Comedy
This past March, when the pandemic began, I was up north with my dad at our cottage, making maple syrup. Everywhere was locking down, so we just stayed put, and ended up living there for over a month. I know it was a terrifying time for the world, and the beginning of the strangest and most difficult year in many of our lives - but I can't help remembering that month fondly. We developed daily rituals, spent huge amounts of time walking in the winter woods - and, eventually, looking for things to do, went over every inch of that old place. I found myself digging through a drawer in my bedroom that I had forgotten about. My family used to spend our whole summers up at that cottage, we'd leave the day school let out and wouldn't come back until the day before it started up again. It was an amazing way to spend a childhood, and an even better way to spend your teenage years. But one of the last summers we spent there, I had just started a relationship with a girlfriend back home. She was my first girlfriend, and I was head over heels in love, and going away that summer was not the fantastic experience it usually was. I had a 1999 Nokia Muchmusic cell phone with a pay-per-text plan, and there was no service at my cottage except in one spot at the end of the driveway. She was staying at a summer camp as a Counselor-In-Training with limited landline access. So we wrote each other letters. She would spray them with perfume so that they smelled like her. I kept them in the bottom drawer of my bedside table, and read them every night before going to sleep. Over the years, that drawer became the home for everything to do with my first love. Birthday gifts, anniversary letters, little origami swans she made out of magazine pages. Then it became a place for all nostalgia-inducing things. Old photgraphs, a tiny baseball glove, broken guitar picks. Then one day I closed it and didn't open it again. The thing I couldn't believe, when I finally rediscovered it this spring, was the smell of her perfume. It filled up the room, clear as the day she scented her letters with it, and I was transported. And as I sat there, digging through the artefacts of a forgotten life, I thought, "this is a country song." I recorded this demo the next day. When I do this tune for the album I'll add pedal steel, I'll arrange the guitars a little differently, and I think I'd like a woman's voice doing the harmonies on the chorus. But there's also a lot I won't change. I think plenty of people have an old drawer like this one somewhere in their lives. If you have one, open it up.