Hearts on Fire
I recently finished Michael Barclay’s Hearts on Fire*, a book about the rise of the Canadian indie music scene around the turn of the millennium. If you look at that era from the outside, it looks like a series of overnight miracles. Suddenly, the world was paying attention to a collective from Toronto, every band from Montreal, a country singer from Alberta, and a literary band from Winnipeg.
Nobody was trying to write a global hit or fit into a radio format. They were making music about the worlds they actually knew.
The Weakerthans grew out of Winnipeg’s punk scene. Corb Lund went back to the foothills of Alberta and started writing about the life he knew. Broken Social Scene came from the overlap of a particular group of people in a particular Toronto neighbourhood. Every one of those stories started as a colloquial movement.
It feels like we're increasingly surrounded by things that could have come from anywhere. The local details are often the first things to disappear. But the bands in Hearts on Fire point to something different. The more they embraced where they came from, the more they gave people somewhere to enter from.
When you know where something comes from, it gives the work a point of view. The way people talk in your town. The history of a building. The habits of a neighbourhood. Those things might seem insignificant from the outside, but they give an identity somewhere to begin.
You don’t build something memorable by pretending you could be from anywhere. You build it by being undeniably from somewhere.
Hold steady.