Barbara Lynch is a musician/singer/songwriter from Toronto. Her first album, Goodbye and Goodluck, was released by Duke Street Records in 1996.
Barbara self-produced her second album, In the Nickelodeon, in 2008 and then in 2009 become a part of the new Cowboy Junkies’ record label, Latent Recordings.
This year she released her third album, where did you go. Here’s what she shared about it with Paul Corby.
With … Goodbye and Good Luck, I was pretty convinced I would never be able to do another album. So, it was sort of tongue in cheek goodbye and good luck.
Because it was in 1996, it was an edgy album and wasn’t really acceptable at that time. I had a reputation for being a darker artist, which of course my current album is now too, except that now it’s become more acceptable to talk about darker things like, you know, family violence or whatever else occurs to you to write about.
But Duke Street, those were good days. A lot of media attention, really good articles and magazines, cover of Eye Magazine, all kinds of stuff. But it did not get radio airplay and basically, I just went broke after it was over and I stopped doing music and I got a full-time job. It happens to the best of us.
When I was just beginning to realize how serious COVID was, I thought I might actually be at home for six months with no one there. I live alone and even my dog died, so I thought, you know, ‘What are you gonna do to entertain yourself?’ I’ve always wanted to pick up a little blues rhythm guitar, a little parlour guitar. And I researched, and I thought, you know, why don’t you do that now? And so, I called Long & McQuade and they found an old guitar in the basement for me. And then I started watching Fred MacDowell videos.
And of course, I’m a piano player so I was learning. And much to my surprise, I started writing these story songs, some of them about when I was a kid growing up. ‘Cause I thought, you know what? Nobody’s gonna hear this music. Nobody’s gonna hear these songs. You don’t have to worry about what anybody thinks about it. You can do whatever you want.
So I sent them to Michael Timmons, and I said, you know, ‘Do you think you would consider working on this sometime if COVID ever ends? And he said he would. So then I started really focusing on getting these songs.
I started thinking, ‘You know what, Barbara? You haven’t written an album yet that is truly what you wanted to say before you drop dead.’
Basically, this album is extremely simple, and it is that way for a lot of different reasons. If I add another instrument, it’s because it needs to be there, you know? That’s the way it is. I’ve kept this one very plain.
It’s got a lot of third person narrative in it as if it was stories more than personal revelations.
All the songs were based in the country, just because I like the simplicity of the country and it’s fun. So, you can mention gravel roads, you can imagine people drunk in the ditch on a date. You can imagine them walking home with the birds, singing. All these things really came to life. Some of them are totally true. Some of them are fiction, but the emotion is always the same.
And I am a closet short story writer. Like, after this, I’m seriously thinking I could sit down, maybe I could write some short stories. But with this album, I feel I’ve said what I always wanted to say. It’s a simple portrayal of people living their lives the best they can. And they’re all good people and they do their best.
And fundamentally, what comes across, as Michael Timmins, who was the producer, said – it’s loaded with humanism. That’s because I’ve always believed in the goodness of human nature. And I do. And I believe that people are good if they don’t get screwed up along the way. And all the people in these stories are good people. That’s why it makes people feel better when they listen to it.
One song, Dance with Me, starts with several characters. There’s a young woman looking forward to her wedding day. She sees it as a time when she can finally take control of her life, and she can have her own house. She says, “I’m gonna keep my kitchen clean.” She’s filled with good intentions. It starts with her, and it moves on to some other people in various predicaments that we all can relate to, which sort of makes you feel less alone. I play it on the piano, but I wrote it on the guitar, and I never would’ve written it on the piano ’cause it broke my usual piano song-writing rules. It’s much more open.
Another song, “Rita Doyle,” is a story, written on the guitar in an ancient kind of Cajun sort of rhythm, and I talk about this woman that was born in the country, and she goes into rages all of a sudden, when she’s about 13 or 14 years old, and no one knows why. And of course, nobody cared in those days because you just go and work on the farm. So, they took Rita out of high school, and they put her on the farm to work, and who knows what her life was like, but it couldn’t have been that great because then she ended up living in the city in a car outside of a bar. And she’s maintaining her independence. And of course she is a little bit odd, to say the least. But she is herself, she does the best she can. She has her own kind of freedom, and we have an image of her rocking in a rocking chair beside a river somewhere.
‘The way we treat each other can’t be changed by Trump’
Now we do go into a bit of allegory here. I can’t always be a realist. She’s rocking in a chair beside a river. She’s imagining that the birds that come by will take her home. And I truly love that song. I just feel so much sympathy for older people or anyone that’s outside of civilization and they’re fiercely fighting to live their life, you know? And they want to live, and to live a good life. And that’s Rita. I understand this is a very odd album, but I think that, especially in the times we’re having right now with this classic battle of good and evil that’s happening, that the portrayal of these people in these songs will remind us that we all share all these things and we’re all good people. And you know, the way we treat each other can’t be changed by Trump. The way we relate, the things that we do, the way we live out our value system. We have all these choices. We’re still free to do all these things.
Let me tell you about the closing song on the record, Worry No More. It hasn’t got any characters. I think that all my life I’ve been very aware, oddly enough, of time going by very quickly and wanting to make the best of the time we have and being aware that anything can happen. That’s just the way I was raised.
On the album, I have a picture of an elderly lady, but if you look into her eyes, you see like this woman, what has she done? Like all the stories that she has her life, like what is it like to be her? And this is what I want people to see about every character. What is it like to be them?
When you can put yourself in somebody else’s shoes, you can feel this connection with other people. You care about them. You care what happens to them. And I’m just really glad that I ended up by saying that I still fundamentally believe in the goodness of
human nature, and I do worry no more.
This song came out of nowhere and I played a little sort of tiny blues line in it. Remember I just started playing the guitar, so I was pleased that I could even play a little line. And then I put Shelly Coopersmith on a beautiful viola and fiddle, and it’s
turned into this beautiful little gospel song and it’s become popular with quite a few people.
It is a very gentle, accepting look at dying. That’s what it really is. And of course I’m terrified of dying just like anybody else. But if I was dying, I think I could listen to this and feel a little bit more accepting of the rise and fall of what life is. As we head out into the cosmos, then we’ll worry no more.”
“I am going.
Going to worry no more / going down to the river
See the sun go down.
I got a story.
It can’t be done.”
