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Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Includes unlimited streaming of Telegrams
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about
The seed for this song began one summer with a stargazing mission up to Mount Seymour with some friends. There was supposed to be a meteor shower that night, and we wanted to see what we could see. As we walked around in the darkness, my friends kept seeing things happening in the sky while I seemed to miss them for some reason. Not long after that night, I met a woman at the Vancouver Folk Festival who rolled her own cigarettes. I loved watching her hands craft away those neat little tubes of tobacco which she’d then raise to her tongue to seal them shut. Once before lighting up, she said something like, “It’s much better to smoke these than pre-made cigarettes,” and I figured she was probably right. She also told me that a few years earlier she’d became so obsessed with how beautiful her hair looked that she cut it all off to prove she could defeat her own vanity. I’m not quite sure how or why I connected the star gazing story with the one about the woman from the folk fest, but somehow they seemed linked in my mind. Perhaps it was the element of light—fire in the sky, fire in one’s hand, and for that matter, fire in the heart. The lyric, also touches on questions around human existence and how small we actually are in the face of a giant sky. I remember trying to raise the stakes for the narrator as the song progresses, starting with contemplating the small details of the day to day to later asking the age old question of: why am I actually here? Note that the lyric does not claim to provide any answers to that question.
lyrics
Now the night’s burning off like a candle while we’re out here collecting stars. You keep calling out, Oh, I saw another one fall, but I haven’t seen anything falling so far. But when I do I’ll be certain to tell you, until then I am keeping your name safe behind this cracked bull’s eye window, sometimes at night it lets in the rain, sometimes it lets in the rain.
While your mother recites from her prayer book I learned of your mysteries there on a blanket of leaves in a forest as pieces of sunlight fell out of your hair. Then you took out your smoking tobacco, said, This kind’s not so bad for your health as I studied the arc of your fingers rolling paper up into the shape of a barrel, paper in the shape of a barrel.
So long you fake heart shaped necklace, you said as you blew in your hands before you threw it into the ocean you said I could be your man.
I crawled through the night to a patch of light and a black cat stared into my soul and out past the farm to a burned out barn the babies cried out from their satellite burrows. And the last thing you said resembled a prayer, then you took off your clothes and cut off your hair and I’m still not sure what’s really up there but sometimes I like to pretend like I know. Sometimes we pretend like we know.
credits
from Telegrams,
track released March 29, 2019
Composers: Tariq Hussain
Performers:
Tariq--vocals, guitar
Sam Davidson--keys/synths, woodwinds
Skye Brooks--drums
John Walsh—bass
Jesse Zubot—strings
Micajah Sturgess—french horn
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