The song that became the theme for the Reverie Nature Podcast did not begin as a song. It began with ten minutes on a hilltop. I was doing some regular hikes on Blueberry Mountain and, as I sometimes did, stopped at the lookout to write in a nature journal. There was no intention of composing anything. I was simply trying to record what was happening around me before my attention wandered off to something else. A scarlet tanager was singing. Trembling aspen leaves were moving in the wind and falling one by one. A heavy mist was coming through the countryside, climbing the hills and being combed by the pines. I was above the forest, looking down on the canopy. The weather was changing quickly. The leaves made their particular aspen noise until, eventually, they did not. They had fallen.
The first lines came from what was actually there. The tanager was singing. The leaves were falling. The mist really did seem to be combed by the pines. Sometimes nature writing requires less imagination than attention. The song came later, which is worth noting because when I look back at those journal notes now, I can see things in them that I did not consciously put there. At the time, I thought I was recording a place. But I was also living through a particular moment, and the news of the day was somewhere in the room, even though the room happened to be a hilltop.
In Canada, residential schools and the discovery of unmarked burial sites were occupying a great deal of public attention. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission had already documented the deaths of children at residential schools and the long history of inadequate records concerning their deaths and burial places. In 2021, discoveries and investigations at former residential school sites brought the subject into public consciousness with renewed force. I was not sitting on the mountain thinking, I should now write a song about residential schools. Quite the opposite. I was trying not to write about anything. And yet some of those thoughts seem to have been waiting just outside the journal.
The trembling aspen leaves became more than leaves. Falling one by one suggested loss. The mist moving through the hills suggested departure. The storm became weather, and something else. None of this was planned. Meaning had simply arrived after the fact, which may be one of the more useful things about writing. We tend to imagine that meaning is something a writer puts into a piece, but sometimes it is already sitting there, waiting for the writer to notice it. That is also why I have always preferred songs that leave some room for the listener. A mist can remain a mist. It does not need to be promoted to metaphor before it is allowed to be interesting.
The storm imagery in this song was partly the weather itself. It was a windy day, the sky was dark and moving, and the mist was travelling quickly. But there was another storm in the background, one that had nothing to do with meteorology. “Lightning surges. Thunder pounds. The sky’s dark and out of control.” Those lines can belong entirely to the weather. They can also belong somewhere else. The same thing happened with the more hopeful images. There was still green among the brown hills. Sunlight was breaking through the darker sky and reaching the forest floor. I had the thought of resilience without necessarily deciding that I was writing about resilience. The image arrived first. The interpretation came later. A fallen leaf can be a fallen leaf. It can also remind you that things end. Both statements can survive quite comfortably in the same song.
The music gave the images another layer, and this is where prosody became part of the writing. I had been experimenting with drop D tuning, lowering the lowest string so it could continue to ring underneath the chords. The progression was simple: D-sus2, C-sus2 and G-sus2. The chords repeat, and many of the notes remain in place as they change, so rather than moving dramatically from one harmonic destination to another, the song tends to hover. The lyric is carrying loss, uncertainty and a little hope, while the harmony refuses to settle the matter for us. That relationship between what the words are saying and what the music is doing is the useful part of prosody. The chords do not simply accompany the lyric. They give it another meaning.
There is something slightly sombre in the harmonica and arrangement, but the underlying chords are not particularly unhappy. There is a lift underneath them. The result sits somewhere between loss and hope, which seems appropriate for a song that began with falling leaves. Later, the song acquired a video and, with it, a life that had very little to do with the original ten minutes on the mountain. There was an old cedar tree, estimated to be somewhere between 250 and 500 years old, with generations gathered around it. My daughter played harmonica. There was drone footage over Blueberry Mountain during an unusually good fall for colour. None of those things had been in the journal, but they belonged to the song anyway.
A year and a half after I wrote the song, someone at a local song circle suggested submitting it to CKCU’s Tree Songs project, which brought songwriters together around the idea of celebrating and protecting trees. A song that began with sitting above a forest had somehow wandered into a conversation about protecting one. That seems appropriate. A song can make a landscape feel familiar without becoming a policy document about it. It can make a tree difficult to regard as merely a tree. The old cedar does not need to make an argument. It has already been standing there for several centuries. The rest of us are comparatively recent arrivals.
Looking back, the song was never really just about what I saw that morning. The weather was there. So was the news. Personal memories were there. Family came later. Other musicians came later still. The recording itself changed it. What began as three chords and a few notes in a journal gradually accumulated people, places and meanings. But underneath all of it, the original hilltop remains: a bird, aspen leaves, mist, pines, wind and a darkening sky.
It is tempting to think that writing begins when you decide to write. I am less convinced of that now. Sometimes the writing begins earlier, while you are simply paying attention. The sentence arrives later. The song arrives later still. Meaning may take even longer. You go up the mountain intending to write down what you see and come home with a song. Then a daughter, a cedar and a few hundred years of history get involved. At that point, it seems reasonable to stop explaining.
Writing a Song: Podcast’s Theme Song is Episode 7 of the Reverie Nature Podcast.