Songbook: The Music and Lyrics of Steven Heighton

When a good friend’s dog died, she and I consoled ourselves with a bottle of wine, a couple of games of Scrabble, and Steven Heighton’s CD The Devil’s Share playing in the background. The games were enhanced by our granting double-scores to words we could justify as being ‘doggy’ (bark, leash, furred) and by the fine music easing both our souls.

So when this little book came along, I was thrilled, as I figured I’d be getting into how the songs had come about, and more.

The introduction by Steven’s longtime friend, the musician and singer Ginger Pharand, offers some consolation, but not enough to fill in the blanks that still remain for me.

She lets us know how precocious he was as a young writer, submitting a novel to M&S and then getting an actual meeting in response, all at the age of ten. She also fills us in on his musical background, his days in a band called Acröpölis (yes, with two umlauts), his skill at hearing and then playing back a melody almost immediately. She even offers us a section with songs that weren’t recorded, a whole batch of what should have been his next musical collection.

While I was happy to see the lyrics spelled out, reminiscent of days when a CD might contain a small booklet with the words to all of its songs, it was less of a thrill than it might once have been, as I’d already been to the internet to confirm what I’d thought I was hearing on several cuts. And really, when it comes to the pages containing the lyrics, nicely laid out though they are, as a person who doesn’t play a guitar (or any musical instrument beyond perhaps maracas), the insertion of chord notations might as well be Greek. I suspect Heighton himself may have had a chuckle out of that comparison, as he recounts his own challenges in learning enough Greek to get by in his fabulous account of working with refugees, Reaching Mithymna — a book that’s definitely worth reading if you want to understand just how multi-faceted a person he was. Cheeky fellow that he seems to have been, he even includes a line of Greek on the liner notes for the CD.

To really understand the words in this book, it’s pretty much mandatory that you track down the CD or go to the website mentioned in the book so you can hear for yourself the range of Heighton’s songs. Sometimes you’ll be reminded of Leonard Cohen; with others, maybe the growling sounds of the devil himself.

As for my own wishes about where this book might lead, I can only cross my fingers that some of the new songs might be preserved on secret electronic devices somewhere — kind of the way Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr were able to assemble a new Beatles song last year — or at least that Ginger and the rest of the band members might get together and do what they can to bring us another compilation of music from Steven Heighton. Pharand does inform us that two of these unrecorded songs were performed “… in Fernie, B.C., in December 2021 at Steven’s final gig.” I for one am going to keep hoping that I’ll get to hear them, as well as interpretations of the other songs we’ve been tempted with in this publication.

Steven Heighton (1961–2022) was a musician and the award-winning author of 20 books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, including the New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Afterlands and The Waking Comes Late, winner of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. In 2021, he released his first album, The Devil’s Share. He lived in Kingston, Ontario.

Ginger Pharand is a literary editor, educator, and psychotherapist. Originally from South Carolina, she lives in Kingston, Ontario.

Publisher: ECW Press (April 23, 2024)
Paperback 6″ x 9″ | 104 pages
ISBN: 9781770417717

Heidi Greco

Website

Heidi Greco lives and writes in Surrey, BC on the territory of the Semiahmoo Nation and land that remembers the now-extinct Nicomekl People. Her most recent book, Glorious Birds (from Vancouver's Anvil Press) is an extended homage to one of her favourite films, Harold and Maude, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2021. More info at her website, heidigreco.ca

(Photo credit: George Omorean)