Canada Sky

A story about a song and a night sky in Saskatchewan.

I attended a small Bible college in Canada in the mid-90s. I fell in love with Canada when I was a young man. It was wild and big, and it was the perfect place for me to learn who I was away from my family. I moved to Calgary in the fall of 1995 and immediately knew that Canada would be my home for a while. The landscape was just what a young man needed. I could get lost in the wilderness and feel the threat of what wild places do. I loved climbing the rocks in Grotto Canyon, or spending the night in Kananaskis Country in the open air with my dog and a couple of buddies. It was always cold, and that added an edge to living there. I would fly fish the Bow River and ski at Lake Louise, knowing that I was becoming something new. I found God there, too. I learned about His grace instead of his condemnation, and it revolutionized my life.

While I was there, my music career started to flourish too. I loved writing songs and playing in front of coffee shop crowds. I was getting better as a songwriter and guitar player, and I could feel it. The acoustic guitar was becoming part of my handscape. I could play nearly anything I heard, and writing music was getting easier. I was dating a woman from Saskatchewan at the time, and we often drove back to her farm in Norquay on the weekends. The 10-hour drives were just part of living in a place where most neighbors are an hour away. We usually had to leave after school was over on Fridays, so it meant most of the drive was in the dark. I learned the Number One highway well. So many of those nights were adorned with the Northern Lights and the beautiful, bright stars of the wide open prairie. I would often stop to try and reinvigorate my sleepiness by stepping outside at a rest stop and breathing in the frigid air of the western prairies. The stars always took my breath away. They seemed brighter than any other place I had ever seen them, and they seemed so consistent to me. I often wondered how they had been formed so perfectly, how the light that I was viewing might be thousands of years old, how perhaps the stars I was seeing were already gone.

I wrote this song one winter day during a long break between classes. I had been working on the guitar part for a while, but the melody and the lyrics came quickly. I wanted to write a testament to how God had been good, and how, despite my own wandering falibility, He was faithful to me. The girl and I had broken up. She had found someone else at her college in Winnipeg, and I wasn’t interested in pursuing her through that confusion. The lyrics came quickly in that place.

The song was a crowd favorite during my touring years. My bass player and I would always do it together as part of the show. He and I had worked it out when he first arrived, and for much of his first season with me, it was just the two of us playing all the songs. As the band grew, however, we never gave up on the unique sound that the two of us could create playing this song. I hadn’t played it in 23 years when we decided to do our reunion concert in November. I had to work to figure it out again. There were strange chords that I had long forgotten how to make my fingers get to, but after a few hours, it was back and more meaningful than ever. Our bass player for the show is my son Emerson’s instructor. He said that I should play it with Emerson instead of him. I loved the idea. When the night came, the song was really special. I was there all those years later, reminded of my lovely friend from the past, and my cold nights on the Saskatchewan highways, playing with my son: something that in that era of my life I could never have contemplated.

I hope you enjoy this song. On a day when war is once again upon us, I still implore the one who hung the Canada Sky to be the same when all things have changed, and when war remains the only constant in my adult life.

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