Jim Parker
LOST HIGHWAY
This one was written in 2004 while on a trip to California with my wife Susie. I went on a solo drive into Joshua Tree National Park one day which is basically the middle of the desert. It felt very surreal to me, especially when I came upon a light plane that had crashed nose first right beside the road. Two kids had stolen their parent’s plane and flew it till it ran out of gas. Earlier in the day, I had seen an advertisement for David Lynch’s movie of the same title and so all the ideas just coalesced into this song.
PRAYING FOR RAIN
I remember when the idea for this song came into my head. It must have been around 1999 and we were on vacation down in the Maritimes. We had been listening to the news on the radio about drought out on the Prairie and I guess I must have started imagining what that would be like. The farm that has been in your family for generations now threatened because the rain won’t fall and you can’t grow anything. I always liked the “ghost in the field” line and at one point thought I might call the record that instead.
THE BEST THING I COULD DO
Most times I can’t remember when or how I came to write a song. I vaguely remember walking my dog and thinking about this one and I seem to remember it took a long time. I had a middle section where the band would have just built for a long time on one chord while I kind of sang these anguished cries but it would have taken the song into the 7-minute range and made it way too long. It’s already too long (for radio) as it is although I don’t think it feels it. Anyway, this is clearly about an anti-hero who we find standing beside the highway, somewhere in the middle of the Prairie in the middle of winter holding a sign that says “Headed West”. He is hoping to escape from the “evil” inside himself by hiding in the mountains somewhere and at the same time release the woman who loves him back east.
TOMORROW’S YESTERDAY
My wife Susie and I spend our weekend mornings sitting on the couch in our kitchen with our dogs, coffees and the newspaper. Occasionally I will get my guitar and fool around with ideas and see if anything pops out while we’re there. This song came exactly that way and pretty much all in one go. Susie helped with a number of the lyric ideas in this one thus the co-write. Pretty clear message…LIVE FOR TODAY! I’m still workin’ on that one!
NIGHTS LIKE THESE
I wrote this song after a trip to Ireland in 2004. It was originally going to be called “The Tulley Road” after a narrow, winding, roller coaster of a road near where we were staying in Northern Ireland but it morphed into this instead. I picture a couple walking hand in hand through a moonlit meadow on a soft summer night
FIELD OF FLOWERS
I was doing a show in a park one evening and as I was setting up my gear I noticed a fellow some distance away lying on the grass amongst some flower beds. He lay there for the whole time I was setting up and I thought it was something I had never and might never do. I’m much too wired and would have to get up and do something after a short period of time but it got me thinking. What would it be like to lie in a field of flowers for a whole day? What would you see? What would happen? So this song just started to come to me as I was waiting to do my show. I think I wrote it quite quickly. That said, it took forever to record, especially the 12 string electric guitar which wouldn’t stay in tune. I ended up recording each chord separately. Susie came up with the “See what I see” line.
SHE’S MY BABY
This song has got to be 30 years old and one of the first songs I wrote that I kept. I’ve played it in a number of bands over the years but never seriously recorded it. This version was recorded with my friends from the band “The Genuines”, Artemis Chartier, Ray Gauvin and Heather Sullivan. Stylistically inspired by the Georgia Satellites, it’s a very basic song about a simple country boy marvelling at his bride to be on their wedding day. I was going for the real “swamp rock” type feel on this one. Ray played a great solo as usual!
WARM SASKATCHEWAN NIGHT
My family comes from Saskatchewan so I wrote this as a bit of an ode to the Province and a nod to my ancestors. From my point of view this is not in the present day but more like the 30′s with a bit of a John Steinbeck feel to it. Again it’s just one magical, romantic night in the lives of this couple. I wanted the song to sound like the players were sitting in a circle in the living room of the couple’s house out in the middle of the Prairie.
I’M A REBEL (IN A SUIT AND TIE)
This song is a shout out to all the folks who have to put on the “uniform” every day when they go to work. Their job is what they do but more often than not it’s not who they are. They are still those crazy people they were in high school or university, just a little older. Anyway, in this story, the narrator is having to come to terms with the fact that although he feels like he’s still that wild guy, the reality is, he has a job and a family and maybe some of those dreams of his are going to have to wait just a little while longer.
LOVE WILL FIND A WAY
Who couldn’t hear the stories of the folks who lost their money and jobs in the crash of 2008 and not feel moved? We have all heard story after story on the news about people losing their homes, careers, savings…whole ways of life and it certainly got me thinking. This song just popped out as I put myself in the shoes of the person coming home to their partner and giving them the news that they got laid off because the plant they worked at had abruptly closed. The people in this story are resilient however and have even been through this kind of thing before. They are determined to hang on, ride it out and survive for even if they’ve lost everything they will still have each other. I chose a paper plant because my father and brother worked in that industry for most of their careers. Stylistically this is definitely inspired by Springsteen, one of my heroes.
LOOKIN FOR A MIRACLE
I started to write this when I was feeling particularly down one day. I like to mess around on the piano and I think I had been playing Hey Jude at the time and thought I wanted to write a song that captured that essence and feel. The chorus just popped out. Not being a very religious person I was hesitant to write a song about miracles until I realized that they weren’t from up above but were from inside ourselves and each other.
Listen here now!
