The Tale Behind The Tune ... Who Knows

A Burrows / Campbell / Leishman Collaboration    |    6 min read

This song came about in the strangest of ways. The original guitarist in Burrows And Company … the late Larry Leishman … long term friend of mine and a musician I had written songs and had made music with on many occasions … had discovered sampling on the Garage Band program on his computer. So he sent me a recording with a whole bunch of unrelated disjointed musical phrases he had created with that for fun. Here is the track he sent me at that time …

For some reason when I was listening to it at 3 AM one morning I started hearing a song coming together in my head. Not long before I had gone to a presentation by Dr. David Suzuki at The Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto. He was on tour with Randy Bachman and others trying to encourage people to actually start doing something to make this a better world and to improve our relationship with this wonderful little planet we all depend upon. He had a list of ten things any and all of us could do to make that happen and he was asking us to pick one or two of them to focus on and help create progress here. Dr. Suzuki also expressed his utter frustration with how little people in general seemed to care about such things … which had in fact led him to launch this initiative. I wasn’t particularly impressed with his idea of presenting the list of ten… seemed rather basic, simplistic and reminded me of David Letterman! However, I could readily empathise with his utter disappointment in feeling that he had spent much of his life working on something very important that very few people seemed to be paying attention to at all or doing anything about. So it seemed to me if we could get people to think about how our current behaviour and actions were compromising the future of their children, we might have a hook that might draw folks in and cause them to adjust what they were doing from that perspective. As it says in the song … We tell them that we love them. Care for them in every way. Was it will they someday wonder. What we do or what we say? The song was clearly written in an effort to drive that message home and get folks to seriously consider what our generation has done and is doing to this planet in terms of how it will affect our children directly and their children thereafter. As in the chorus … Who knows, somebody tell me. How will we look them in the eye? Who knows, next generation. What will be our alibi? Clearly, we don’t have one … at all. So I got to work on the lyrics for this song I could hear in my head but could not sing to the track I got from Larry … finished up at about 5 AM.
 
When I got up later that morning, I went back and listened to Larry’s funky eclectic track again and started breaking it up into coherent passages, isolating and naming all of them … then went back and organized them into a database. Thereafter I made a map of which passages I wanted in what order and how long for each passage so we could create a recorded track I could sing the lyrics I had written to … I hoped!

Called a longtime friend of mine and former elementary school student I had taught in Grade Six, who had become a wonderful and very competent recording engineer … Scott Campbell … and asked him for his help. I sent him Larry’s original recording along with the database of musical phrases I had collected and isolated, and a “road map” of how I wanted them assembled. He then went to work cutting and pasting various phrases and assembling the background track for me to sing to as instructed by the road map. He did a seamless job of putting that track together for me … the next day I took the recording
Scott had assembled to Dave’s studio and sang the song to the constructed track.

I shared the song with Larry and explained the thought process that had led me to write the lyric and as a result he agreed that we should send the song to Dr. Suzuki as a gift. In doing that we indicated to him that we were not seeking compensation of any kind and  we invited him to use the song in any way he deemed appropriate in achieving his goals. To my surprise and joy I received a phone call from David Suzuki not long after. He expressed his gratitude for our gesture and told me he was calling from a fishing lodge in Haida Gwaii where he was unable to listen to the song, but that he would do so when he got back to Vancouver. I never heard anything further from him … don’t know if he ever actually listened to the song or not … did call his office at one point but was told that he was a very busy man and was currently working on episodes of The Nature Of Things. Guess he was taking care of business … and after all I’m no Randy Bachman. One thing I will and must say however is that Dr. Suzuki has done wonderful work throughout his life in drawing our attention to important issues with regard to what we are doing to this planet and to what we should be doing instead, with candor and relentless commitment. Interestingly that he and another David … Attenborough … deliver much the same message. However, everyone seems to love the latter David whereas I have heard some say that the former David is too abrasive … many of those folks don’t like Greta Thunberg much either. But the fact is Dr. David and Greta are just telling us that inconvenient truth Al Gore talked about is an urgent and critical matter that must be addressed immediately. And they are correct. Despite all our best intentions … and let’s remember the road to hell is apparently paved with those … and despite all the sweet talk that exudes from our political leaders, Canada has never met any of the commitments we have made in international accords on the environment … not in Kyoto, not in Cancun, not in Paris, not in any of them. And unfortunately, we are not alone … far from it!
 
We humans are literally consuming this planet. We are having an increasingly drastic impact on the ecosystems that support life on Mother Earth. We are driving a great many species of life on this planet into extinction and in the opinion of many prominent environmental scientists we are in fact in the midst of our own extinction. Talk is cheap … we need far more than that and we need it now … not just for our own sake, but even more importantly for the sake of our children and our children’s children. How will we look them in the eye? What will be our alibi? Again … we have none! And it’s not just politicians and business and parents who need to bear responsibility for this situation we are facing either … as David Suzuki suggested in his presentation, each one of us has an obligation to do whatever we can to do something about it. Little changes we all make in our lives in this regard could make a big difference collectively. For example, as consumers we could not just make purchases based on how much something costs alone … which many consumers I know have a tendency to do … we could more often consider the “big picture” when buying things. Because when we buy something, we are endorsing something. Perhaps we could give greater consideration to things like … where did that commodity come from, what were the working conditions of the people who made it, how does the production or harvesting of it impact our environment? etc etc. Obviously, cost is a major consideration too but it’s not the only thing we should be thinking about. The way we spend our money can have a huge impact on the businesses and services that provide us with the things we buy. And there are many other ways we can collectively have a positive impact on the world we live in.
 
The wonderful photo of our lovely little planet taken by the astronauts in Artemis 2 used in this presentation is a reminder of just how delicate and fragile our world and life on it really is. On their mission, those astronauts remarked during the solar eclipse they witnessed as they circumnavigated the moon, that this universe we all live in may be beyond our comprehension. They were struck with awe and wonder by the nature of reality … we should be too.  One great benefit of this wonderful journey into that universe was that it brought us all together in many ways. May the love we all have for our children bring us together to make sure do whatever we can do to leave them the best possible world. Because they’re … Gonna reap just what we sow.
 
Happy Earth Day.
 
Thanks for taking the time to read our Tale Behind The Tune.
And for your ongoing support for and interest in our music … much appreciated.
 
We are Burrows And Company … the best kept secret in Canadian music.
You can help us change that.
 
Bob