A lot of the best songs being written today-- certainly some of the greatest songs I know of, by anyone, from any time, are hidden from the general public. Or finding them, at least, requires significant effort. Legwork. Fieldwork. Travel. You gotta be a folk detective to collect these songs. You've gotta go to the places where they live. They're not being piped through the speakers at Pizza Hut. You won't find 'em at HMV. A lot of the best songs I know, you won't even hear on the CBC, or the even more individual playlists of university stations.

Many great songs are local secrets. Every city or town has 'em, some more than others. You find 'em in small clubs, run by renegade individuals. Music rooms which become the nuclei for nests of songwriters and the audiences who love them. In some cases these songwriters embrace the life of the road and become troubadours. Carrying their songs to faraway places. These troubadours hop from community to community, gathering listeners and connecting the pockets of audiences which exist from coast to coast.

In other cases the songwriters and their songs remain local. The songs belong to the underground few who are lucky enough to have them in their orbit. The songs are a source of local pride, and belong to those who treasure them. Perhaps, in these cases, the writers are missing that gene which causes someone to forsake normality for a life in the wind. The exhaustion of the full-time, far-flung artistic pursuit isn't for everybody.

In this way, the travelling troubadour has the advantage of experiencing some of the beauty celebrated in each locale-- of discovering world-class songs in the nooks of the world, and then bringing them home. If you're a songster like me (a songster, by my definition, is someone who might write songs but who more importantly collects them), they stick to you like burrs. You carry them with you to other places and make them less secret than they were before. Good songs aren't meant to be secrets. That's why we remember the good ones. It's natural selection. The same way the burr of a flower clings to an animal's coat in order to travel somewhere the flower might take seed, a catchy melody or brilliant lyric catches a songster's ear, so it might travel to new listeners in new places. That's how songs flourish.

And that's what my album Paper Nickels is about. Paper Nickels is something I've dreamed about making (and talked about making) for years, and it's finally being made, and released this November. It was recorded live, over two nights in January, at The Tranzac Club in Toronto. The finished album contains twenty songs, featuring 16 writers besides myself. It's the garden that's grown up from all the burrs I've brought home over the past ten years.

DIVINING THE METRE IN A JUNK PILE

Today I'd like to introduce just one of the 16 writers I cover on Paper Nickels:

Raghu Lokanathan is a songwriter who lives in Prince George, BC, a town he has celebrated in song (take a listen to 'Caledonia', Raghu's love song for Prince George, from his 2004 album of the same name, in which town becomes woman):

as I came walking down Burden Street
heavy-hearted and dragging my feet
a funny kind of woman there I chanced to meet
named Caledonia

I smiled at her and I said, 'how do you do?'
she threw me against a tree and said, 'what's it to you?'
I said 'I come in peace', and then she loved me black and blue
Caledonia

Many denizens of British Columbia will say, all too predictably, 'How could anyone write a love song for Prince George?' Prince George, they'll be quick to tell you-- unlike Victoria or the Kootenays or other places celebrated widely for their obvious beauty-- is a drab and decrepit place. A mill town. A redneck town. A boring town. An ugly town. Well, that depends on where you're standing. And how accessible you're able to make yourself to beauty that's not so obvious. As Raghu puts it in 'Caledonia':

I say, 'no, you're wrong, she's not nice, but she's real
she's got love to give, she's got secrets to reveal
to the one who in her mess sees the power to heal
heal me, Caledonia'

I love the last words of the song:

I asked her once about death do us part
she said, 'I make no such promises, but I'll show you my heart
here it is, wild and sad, like some great work of art'
Caledonia

One of the fundamental things which makes Raghu's work so extraordinary is his ability to make himself available to the heart he sings about in that song ('There are pretty girls in the islands I hear/ with sweet-smelling skin, and lacy black underwear/ me, I'm in love with a forty-ounce stare/ named Caledonia'). Many of Raghu's songs seem to say that people expect places to lie at their feet in their beauty, but that what people ignore is their own responsibility to be present-- that it's your presence which allows you to see the beauty that's there-- but you need to be available to it.

Another song which celebrates this idea is 'Half-Moon Thursday', a sidewalk-level portrait of Prince George, which, as far as I can tell, is as much a vantage point as it is a song (click link to listen to song). I love this tune. And its lyrics are worth printing here, for them to jump off the screen.

Half-Moon Thursday (Raghu Lokanathan)

Wasted And Staggering is looking for a smoke
Mr. and Mrs. say sorry but they don't
New Love rushed across the street to avoid him
and Wasted is dancing a solo

Slave Wage is shuttin' down the Subway joint
High Risk is adding up the big fat accounts
Red Zone is painting RESIST on a shed
and Wasted is dancing a solo

Half-Moon Thursday, Autumn Mill Town is gonna see his baby
won't be long now

Six Cylinders is crackin' down the drag
Flip Flop is pedaling to the basement
Track Pants is walking a three-legged dog
and Wasted is dancing a solo

Free Verse is divining the metre in a junk pile
No Mind is waiting for the ferry man
Good News is wired up for bad rock n' roll
and Wasted is dancing a solo

Half-Moon Thursday, Autumn Mill Town is gonna see her baby
won't be long
it won't be long
it won't be long
it won't be long now

Wasted And Staggering is looking for a smoke
Mr. and Mrs. say sorry but they don't
New Love rushed across the street to avoid him
and Wasted is dancing a solo

and Wasted is dancing a solo
and Wasted is dancing a solo

Which brings me back to the impetus for the album Paper Nickels, an album which puts into action the concept Raghu articulates so beautifully in these songs. 'Free Verse is divining the metre in a junk pile'. Exactly. Beauty is hiding in unexpected places, but it's there ('wild and sad, like some great work of art') for those willing to make the effort.

PROFANE HYMNS

Just two more Raghu songs, and then a Paper Nickels teaser (which won't be as good if you skip to it first... c'mon, stay with me). Raghu Lokanathan has said that he writes 'profane hymns'. I think the song 'Unholy', from his 2009 album Blue Girl, is a beautiful example of one of those. 'Unholy', like Raghu's song 'Sugar Candy Mountain', compelled me to learn it and play it even though I didn't really understand it. Or rather, I didn't understand it in a literal, linear way. My body understood it. It was my brain that wanted to catch up (listen to 'Unholy').

So I asked Raghu about 'Unholy'. This is another advantage the troubadour has, is this opportunity to ask their favourite songwriters about their lyrics directly. I was travelling with Raghu in March of 2011, and while we were in the car I grilled him a little.

I said, "I understand 'the stained glass goes through all the colours/ the hungry eyes go through the channels/ a hundred kinds of just the usual, never satisfies'. I mean I've sat on the beds of enough hotel rooms with a remote control in my hand, but what about the next part? What do you mean, 'the endless bloody loose rebellion/ just one enemy, one companion'? What were you thinking about when you wrote that?"

Raghu said, "I guess I was thinking about the nature of my own mind. How it's this constant uprising, this constant rebellion-- but not an organized rebellion. It's loose, and chaotic. But it's what we've got."

"Okay," I said. "But what about the end of the song... what can you possibly mean by 'the milk takes care of the red and the purple/ the old lady climbs up turtle by turtle'? C'mon, Raghu. What's goin' on there?"

Raghu told me that he was reading about a lecture Carl Sagan gave on the origin of the cosmos, and when Sagan was finished, taking questions, a woman stood up and said, 'You can't fool me! Everyone knows the world is on the back of a giant turtle!'. Carl Sagan asked her, 'Well, what's the turtle standing on?', and she said, 'Oh no, you can't fool me again!! Everyone knows it's turtles all the way down!'. Raghu said that he was thinking about that while he was making himself a cup of tea.

the milk takes care of the red and the purple
the old lady climbs up turtle by turtle
unholy

It pays to be a troubadour.

EVERY PILLOW IS THE ROCK OF MY STRUGGLE

I first became addicted to the song 'Sugar Candy Mountain' when my former duo The Undesirables did a mini-tour with Raghu in BC in 2009. As I mentioned above, I didn't know exactly what the song meant, but I was comforted by it, and I came to need it-- at first listening to it every day, and then soon enough learning it and playing it for myself, which became a daily ritual. I asked Raghu what he'd been thinking when he wrote it but he couldn't tell me. 'I just had a deep feeling of trust in my body the whole time I was writing it'. Which makes sense to me, because I have a deep trust in this song. It just feels very right. I played it for Jonathan Byrd (another of my favourite songwriters) and he dubbed it a 'hobo jungle fever dream', which is to date the best description of it that I've got.

Corin Raymond and The Sundowners recorded 'Sugar Candy Mountain', live, back in January (incidentally, Raghu Lokanathan opened the second of the two nights). 'Sugar Candy Mountain' ends the first disc (Set 1) of the double album Paper Nickels. Which comes out in November. In the meantime, here's Raghu's recording of the song from his 2008 album Petal Press: Listen to it here.

IF I MEET THE BUDDHA YOU CAN KISS HIS ASS GOODBYE

Someday I'm gonna record an entire album of songs by Raghu Lokanathan. He's one of the best singer/songwriters Canada has, and he just happens to be my favourite. This Jukebox has barely touched the surface of his catalogue, which deserves to be celebrated in a way we can all enjoy. I believe in Raghu's songs. I believe that when they receive an even slightly wider audience, that other songwriters are going to pick them up, like those burrs I was talking about up top, and that they're going to start being heard by new audiences as a result. That's my hope, anyway.

I'll leave you with a Raghu song which I believe will soon be a campfire staple. It's already on its way: I played this song at the Winnipeg Fringe Cabaret on Saturday night, upstairs at The King's Head Pub (an incredible event at which many performers from the Fringe do short bits which have nothing to do with their shows-- but the coolest part is that the only light in the room comes from the flashlights the audience is armed with-- no one knows where the performers are gonna pop up, but as soon as the next act begins, every flashlight beam finds them-- it was magical). I opened the proceedings by standing on the service counter and singing Raghu's song 'Fucking Genius', which is exactly what I think this song is.

When I was in high school, a guidance counsellor I liked gave me a book called If You Meet The Buddha In The Road, Kill Him, by Sheldon B. Kopp. Which I never read. I still have that copy he gave me. Maybe I'll get to it someday. In any case, whenever I hear this song I'm reminded of that book. 'Fucking Genius' didn't make Paper Nickels, but here's the recording of it from Wednesday, January 25th, 2012 at The Tranzac, in Toronto, the night Raghu opened the show. 

If you like this track, you're gonna love Paper Nickels, which contains twenty songs I can guarantee are gonna go home with you on the cuffs of your jeans.