Many thanks for your kind words! I really appreciate it!
My Funeral - I had to officiate at my mother-in-law’s funeral; I’m not an ordained minister, but I have served occasionally as a lay minister in a United Church of Canada congregation. I’m not allowed to do sacraments (weddings, baptisms, and funerals), but as this was a secular funeral, there was no problem.
Well, okay, the trick was - I had to navigate my father-in-law’s tolerant atheism, my wife’s militant atheism, my brother-in-law and his family’s evangelical Pentecostal/Baptist beliefs, my own beliefs, and my late mother-in-law’s New Age beliefs, which were shared by her many Tai Chi students in attendance.
It was tricky, but I daresay I put together and presented a service that was respectful of everyone’s wishes, including my late mother-in-law’s. So, after the service, I’m driving my wife and family back home, and she says to me “I think that went really well.”, to which I said “Thank you. I think she would have been happy, and I think everyone there felt it was appropriate. So, what would you want? For your funeral, I mean.” My wife laughs and says “I don’t know! I’ll be dead! Surprise me!”. Then she say to me “What would you want?”.
At which point, I turn from Victoria Road onto Stone Road, and I see a ~200 year old oak, and the first lines of the first verse just popped into my head.
The Best Day of my Life - this is a mix of truths, half-truths, and things that were true at the time. We’ve never worked in offices at the same time, but while I worked in the office of a United Church in Toronto, I did indeed lose an earring, spill coffee, rip a very nice jacket (and swear like a sailor when it happened, to which the minister said “Now there’s the sound of a man preparing to worship!”), and on the same day, I changed the passwords with caps lock on and was shut out until the IT guy could figure it out and fix it. All true, but we’d already been married 30 years.
The toner on her jacket, etc., comes from before we were married, but we’d been together for about a year. She was a temp for the Ministry of Labour, and one of the engineers was having trouble with the printer or photocopier. Sure enough, when she went to help, he had just managed to yank the toner cartridge out, breaking it in the process, and completely covering her outfit in toner. He then took her nice mechanical pencil to use as a lever, and broke it. She was ready for a glass of wine when I picked her up after work.
She does now work in NYC, I’m stuck on the Canadian side of the border until my green card comes through (can’t even cross for a visit!), and she wasn’t allowed to cross the border during the pandemic lockdown. During which time, I was living at her father-in-law’s place, clearing it out, fixing it up, and getting it ready to be put on the market.
Amusingly, I did say romantic things to her on the day we first met, at the U of Toronto School of Music Christmas party in 1984. She has no recollection of talking to me there - she was convinced we hadn’t met until January of 1985. Sadly, Billy Bragg has already written the song “The Fourteenth of February”, about his inability to recall the night he first met his partner.
Follow your Silence is the only one of my songs that I wrote in a single day. I guess I should do that more often…
Nous - Ha! I still think it’s clearer than any Yes lyric I’ve ever heard… 
I have a favour to ask of you - actually, two favours. Number one, if you’ve liked it at all, please tell other people about it! It’s really hard to get people’s attention with so much music out there and available.
Number two - would you be so kind as to give me your advice about what genre it does fit with, and what playlists or radio stations you think I ought to suggest it for? I didn’t write any of these songs to be any particular genre, it was more a case of these are the words I thought of, and this is the music that I thought worked. I’ve been using a site called ‘Submit Hub’ to suggest my music for various curated playlists, but I haven’t had much joy out of it, and I think I’m suggesting it in the wrong places/to the wrong people.
It doesn’t help that I don’t use Spotify at all, so I’m not used to navigating its particulars…
Any advice gratefully accepted!
