Jim Parker
WHAT KIND OF WORLD
What Kind of World took me several years to write as I had the chord changes bouncing around in my head for a long time before it finally came together into this song. The impetus came from seeing some news footage of a Palestinian father and son caught in a crossfire during an uprising in Lebanon. I think the words are as timely today as ever and probably will be 100 years from now, unfortunately.
FOREVERLAND
This is a piano song I had started to write around 2015 and had recorded on an old cassette (yes cassette) recorder. When I was going through my old tapes a few years later I came upon it and decided to finish it. I wrote it as I recorded and shot the video in Florida in 2018. In the song, the narrator is clearly missing someone who is lost to them and the only way they can escape the pain is to be with them in an imaginary world.
ALIVE
This is the newest song on the record. As I was finishing up, I felt I needed one more shortish song and this kind of popped up. It’s written as if giving advice to a friend who is going through tough times about how great it is to just be alive. We all need to be reminded of that from time to time.
A SIGN
A Sign is another song I found while going through my old cassette tapes. I started writing it in February 2013 when the papal conclave in Rome was deliberating on who would be the next Pope and finished it in 2016. It’s about how everyone is looking for a meaning in life and the things around them and that sometimes that search can take them to perhaps bizarre places. In the end, the narrator is just looking for a sign from his partner that they still love them after some thoughtless act.
WALKABOUT
Every few months I do a songwriting workshop with a group of mentally challenged folks near Toronto. They are absolutely wonderful people and I’m consistently amazed at the great stuff we write together. We recently decided to try and write a “Disney” style song and came up with a whole storyline to support the song. It is called Walkabout and is set in Australia in the late 1800s. In the story, a young Aboriginal girl is about to go “walkabout” in defiance of her village and family. She is standing on top of a hill looking out to the Outback before she starts her journey while a village elder who supports her quest sings the song to her. There were probably 15 people who were present when this song was written but for legal reasons, I can only list the main contributors, one of whom is my wife!
SPIN
Sometimes you sit down at the piano and something just pops out. That’s what happened with Spin. Suddenly there it was! Very much a Beatle-esque type of song and just a lot of fun. How many adjectives for going around in a circle can you find?
THE VIGIL
I actually started to write this song in 1974 after a girlfriend of mine broke up with me (sob). In the 80’s I tried to finish it but couldn’t figure out how it should go and so it lay gathering dust until 2015 when I finally got a handle on it. Really just a broken heart song, I made it more fantasy where I picture this lone, darkly cloaked figure standing on an ocean shore waiting thousands of years for the return of his loved one. Someone should tell him, “Hey pal, she’s not coming back!” I stretched out the middle into a broad guitar solo played superbly by Andrew Watson.
THE NEXT VOICE YOU HEAR
This song appeared during a particularly prolific period of writing. I was in a band called “The Genuines” with Artemis Chartier, Heather Sullivan and Ray Gauvin and I were writing a lot of stuff for Arty to sing. This was one of them. It’s a song about charity and empathy, something my wife Sue and I both believe in a lot. We recorded it in “B” with Arty singing it (and she did a great job) for an album that never came to be. I always wanted to try my hand at it so for this record I lowered everything a tone and gave it a go. The voices in the middle were students and teachers from Ramer Wood Public School in Markham, Ontario.
TIME STRETCH
This is my attempt at a Progressive Rock instrumental. A drummer by nature, I wanted to write something that would be fun to drum to and came up with this. I played all the other instruments as well including the guitar which was really stretching my meagre abilities. I thought about bringing someone else in to play it but decided in the end I could barely pull it off. It’s in C and follows a 1, 6min, 4, 4min pattern.
LEMURIA
I decided I wanted to write a song about a mystical place ala Shangri-la or Xanadu but realized that a million songs had been written about those places. Upon doing a little internet sleuthing I came upon the legend of Lemuria, a land that was said to have once existed in the Indian Ocean. As it turns out this is a big deal to a lot of folk’s but I didn’t know that at the time of writing this. The lyrics are pretty self-descriptive and are about someone who just wants to escape all the crap that is going on in the world and find somewhere peaceful and quiet to live out their days. The video is a take-off of Indiana Jones and was a real laugh to make.
PULSE
For many years I did musical mentoring at the Durham Alternative Secondary School in Oshawa, Ontario through a yearly grant from the Ontario Arts Council. In one of the projects we did, DASS, Empty Cup Media and me, teamed up with Mary Street Public School (also in Oshawa) to do a song which all the students would sing. It was titled Pulse. The verses were spoken but the lead in the chorus was sung by student Emily Hamer who did a fantastic job. I always wanted to write a musical verse for the song and so this year I did and then recorded the song with me singing. I kept Emily in the 2nd and third choruses and of course added everybody for the last chorus. There was also a young student from Mary Street who sang the acapella chorus whose first name was Matt. He also did an excellent job!
