400 NORTH

four hundred dances, it felt like tonight

we just couldn't stop

they were playin' our favourites, start to end

we yelled "turn it up!"

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(refrain) but silence is good, and what's under the hood

will get us over this hilltop dome

and a river of light falls into sight

here we are, half-way home

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i swear there's four hundred pickups, haulin' Skidoos

lookin' for the snow

who knows why they love that noise

but i could tell you what i know

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(refrain)

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of the four hundred things i could say in this darkness

to move you, north with me

"i love you" would be the first and the last,

and a few times in between

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(refrain)

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(coda) it's less than an hour now

you just close your eyes

i will wake you for

the next river of light

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there are random times when Deb and i have the same thought, and there is a particular place where we always do. it's on the 400 freeway north, where, over the crest of a hill, you can see a ribbon of headlights snaking down the curving hill in the southbound lanes, and the thought we share is "and the river of cars / they fall like stars / down the I-75". killer line from the song named after the interstate.

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one small thing that bothers me about Fred Eaglesmith is that his geographical images, and inspiration, i suppose, are almost all American - on this album, it's Texas, the I-75, Wichita, Oklahoma. his music is quite correctly called "Americana".

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this song is an hommage to our favourite cut on "Dusty" - my lyric could be sung to Fred's melody, fairly easily. but i make it personal, and hopeful, and drag it into central Ontario.

i wanted to change "river of cars" to "ribbon of light", but Deb lobbied successfully to stick with "river".

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that killer line is a great example of rule-breaking behaviour, the outcome of which is stronger and better than what he might have come up with by following the picky standards some of us like to set for ourselves: 1. the grammar is questionable, ie. singular "river", plural "cars", plural verb form even 'though it's "river of cars"; and 2. he piles a simile on top of a metaphor in the same line.

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it's brilliant. but i doubt there's any planning involved - i think Fred just doesn't care much for conventions. he writes a lot of songs - a friend of his quotes him as saying "i write fifteen songs before breakfast" - and performs and records the ones that work.

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so that's song number seven, less than half-way through the month. "Here we are, half-way home."