I spent most of last week obsessively listening to 'Retrace.' It's such a deceptively simple little song, but every part of it - melody, that rhythmic guitar hook, lyric - is wonderfully, effortlessly natural. It all hangs together so well. That 'naturalness' is a very important quality in a song for me, and its absence often explains why I dislike Hip tracks like 'Save the Planet.' Anyway, the key line is
I'll retrace my steps though I know we're all saying goodbye.
It slips in there at the end and somehow makes sense of everything that has gone before. I don't know exactly the people and situations he has in mind, but clearly the party and its aftermath marked a decisive moment where he realized that important relationships are doomed or disintegrating. And he has been trying to work out what went wrong ever since.
'Broadcast' has also interested me as a coda to these repeat listenings of 'Retrace.' The recording isn't as good - Gord's vocal is a little too forced for me, where the song seems to call for something gentler, less strained - and I'm not crazy about the hurrying from the chorsus into the second verse. As a composition, though, it's beautiful. One of Gord's best evocations of a single moment ('our beautiful due'...the whole scene of the Great Lake, the wind, our inheritance as residents of this place; and the moment itself also 'our due,' separate for a moment from those fourteen others inside the house, or wherever). The only thing I can't figure out is why the freighter is losing so many apples into the lake!
(Originally, I thought the implication was that the ship had run aground, but I think that's much too dark for what is basically a song about peace).
