SOUNDTRACK: WHITEHORSE-Live from Mountain Stage (May 16, 2012).
Whitehorse is opening for Barenaked Ladies on the current leg of their tour (we’re going to see them in October). I hadn’t heard of them. Turns out Whitehorse is the duo of Luke Doucet and Melissa McClelland. They are from Canada, which may be why they are touring with BNL–because they’re not very funny or very upbeat.
They play four songs in this Mountain Stage show. I really like “Killing Time” which has a very alt-country feel—McClelland’s harmony vocals are great on the chorus, which has a very low down dirty feel. I particularly like the lines:
Pimms in the cooler and daughter in the yard Playing California strip croquet
And
Tongue is a sharpened razor Little miss know it some But get her alone she cries I wanna go home Oh, this little piggy plays dumb.
They have some good stories too, like the one about “Emerald Isle” which is about Luke running a marathon in Ireland. His Irish mother, who had never been to Ireland, flew out to meet him at the finish line and his wife, Melissa, flew in from Australia as well. There are more great harmonies in this song which, while mournful has a wonderfully uplifting feel. “Night Owls” is a very slow ballad which, while lyrically interesting, is a little too slow for my tastes.
For the final song, Melissa explains that the two of them had been playing solo and then they got married and still played solo. And then they decided to join forces. “Broken One” was a song that Luke wrote for his ex-girlfriend (and it is mean); Melissa says that she fixed it for Whitehorse. It’s a pretty standard country song with a honky tonk feel. It has a great blow off line: “You gotta have a heart to have a broken one.”
There’s something about Canadian Country music that I like so much more than American country music. I wonder what that is.
[READ: August 24, 2013] Wilderness
I recently stumbled upon this book at the library. I was only vaguely aware that Doyle had written a children’s novel, but there it was on the shelf. This is not a young child’s book, which is kind of a shame. I know my son would love half of the book, but I didn’t think he was ready for the other half.
The two parts of the story are about different members of the same family. The father, Frank, is the same. He married a woman quite young and they had a daughter. When the daughter was about 4 years old, the father and mother realized they could no longer live together. After some fights, the mother left for America. Where she stayed. Gráinne, the daughter, is now 18 and she is a sullen, angry teenager. Her dad is still okay, but most of the time she wants to treat him like he’s not. But he seems okay with that and gives her space. The crux of her story is that her mother has decided to come back after all these years. And Gráinne now has to deal with that.
Her story is a little mature, (especially for my 8 year old son), and she has some pretty harsh things to say about her parents, (which I hope he doesn’t have yet).
The other half of the story concerns her half brothers, and I know my son would love this part. Conveniently, the two stories are easy to demarcate–the ones with the boys are named Chapter 1 etc, the one with Gráinne are named things like The Bedroom, The Bus etc. So I did consider telling him to read just those parts. But maybe I’ll just wait. Anyway, her half brothers, Johnny and Tom, belong to her dad and her stepmom, Sandra. Sandra loves her boys and her husband and even Gráinne–most of the time. But lately Gráinne has been a little much. And Frank has encouraged Sandra to take the boys and go on a trip, just with them. That will let her focus on the boys and give him some time with Gráinne.
Sandra doesn’t want to feel kicked out of her house especially by a sullen teenager, but when she learns that Gráinne’s birth mother is coming to visit, she concedes and books a trip for her and the boys to Finland–an arctic experience in the wilderness. And while Gráinne’s story is interspersed with the Finland tale, it is the boys who are really the center of the book. And the thing is, I liked Gráinne’s story but I feel like it took away from the adventure and was just too much for me to let my son read this very exciting adventure about ten and eleven year old boys.
When the boys get to Finland, they are thrilled by everything–the snow, the comfortable hotel (this is a major ad for Finnish hospitality, let me tell you) and most of all, the dogs. (The cover made me thing the boys would get in trouble with wolves, but it’s a sled dog and they befriend it). When the boys first arrive, they are younger than everyone else by about thirty years. Rather than hang around with the adults, they play in the snow and then go check out all the sled dogs. And that’s when they meet Kalle. Kalle is the master of the dogs. And when he sees the boys playing around the dogs, he doesn’t yell, he simply puts them to work–watering and feeding the dogs. And the boys love it. They feel useful–they feel like grown ups. And they develop a close understanding of the dogs.
Their stay in Finland consists of the first day’s sled dog ride to a camping area (and back). And on the next day, they sled to a cottage (with no electricity) for an overnight stay. But when the boys arrive they realize that something is wrong. Their mom is not there. On yesterday’s journey she fell off and the sled came running past them all. But this time, there was no sled. So where was their mother?
Kalle and the other guide take a quick look for her but don’t find her. And that’s when the boys decide to do something about it. They steal some dogs and go off into the Finnish woods to find their mother. And the remainder of the story is the exciting time they have racing through the woods, having fun on their own, not knowing what they are doing but trusting the dogs and then freaking out when they realize that now they are lost too. It’s tremendously exciting story, the likes of which I haven’t seen from Doyle before. And it teaches the boys some independence and the usefulness of weapons (and smoking–tsk tsk).
Doyle sets up the pack animals so that the dog in charge, Rock, was being challenged by the second dog, Hastro. And that defiance of the presumed leader parallels nicely to Gráinne’s story. So i can absolutely see why he threw them together. But I’m curious to know what the target audience (10-12 year old boys I assume) thought of the whole big sister story–maybe they weren’t bothered by it at all…. From an adult point of view both stories were very interesting and it was kind of fun to flip back and forth, but the boys’ section was far more exciting.
For ease of searching I include: Grainne.
I Just Read About That... 
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