studios of nearly everyone who played on it.  The bulk of my portion was recorded in a beautiful, creaky, old Orange Lodge built in 1894, with jail cells and a well in the basement and raccoons in the attic.  Ray & I moved in for several days at a time and both worked and relaxed when it suited us.  The ambience and acoustics made a definite contribution - thanks to Mark Abbott.

Don Bray – baritone slide guitar
Don Cameron – mandolin
Ray Dillard - percussion
Max Dyer – bass, cello
Roy Hickling – guitar & vocal
Douglas Romanow – keyboards
Alyssa Wright – harmony vocal

Don’t get me wrong - I’m very proud of my contributions to this CD, but I must say that it would be a shadow of what it is without the people listed above. Their professionalism, generosity and sheer brilliance have enriched me personally and elevated my work. I am eternally grateful. Thanks to Doug for his additional work at his studio and for making the B3 talk. To Lorrie & Ray’s long-time friend Max, thanks for sending such staggeringly exquisite tracks from Texas. Thanks to Don B for being such a great friend and for placing Culloden so firmly on the battlefield. Thanks to Don C for adding so thoughtfully to the colour palette and to the beautiful Alyssa for adding a little harmony to my record.

There isn’t a title under credits that begins to adequately describe the role that my friend and brother-in-law Ray Dillard has played in developing this project. Here are some additions to his list – constructive critic, educator, supporter, collaborator, cheer leader, patient mentor and when the time was right - focused taskmaster. His exceptional talents in the studio and as a percussionist are truly world class, and his boundless enthusiasm continues to amaze me.

Thanks to the local musical community - the Barrie Folk Society, the operators of various open stages and especially to my friends at BaDAS/S whose talents, listening skills and stubborn opinions contribute to my process - even when they’re wrong!

Thanks to Chris for her great design work, her long-time support of my music and art and her wonderful sense of humour.

Thanks to Terry for listening closely to my newest song, looking through all of my art work, reading what I write about it and then applying a finely tuned bs-meter.

Over the past several years I have transitioned from farmer/seed salesman to singer songwriter, painter, sculptor and farmer. Thanks to my family and friends for their support and encouragement in these new directions.

I especially want to thank my wife Sue and daughter Lydia for actively participating on the front line of the changes in my life; for fully understanding the value of time spent creatively and for their unflagging support – even when the next song is circling in my brain and I only hear every third word that is spoken to me.