Some time ago, I was sitting on a picnic blanket on the grass surrounded by many of the people I love most in the world, and Garnet Rogers was playing this song, and it was about as perfect a moment as I've ever had and I wept and smiled and there are pictures to prove it.
Some time later, I was in a hospital bed in a very small old town, and my parents called and said they were going out to see Garnet Rogers. I'd lost my voice, but I whispered "You should you ask him to play 'Night Drive'."
I spent that lonely night looking out the window at a big hill where the sky played out its many colours and slipped into darkness and dim stars shone feebly in the northern summer light, and I hadn't seen the sun go down for months and I was on morphine and I heard guitar loops all night long.
They did ask him to play the song, and he "seemed quite touched," and he played it for me.
1 comment:
Oh, I remember the first time I heard Garnet sing this song. It was at Summerfolk many years ago, one of those mid-August nights in Owen Sound that smells like winter and feels like it, too. Wrapped up in my winter coat, hat, mitts and scarf and still shivering from the cold, my breath making tiny white clouds in the black night sky, he began playing, just him and his electric guitar. The swirling sounds sent me to another place and time, and that place and time was with Garnet and Stan in a car, driving across Canada on night just as black. I cannot listen to that song without crying.
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