When I first got hired to be a performer on Via Rail’s Onboard Entertainment program, I was told I could play my own songs, but also had to, contractually, play Canadiana, recognizable songs, and, of course, train songs.
I was familiar with the term “train songs” because I had been privy to “Train Song Sundays,” a weekly show put on by the Dirty Old Band. They were a Montreal outfit of three core members with sometimes rotating fourth, fifth and sixth members. The first time I ever heard one of their sets (at a bar called Brutopia on Crescent Street), it was shortly after I had left a violent stretch of years in Jerusalem, in my early twenties, and I felt like in some musical way, I had come home after a long and lonesome journey. I had the corner barstool next to the brick wall and I leaned into it for support. I closed my eyes and imagined myself invisible and safe, while they sang and played guitar, banjo, mandolin, and my soul felt like it was being put back together in a way that it could understand itself again.
Not every song they sang was strictly about a train, (some were about boats, some were about cocaine, some were about Jesus) – but there was just a feel-good-about-feeling-bad essence to them, a slow, chugging rhythm to them, and I felt a real soul-belonging in them. The cast of characters around Train Song Sundays, whom I met that first night became the major players in my life for the next six years, including a long term relationship with one of them, but that is another story, long enough for a three-volumed book.
It was a good decade between that and my first performance onboard Via Rail’s THE CANADIAN, which stretches out from Toronto to Vancouver and back again, and by then I was already used to looking up song lists, lyrics and chords on the internet. And so, in preparation, I put “train songs” into the search parameters, and had it been attached to one of those old-fashioned printers with reems of paper attached-to-be-later-perforated, it would have rolled on forever. I could not believe how many songs there were about trains. Train songs spanned from the very beginning of, well, trains, to, well… now. They also spanned across almost all musical genres. The blues, certainly, but folk, country, rock n’ roll, jazz, pop, punk, alt-rock, (I can’t speak for metal, the light or the heavy, for it’s out of my familiar territory), but really, the train-track of lyrics about trains is still steady and strong, and goes well past behind us and may well continue on forever.
The staggering amount of train songs made me really wonder. If I were to put any theme into internet search parameters, would there be as many? Perhaps there are as many songs about the sea, those would span farther back in time, I suppose, and I think if the lists were put back-to-back, side-to-side, train songs would still outnumber. I can’t think of any other topic (other than love) that could get as many songs on a list.
What is it about trains? And why do people love songs about them so much?
After some musing, I thought I just might have the answer.
If you break them down, all train songs are about time, distance, and longing. As far as I’m concerned, those are the three critical axes, the essence, of being alive and having human spirit.
Train songs are about coming and going, leaving or returning, sometimes it’s home, sometimes it’s love, sometimes its prison – sometimes it’s slavery to freedom, war to peace, or even this life to the next.
The themes of train songs are the big ones. Train songs are expansive. There are not as many stops along the way as with a car ride, or a stroll – there isn’t a zoom in to a specific story about corn-flakes or coffee or one conversation and a glance. Songs about trains tend to cover a lot of temporal and spatial ground, just like trains themselves, and when you look at life from the perspective of a train, or a train-song, the minutia no longer matters. It’s the big stuff you remember. You did me right, you did me wrong. I’m here, you’re gone. Often it’s the marker of a chapter ending and a chapter beginning.
With all of that in mind, it made perfect sense to me that the train is the perfect metaphor for the important journeys all of us are on in our lives.
It was only a few years into singing train songs aboard a train that another thought occurred to me, in a great big ‘DUH!” moment – The train songs of yore were not necessarily arch-metaphoric at all. Blues and folk musicians of the era of trains actually rode them!! Even in box cars and hopping on freight trains - They were spreading their music BY train, so naturally the imagery came up, autobiographically! and many of them would get into trouble and land up in actual jail! Those songs about being in prison and hearing a freight train whistle blow and longing to be on one of the boxcars – those weren’t written by middle-class suburbanites who were playing some imagination game. These were the anthropological equivalent of field-recordings of real life stories and circumstances.
Nonetheless, they still worked symbolically, from first word to last, as relatable metaphor - and all the aching melody and determined rhythm in between, even when sung by a middle-classed-raised half-Israeli Canadian woman, who had come to be in a chapter of real-life nomadism and folk-singing aboard a cross-Canadian train – they worked!
Why, of course, they did! because I was actually a folk singer on a train sharing stories and songs with passengers, and that is not some pretend costume of mine, that is real life, real truth.
The more interesting question is: why did these songs resonate with wealthy first-class sleeper cabin ticket holders?
That question brings me back (like all topics inevitably do) to the potency and magic of song-language, especially as is dressed in the contours of rhythm and melody – its power to tug at way more than the signifier-signified simple linguistic equation of what it portends to be talking about.
Because you don’t have to be in an actual prison to know what it feels like to be stuck, remorseful, and longing.
You don’t have to leave literal shackles and slave masters behind to be able to narrate an example of liberation in your own personal life history.
You don’t have to be a weary hobo with greying hair to know what it feels like to be scared of age and loneliness and instability.
And you don’t have to be a lonesome vagabond to know what it feels like to be homesick.
We are all travellers through this life. We are all at the mercy of time, and in its hands. We all have love behind us and ahead of us. We all have beating hearts that chug-a-chug a rhythm.
We all move through space and time while the world outside our windows moves too.
That is enough to make every train song resonate.
That is enough to make every life a train song.
If you get the chance to ride a real train – do, cause it’s one of the most poignant ways to feel and appreciate the most important themes of our lives.
Let that whistle blow, and keep on moving down that track,
Clickety clack, clickety clack, clickety clack.
…
If you’ve enjoyed this essay and would like to read more, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Your monthly contribution helps me create more essays for your enjoyment, and you will get exclusive content that is not available to the general public.
For similar access to my new songs, videos and other artwork, please consider becoming a patron on patreon.com/OritShimoni
Always grateful!
Thank you for reading,
Orit
Share this post