task.
How many more times would I have to do this, I wondered, before I felt settled and had both a life partner and a place that truly felt like home? Was Toronto going to work out for me? Was it not the same city I had escaped from twenty years ago? Even if I did find a way to fit back into life in Toronto, how was I ever going to replace Srdjan once I was based in Canada? I had no idea.
Had I really become a “global orphan,” never feeling completely rooted in one special place after having lived in so many? I tossed and turned night after night, praying I was making the right decision and knowing that leaving California would change my journey — both musical and personal — forever.
The most common type of house move seems to be simply to a different part of the same town, but with me it always seemed to involve crossing continents, and this time I was moving south and north simultaneously and also switching countries of residence. How I longed for help, a mate with whom to share the tasks, the decisions, and the memories.
At the suggestion of my late girlfriend Dale Mearn’s former boyfriend, Don Carmichael, I had rented a furnished sixteenth-floor two-bedroom condo, well-situated in downtown Toronto’s Yorkville. The corner unit, it had plenty of light and a distant view of Lake Ontario and the CN Tower, as well as a view of Cumberland Avenue. Conveniently, there were two subway stops a stone’s throw from the condo’s back entrance. I could hop on the subway and arrive at my mother’s Royal York stop in only twenty minutes.
Most of my furniture was sold or shipped to Palm Beach, and having an already furnished place in Toronto suited me just fine. I arranged my five Juno Awards on the guitar-case coffee table, and Don kindly helped me hang the gold and platinum discs that I had been dragging around the U.S. with me for the last few years.
Canada was going to become my home again! Now that I was actually back, I enjoyed the homecoming feeling and felt determined to embrace all the positive aspects of life in Toronto. As the lyrics of my song “Home to the Shores of Lake Ontario” say, “The world has been my playground, but how was I to know, I left my heart beside the shores of Lake Ontario.”
11
The Return ...To Canada with Love
I had first approached Peter Bond back in 2008 about producing a song I had written in Connecticut called “Canada, My Canada.” The idea of composing a patriotic song had been marinating in my mind ever since Jack and I had attended a World Presidents’ Organization conference in Berlin. It was there I realized that we Canadians had no patriotic song, apart from our “O Canada” anthem.
We were about three hundred delegates from all over the world, and one of the WPO organizers had the idea that we should group ourselves by country and each sing something from our homeland as a way of entertaining the others. The Germans belted out a famous drinking song, the Mexicans serenaded us with “Cielito Lindo,” and the Americans sang, “This Land Is Your Land.” Twenty or so Canadians found ourselves onstage trying to determine if we all knew the same Gordon Lightfoot or Stompin’ Tom song. It was useless. None of us knew the words to anything the others did, and very few of us could remember Canada’s original unofficial anthem,“The Maple Leaf Forever,” now very dated. As a last resort, we stumbled our way through the only Canadian song we vaguely remembered, Quebec’s “Alouette” — how embarrassing. Our performance was, as they say, a “train wreck”! I swore to myself that one day I would write a patriotic song about Canada that future school kids and adult choirs could learn and sing together.
One winter evening many years later, while driving home from a Joan Baez concert that I had attended in New York with a few American and Canadian friends, someone suggested we sing a Canadian song, and I was again troubled that we had nothing to offer. The following day, the magic happened, and back home in New Canaan I sat down with pen and paper. Somehow I was able to channel the special energy and patriotic inspiration required, even though at that time, in 2008, I had no plans to return to my homeland.
The words and the melody came to me effortlessly, and the song seemed to write itself. Was my departed lover Pierre Trudeau helping me from “the great beyond”? He had always been so impressed by my songwriting, even though the demos I played for him had used a studio singer’s voice. I truly believe that this song, with its catchy melody and lyrics, flowed supernaturally into my pencil from some mysterious cosmic guide.
I remember thinking that my biggest gift to Canada, and the one thing I was sure would live on long after I had gone, would be this new song that I had just created, called “Canada, My Canada”:
The spirits of our lakes and rivers gently sing to me
The mighty forests add their voice with mystic majesty
I hear the rhythm in the wings of wild geese as they fly
And music in the Rocky Mountains reaching for the sky
Canada, My Canada
My country proud and free …
With the song written, I now had to find a way to record it and bring the music to life. Peter Bond suggested I approach Chris Bilton, who worked with Jack Lenz as a producer at his recording complex in Toronto. Chris hired several singers and musicians to work with me to produce a demo. Although I thought the result was good, I felt the arrangement had a little too much of a Maritime flavour and was too pop sounding to my ears. I remember returning from the studio with some doubts about what I had just recorded.
• • •
I approached Peter again about tackling “Canada, My Canada,” and producing a more “folky,” straightforward version. Recalling my participation in “Tears Are Not Enough,” Canada’s answer to “We Are the World,” songs both written to help raise money for the famine in Ethiopia, my vision for this patriotic song now expanded. I fantasized that the recording would include contributions from a variety of well-known Canadian singers, whom I would ask to join me. How can I ever pull off a similar effort without a Bruce Allan–style manager? I fretted.
At first Peter balked at the idea of tackling the production himself and tried to offer the project to Richard Fortin, but my powers of persuasion worked and I knew Peter would be my ideal collaborator.
As anxious as I was to get underway with the recording of “Canada, My Canada,” there were a number of other projects that also demanded my attention at the time, so we put the recording on the back burner for a few months. With that on hold, Peter and I started to record a song I had written in memory of my father’s life, called “Do Your Thing,” and another in a Leonard Cohen–esque style titled “Thank You for Bringing Me Home.”
Peter also created the powerful orchestration for an instrumental song I composed called “Spirit of the Canadian Northlands” that included my spoken words:
O Great Spirit of the Northern waters, of the Northern lakes and the Northern forests … I feel you in the rocks, the trees, the sky, the rivers, the earth, and the animals … in the heartbeat of this mighty land.
Next, I re-wrote a song about the life of Canadian artist Emily Carr, a folky ballad that I had first performed with Srdjan, but this time I gave it a waltz rhythm and changed the melody. The author of the Penguin Emily Carr biography, Lewis DeSoto, paid me a lovely compliment when I sent him a fact-checking demo. “Liona you have condensed all the major themes of her life into a beautiful five-minute song, something it took me a whole book to do!” I was touched by his praise and “Emily Carr” became one of my favourite numbers to perform.
I found that songs
