It’s cold out there, my fellow North Americans. A blustery cold, in fact….hockey and hot chocolate weather. Maybe that’s why we’re featuring our 2nd Canadian singer/songwriter in two days. Or maybe it’s because it’s times like these that I search for a warm blanket of a song that hearkens back to my musical roots.
For each of us, this means something different, but ultimately it is whatever serves as our equivalent of musical comfort food. I still recall my teenaged self reading a book by Henry Miller to better understand a referential lyric by legendary Toronto indie band, The Lowest of the Low. In retrospect, I’m quite sure that the lyric was not referring to the book I found in my school library — On the Fringe: The Dispossessed in America — so much as Tropic of Cancer, but regardless my mind was opened to a new subject and I learned something in the process.
Literary references that I found obscure in 1991 are thankfully less so in 2012, and in no small part because of the challenges I was given by lyrics that made me think a bit more and ultimately a bit differently than I might have otherwise. This isn’t to say that I agree with sentiments simply because someone put them together with a catchy tune — I still think Che Guevara was a sociopathic murderer rather than an icon to be blindly worshiped — but hey, I’ve been known to let my analytical guard down from time-to-time as well.
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The primary lead singer of The Lowest of the Low, Ron Hawkins, has released a number of tremendous albums apart from the Low over the years, including one of my top ten albums of 2011. He merits further discussion, but for now…enjoy a song off of his second-most-recent release about a small Ontario town and kids on crystal meth — the feel good song of the year — “The Devil Went Down”.
