Maple Seed
It was Thanksgiving Sunday in 2015 and I was sitting in the car, parked in my building’s visitor lot for a few minutes before I parked underground for the night. There was a family gathered in the same parking lot while their younger children were playing outside. One of those children, a little boy probably no older than 3 years, was mesmerized as he watched seeds spin down like helicopter blades from one of the trees. He would pick up one of those seeds from the ground and hand it to one of his older relatives for her to drop again, so he could watch it spin down back to the ground, and this adorably wholesome scene repeated itself a few times.
In my mind, watching all of this transported me back to my own childhood in Scarborough and the first time I saw those “helicopter” seeds magically spinning down to the ground as they fell. But this was also just a few days before the 2015 Federal Election in Canada. An election featuring a Prime Minister who had decided to rally the worst of his party’s supporters in a desperate effort to win one last election that his party was scheduled to lose (for everyone outside Canada who’s reading this, us Canadians tend to switch between the two most popular federal political parties about every ten years). This Prime Minister’s federal government launched a “Barbaric Cultural Practices Hotline” that ended up encouraging xenophobia and racism, and emboldened those who hated the multiculturalism that defines Canada in the 21st Century.
So in the context of all of that, I was very aware of the hijab this Canadian Muslim woman was wearing in the parking lot on that Sunday afternoon, as she and her tiny Canadian relative shared this quintessentially Canadian moment on a Thanksgiving Sunday afternoon. But also in the context of all of this, I thought about how that falling seed was an experience the child I was years ago in the past shared with this tiny young Canadian in front of me in the present. I thought about how both of us shared that experience with Canadian children from generations before us, and also with the countless generations of Indigenous children who grew up on this land.
I was now inspired to write a song where the verses would be about the different eras of people living in Canada (Indigenous peoples, European settlers, and then finally, the rest of us), with choruses about the generations of children watching those seeds falling every autumn. A universal experience that connects us all across boundaries of time, languages, and beliefs.
Well, now I had to park that car underground and rush up to my computer ASAP to look up what species of tree that seed was from (yes, the embarrassing part of my story is that until that afternoon, I didn’t actually know that seed was…a Maple Seed). But when I finally learned that very important piece of information on that Sunday in October 2015, writing this song became even more important to me, because it also tied two more memories of mine from a few years earlier. The first was from when I was watching a documentary about our flag.
The part of that documentary that stuck with me was how an earlier design endorsed by Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson (dubbed Pearson’s Pennant) was criticized. Unfortunately, the three maple leaves at its centre could be interpreted as a divisive symbol of “The British, the French, and everyone else”. The two blue bars on either side of those maple leaves represented the Pacific & Atlantic oceans and evoked Canada’s national motto (“A mari usque ad mare”, Latin for “from sea to sea”), but some critics saw this flag’s colours (red, white, and blue) as being too similar to flags of both the U.K. & U.S.A.
Late in the process of choosing Canada’s new flag, historian (and former Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick) George Stanley submitted a new design that reconciled both of the main issues with Pearson’s Pennant. Stanley’s design featured a single red maple leaf on a white background, between two red bars instead of two blue bars. This design was eventually chosen, and has been Canada’s flag since 1965.
Our flag literally means “One people from sea to sea”.
The second memory that was evoked by my inspiration to write Maple Seed was from a short solo road trip that I treated myself to in May 2012.
I spent one day in Ottawa, and it was my first time visiting Parliament Hill. I didn’t take a tour inside the government buildings, but I did spend some time walking around The Great Lawn outside. There were families having picnics, speaking many languages I didn’t understand. As someone who grew up in a suburb of Toronto, that is the sound of the Canada I know. That familiar “symphony of dialects from all humanity” made Parliament Hill feel just like another extension of home for me.
But the inspiration for this song came to me back in 2015, and because this song and its message were so important to me, I did not yet feel up to the task of writing this song.
Fast forward to the end of 2017, when I’d just been through the premiere performance of A Canadian Christmas at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, hearing my song on CBC radio, people telling me that same song was already playing in malls around Canada that December, celebrities and government officials reposting the song on social media, and a high school choir in Grimsby, Ontario learning and performing that song in only ten days after hearing it for the first time. Maybe I was finally ready to turn another dream of mine into reality.
I started writing the lyrics to Maple Seed in January 2018, and within a few weeks I had a first full draft of the song. Since then, I’ve revised the lyrics a few times after learning more about the history of the Indigenous peoples of this continent. I’ve had the privilege of consulting with author Waubgeshig Rice and archeologist/historian/educator Dr. Paulette Steeves to receive some vital guidance to correct some issues with the song’s original lyrics during that process. It was a thrill and honour having guitar legend Don Ross perform the guitar track that is the rhythm foundation of this recording. I ’m also very grateful to Angela Maccaroni and Matthew Green for their advice on revising the lyrics early on in the process, to Joanna Majoko for recording a vocal track for the demo recording of that very first draft of the song, and to all members of the Blessed Trinity Catholic Secondary School Choir in Grimsby, Ontario who learned, practiced, and rehearsed that first version of Maple Seed that we didn’t quite get to perform back in 2018 ( I’m very sorry about not double-checking those choir parts before I sent them over).
Thank you to my old friend Christie Fox for the extended loan on that french horn that is making so many more recordings realistic projects for me to actually complete, and last but never least, thank you to producer/audio engineer extraordinaire Marc Koecher at MK Soundworks for being so ridiculously good at his job, that I can record vocal and brass tracks in my room (instead of spending a small fortune on renting time at a recording studio), and still be confident the final product will be something that is ready for commercial release and radio broadcast.
To all the public school music teachers across Canada, if you’d like an arrangement of this song for your choirs for your spring concerts, please let me know. 😊❤️🇨🇦
